Comment by drtz

> It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.

It does not make sense.

The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data centers more appealing than terrestrial?"

The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements contradict this.

Terrestrial will always be better:

1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never be as cheap as zero launches.

2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every way.

3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost more than standard (do they even exist for this application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than no shielding.

4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective radiation.

5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial solar collection for around the price of a single 1U satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is obsolete.

And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.