Comment by numpad0
12 hours ago
Satellite cooling is long figured out, the problem is that it requires a ton of expensive mass.
Radiation hardening is not a huge issue in LEO either. It is an issue, not the issue.
Overall, it's like choosing international flights as your choice of a restaurant. It's...fundamentally...doable...? But nobody knows why you would want that, unless flying GPUs is the point rather than to offer a competitive service using the server sats.
I think the cooling mass is so expensive and fragile that it’s basically an unsolved problem.
No, I mean, you can fly daily from NYC to London and back every single night for 5 years straight just to use the business class seats to sleep and to have inflight meals as your dinners and your breakfasts. That would be a 100% feasible solved problem from technical standpoint. But why would you do that.
They can probably build like, a gigantic satellite that fits in an expendable Starship that has like just couples of RTX5090 32GB backed by a Tesla battery pack and a gigantic multi panel actively refrigerating radiator system. Or use bunch of such Starships to assemble a whole rack worth of GPUs on orbit that costs billions total and minimum half a year to build out. Satellites and radiators are solved good enough for that.
Or you can put just the computer part on a desk indoor on Earth and plug it into the wall and have it cooled with fans. Or have a guy roll up an air cooled rack full of GPUs next to it. Why involve the rockets and satellites and all. What's the point. That's what everyone is puzzled with.