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Comment by joha4270

7 hours ago

Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens.

Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.

I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements

I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.

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joha4270

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throw310822  6 hours ago

> Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production

But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.

  • ben_w  5 hours ago

    They're talking about launching a million satellites, not one massive satellite.

    I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.

    • throw310822  4 hours ago

      The thing is, the infrastructure needed to power and cool each of those satellites makes it economically absurd given that what they collectively do can also be done by a few data centers on earth.

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