Comment by TeMPOraL

They literally have a solution, it's a trivial one and described in the paper. I'll try to paraphrase the whole thing, because apparently no one read it.

1. Take existing satellite designs like Starlink, which obviously manage to utilize certain amount of power successfully, meaning they solved both collection and heat rejection.

2. Pick one, swap out its payload for however many TPUs it can power instead. Since TPUs aren't an energy source, the solar/thermal calculation does not change. Let X be the compute this gives you.

3. Observe that thermal design of a satellite is independent from whether you launch 1 or 10000 of them. Per point 2, thermals for one satellite are already solved, therefore this problem is boring and not worth further mention. Instead, go find some X that's enough to give a useful unit of scaling for compute.

4. Play with some wacky ideas about formations to improve parameters like bandwidth, while considering payload-specific issues like radiation hardening, NONE OF WHICH HAVE ANY IMPACT ON THERMALS[0]. This is the interesting part. Publish it as a paper.

5. Have someone make a press release about the paper. A common mistake.

6. Watch everyone get hung up on the press release and not bother clicking through to the actual paper.

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[0] - Well, some do. Note that fact in the paper.