Comment by bastawhiz
7 hours ago
Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but is solar substantially more efficient in space? I assume the satellites won't orbit in a way that follows the sun. And presumably the arrays of panels they can attach to a satellite don't exceed the size of the panels you could slap on and around a data center (at least without being insanely expensive).
Yeah the main benefits are:
1. solar is very efficient at generating energy, no moving parts, simple physics etc.
2. in space you don't deal with weather or daylight cycle, you can just point your panels at the sun and generate very stable energy, no batteries required
3. environmental factors are simpler, no earthquakes, security, weather. Main problem here is radiation
In theory its a very elegant way to convert energy to compute.
2 is wrong. At a Lagrange point you can do this. Not in low earth orbit - in LEO sunset is every 60 minutes or so, and you spend the next 60 minutes in darkness.
Satellites are heavily reliant on either batteries or being robust to reboots, because they actually do not get stable power - it's much more dynamic (just more predictable too since no weather).
Interesting.
According to this other source https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2026/02/02/space...
the filing mentions this
> these satellites would operate between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and Sun-Synchronous Orbit inclinations (SSO)