alt Hacker NewsI fail to see the economic case. You will need very large solar arrays and radiation hardened components, both of which make it uneconomical compared to a data center on Earth. This is another of Musk's genius ideas like the tunnels that were supposed to be carrying us under cities by now.
Replies
The PV at least can potentially be much less robust than on Earth, since it doesn't have to contend with wind and weather. CdTe thin films, for example, can be just 1 micron thick (the absorption length of solar photons in that material is ~0.1 microns). So potentially the material cost of space PV can be much less than the same peak power PV on Earth.
The bet that they are making is that, in the near-future, energy on Earth will be such an issue (especially if you want to scale) that DCs on Earth will cost more than components + launch costs
It's difficult to imagine any sort of compute in space given the state of the art rad hardened processor is about as fast as a computer Apple sold in 1998.
Musk's "genius idea" there was to (pardon the pun) derail high speed rail and other similar investments so he could sell more cars.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
The problem is that experiments into this by Google have concluded that radiation hardening is unnecessary. HBM memory far surpassed their expectations for survival, exceeding 5 years in their simulated proton beam on earth. Localized shielding for consumer equipment is more than enough, especially combined with ECC.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode