Comment by ineedasername
10 hours ago
Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-server communication with correlated work loads than we already have on earth for most needs.
Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good reason to actually do this unless there's a use for all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is happening with immense growth and demand expected for increased pharmaceutical research and various manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.
Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred thousand watts of heat into space.