Ask HN: Datacenters in Space Before Alaska?

1 points by ironmagma 5 hours ago | 5 comments

I am curious as to why there is already talk of putting data centers into space rather than the much more manageable cold locations we have in the states such as Alaska. Does anyone here know by chance?

OutOfHere 5 hours ago |

In space there is 10 to 1000x more powerful solar energy afaik. One side is super cold, facilitating emitting waste heat into space, and the other side provides all the energy you need, 24x7. The main challenge is moving the datacenter out of solar storm zones with sufficient advance notice, but this is entirely possible using early-warning solar monitoring satellites and basic propulsion.

themerone 5 hours ago | root | parent |

It's way harder to cooling things in space than on earth. You can't use convection to dump heat into a vacuum. Radiative cooling is much slower and harder to scale.

stop50 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Apart from heat radiation they have to worry about other satellites, trash and lastly ionising radiation, since they have to put the satellites far wider away than normally.

OutOfHere 4 hours ago | root | parent |

Space trash ceases to be an issue in the ultra large scale when self-healing properties exist. We are not at that level of technology, and our technology has no healing capabilities whatsoever, but we can't get there if we don't try.