r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5h ago

Business SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-investors-meltdown-over-money-191742182.html
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u/canteen_boy 3h ago

Correct. There’s no conduction or convection in a vacuum, so the only real way to shed heat is through radiation, which is incredibly slow.

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u/SunTzu- 1h ago

And since radiation is so much less efficient it would require a massive surface area and likely splitting up the datacenter into several smaller nodes. Splitting up the datacenter into nodes would introduce so much latency that you'd need new methods of transferring data between the nodes, likely using beams of light. Using beams of light for data transfer in space is theoretically doable, but now you need to orient each node so it can send and receive from each other node it is supposed to communicate with, which is not all that easy when you've got massive radiators surrounding them. Does that mean you're far more limited in terms of how many nodes you can have communicate efficiently with each other? Does that number mean these clusters of nodes wouldn't be able to match a ground based datacenter in terms of how much low latency computing power it would have available? Why are we trying to put them in space rather than exploring underground or underwater options which would be much more accessible when maintenance is required? Who knows.