alt Hacker NewsI read the comment that I replied to as these challenges being a large prohibitor to this development, and I pointed out that these seem like challenges that can be dealt with mostly in isolation from other challenges and in particular not require a large number of engineers to deal with.
Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".
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I don't think anyone is saying that it's impossible to build a datacenter in space. Of course you can do that if you really want to.
But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.
The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiator tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem. Cutting edge stuff like in-space refuelling and modular in-space reassembly and patient capital are crucial to making those work because the radiators aren't getting beyond 100% radiative cooling efficiency however well designed they are.
Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.