It's actually very easy to cool in deserts, because low humidity makes it very easy to move heat into the ambient air. You have to contend against ambient temperatures, but that's what insulation is for. The other big things you need for datacenters are reliable power and a low probability of infrastructure-disrupting natural disasters.
Taking aside you certainly can do radiative cooling in desert at night just fine - you have air, which even if hot to desert standards during the day is still by magnitudes more effective for cooling via direct heat transfer than radiating heat away in vacuum.
With today's very high orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that the desert is cheaper.
With very low orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that space would become cheaper. Solar panels have no atmosphere/night/seasons and are always pointed at the Sun, no cover glass for hail, no 24h battery either. Radiators are 1/10th the area of PV which is very doable.
The question is, where exactly is the tipping point between those two extremes, and will Starship reach that? Opinions on this naturally bifurcate depending on one's feelings about Elon Musk.
I wouldn't be too worried because SpaceX engineers put a great deal of effort into reflection mitigation, including developing a space-rated mirror able to have an RF signal fire transparently through it.[1] The strategy is to bounce all the sunlight away from Earth, which makes satellites darker than even (hypothetically) covering a satellite in Vantablack.
I don’t want to be foolishly dismissive, but I just don’t see how launch costs could be small enough to compensate for the huge overhead of putting things into space and maintaining things in space as opposed to literally any other place on earth.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to tell us that this is economical to show the numbers
Starship becomes “fully and rapidly reusable”, needing little to no refurbishment between launches. Then the lower bound of launch costs is just the expendables (methane, oxygen, nitrogen) which could cost as little as $1M per launch.
SpaceX uses custom silicon (produced by “TeraFab”) that can run at higher temperatures then the radiative cooling requirements goes down significantly and a 100 kW satellite might weight around 1 ton.
Starship should be able to launch at least 100T payload. Assuming they could fit that many, that puts the launch cost per 100 kW at $10,000, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of the chips alone, even if it’s off by a factor of 10.
Obviously a lot needs to go right for this to happen, but it’s not impossible.
Before the cost of flying very heavy shit and dealing with all the problems of operating that shit in space goes to zero, the cost of doing it terrestrially will go to zero. The idea that shooting any amount of payload into space could some how be more economical than just not doing that is completely bonkers and laughable.
It's like people completely forgot that there was 15+ years of connectivity infrastructure build out on earth before Musk did his shittier space version, not the other way around.
Transport doesn't "go to zero." Terrestrial transportation is already fully reusable, so it doesn't have the same cost headroom for improvement vs orbital launch.
Thanks, I really needed this post. I'm saving this for when people inevitably try to re-write history by saying "we didn't need Elon, because did anyone really doubted space-based AI would be the winner?? It was obvious all along because blah blah... <insert 20/20 hindsight>"
The world seems to have become an abstract plaything for these billionaires why would they give a damn about practicality. This idiot shot a car into space for no good reason.
Not completely 'no good reason'—they needed to test the ability to send heavy payloads, it's great marketing for SpaceX (who intend to make money by having people pay them to put things in space for them) and brand awareness for Tesla.
> He can blow his money on 1 million satellites that will all decay back into the atmosphere within a few years
He can also 'blow' his money on helping people by giving them opportunities:
> In 1993, Harris Rosen “adopted” a run-down, drug-infested section of Orlando called Tangelo Park. Rosen offers free preschool for all children prior to kindergarten and a free college education for high school graduates. Today, the high school graduation rate for Tangelo Park is 100 percent. And no, that is not a typo.
Is throwing up "1 million satellites" going to do those things?
How about running DOGE and gutting USAID?
Or helping Trump get elected? Was that a worthy endeavour? How's that working out for the average American (or anyone else on the planet) with four dollar gas and five dollar diesel?
> The only 'key times' were Ukrainian military usage of Starlink inside Russia. Ukraine was given Starlink to use to defend Ukraine, not attack Russia.
Fighting without hurting the enemy? What’s the point? The approach of the Trump administration is just letting Ukraine bleed out.
Russian starlink usage has only just been cut off, how many years did that take?
> Russian starlink usage has only just been cut off
No. Russians have tried to use Starlink in late 2023 early 2024, there were no direct or indirect sales and terminals were disabled on a blacklist basis. They moved from a blacklist to a whitelist in February this year.
> This administration is anti-fraud and anti-abuse
In some ways, yes. I won't defend "Trump coin" but it's pretty clear with things like USAID, Minnesota child care center scams, and the California hospice scam the democrats were in favour of and participated in fraud and abuse.
> There are more things to life than the price of gas.
That is a very privileged view. In the US specifically, with its abysmal public transportation due to car-centric {ex,sub}urban design, a lot of people will need to pay more for getting to work and will have to cut back on (e.g.) groceries.
Globally, oil prices are wreaking havoc in all sorts of ways on daily life:
> Worsening fuel shortages resulting from the war in the Middle East are threatening sacred funeral ceremonies in Thailand, where Buddhist temples are scrambling to obtain diesel for cremations.
> The abbot of Wat Saman Rattanaram in Chachoengsao province, about 80km (50 miles) east of Bangkok, warned that a suspension of cremation services was a real possibility. Some petrol stations have run out of fuel, while others allow sales only to vehicle operators.
Yeah, okay, you throw million satellites up there to satiate your greed and hubris. Now what? We are already past the Kessler syndrome's hypothetical tipping point when it comes to exospheric orbit saturation. Are these million satellites in exospheric orbit going to make matters better for mankind or worse?
Proposals like this has more to do with Finance (spaceX quotation / funding / shares values) than real applications. But is anyway a risky very bad idea.
Majority of people my generation are able to experience what once was very common only few times in their lifetime due to light pollution.
It feels dreadful to realize that even that experience will be taken away forever.