Comment by downrightmike
1 day ago
Having your exponentially more expensive fleet of satellites constantly burning up versus dedicated cables that rarely need replacing
1 day ago
Having your exponentially more expensive fleet of satellites constantly burning up versus dedicated cables that rarely need replacing
The big use-case for Starlink is typically for people in locations without dedicated cables.
All energy generated on earth contributes to global warming, even solar panels which decrease Earth's albedo. If you care about climate change and the earth you should want the datacenters to be in space.
The earth is limited in the amount of thermal energy it can radiate.
Ah yes, burn thousands of tonnes of methane (assuming Spacex) to launch a data centre satellite into an orbit, then burn thousands more to maintain it and update compute or burn the entire thing in the upper atmosphere, to avoid contributing to global warming by not burning all of that fuel and dry mass.
Both aluminum and iron atoms are heavy and thus make it into the ocean where they both increase the ocean's carbon sink capacity. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-aluminum-affect-climate-ocean-...
From an energy POV, the chemical launch energy required for orbital insertion is 900GJ per satellite (when amortized) whereas the satellite produces 18,900GJ over its 5-yr lifetime, and far more if it lasts longer.
Uh, that's not how global warming works, you know.