Maintenance for a mountaintop data center only requires a team of skilled mountaineers. In space you'd need astronauts. It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper, perhaps two or three.
Nobody is doing maintenance on a small cluster in a satellite. It's disposable with a timespan of less than a decade to recoup all costs. Note that the usual argument to retire hardware is the electrical costs but when you've got lifetime solar you can run it indefinitely.
Nobody is doing maintenance on an orbital data center because it's too expensive and dangerous, not because it wouldn't be useful. Maintenance in space would in fact be way more useful than on land because the redundancy required by a lack of maintenance necessitates extra mass.
If you could pay a few space sherpas $100k to head up into LEO and service the thing, it would definitely be worth it.
Maintenance for a mountaintop data center only requires a team of skilled mountaineers. In space you'd need astronauts. It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper, perhaps two or three.
Nobody is doing maintenance on a small cluster in a satellite. It's disposable with a timespan of less than a decade to recoup all costs. Note that the usual argument to retire hardware is the electrical costs but when you've got lifetime solar you can run it indefinitely.
Nobody is doing maintenance on an orbital data center because it's too expensive and dangerous, not because it wouldn't be useful. Maintenance in space would in fact be way more useful than on land because the redundancy required by a lack of maintenance necessitates extra mass.
If you could pay a few space sherpas $100k to head up into LEO and service the thing, it would definitely be worth it.
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