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I hope I didn't mislead anyone into believing that 2000 square meters is a megastructure. Nevertheless, most people have never seen an Ascend 950 so I don't think that helps contextualize anything for anyone. 2000 sq m is fairly large for a space radiator - the ISS has only about 400 sq m.
Perhaps. And yet, Starcloud plans to operate in LEO. I assume they aren't totally retarded and have thought through the choice of orbit. It's difficult to have a discussion about this when you ignore the details from the actual proposals in favor of advocating for stuff they aren't doing when it's convenient. Either the people working on this are smart and have chosen the best parameters for this, or they are stupid to the point that the internet peanut gallery can do better and therefore aren't going to succeed. You must pick one.
If you're pumping coolant through a tube that's open to vacuum, you're going to have some problems.
I don't really understand what drives a man to repost second hand all caps claims. I'm not even saying that he didn't say this, but surely you must understand that this is simply not convincing to anyone?
Space based DCs also fail the "not currently happening" test, so this part is a wash.
You know what, fair enough. Let's ignore Starcloud since this is primarily about SpaceX. They've just issued a concrete design: Starmind
• 150 kW peak compute payload
• 120 kW average compute payload
• 70 kW per ton
• Wingspan: 70 meters
• Deployed height: 20 meters
• 110 m² deployable liquid radiator
• Redundant pumping loops
• Integrated micrometeoroid shielding
• 150 kW solar array
• 250 W/m²
• High-speed laser links interconnect satellites and beam AI results back to Earth through Starlink. Low-latency, high-bandwidth connection
• SpaceX-manufactured solar technology from Bastrop, Texas
So, that's 917 square meters of radiator per 1 (sustained) megawatt, and more importantly 70 kW of capacity per ton, at SSO. I see Starship has the theoretical capacity of 40-60 tons to SSO, let's say 50. At, say, $200/kg that's $8M to deliver 2.8 MW of compute. As per Jensen, 1 MW can go for $100M. There's plenty of slack in this. Even if Jensen is off by an order of magnitude, the "getting it into space" part is almost a rounding error and can make straightforward sense given terrestial/political constraints.
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I was too lazy to de-caps it, and I hope that people of this forum will find the issue of the costs of 1 gigawatt of capacity on Earth more salient than the funny detail about all caps.
Problems of space compute have straightforward engineering solutions, the costs of which can be estimated. Whether these solutions are worth the cost depends on the costs of building the same capacity on Earth. So arguments about radiator area, micrometeorite damage or coolant mass are kind of… weightless unless grounded in comparison to the baseline.
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