Its wildly popular to the tune of 70% support amongst the general population?
The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.
Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space.
And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...
Absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy many hundreds of satellites (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner).
> (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner)
really think about that statement when discussing deliberately avoiding government jurisdiction...
(perhaps also consider that it is not the case that no one can damage a lot of satellites in orbit, but that up until recently no one has had any incentive to build the number of interceptors you would need to do it. But how viable is a space-based datacenter business if you decide to try and pretend you're untouchable, and one of the _many_ governments which operates anti-satellite weapons simply shoots one of your satellites? The debris field from ASAT weapons tests has been of considerable concern everytime they've been used - and given the proximity of useful orbital slots for such a service, the number of intercepts required to render a constellation completely inoperable is going to be _far less_ then the number of satellites).
(in the vein of motivation too: it is well within the power of most well-funded governments to build laser systems would would degrade or destroy orbital satellites, but again, no one has had considerable motivation to do so till recently)
(and of course all of this is - again - competing against the simpler option of simply arresting the people on Earth, or interdicting their ground stations)
Lots of words. Can’t honestly say I read them all. Meanwhile Russia had a pretty strong motivation to destroy Starlink. Motivations don’t get much stronger than that.
The real issue is that the power situation in LEO is still actually terrible! Your solar is a little more performant, but you're plunged into hard shade every 45 minutes.
There exist the so-called Sun-synchronous orbits, which exploit the precession effect caused by the fact that the Earth is not a sphere, to pass over the same point of the Earth at the same local hour. On a small subset of these Sun-synchronous orbits the Sun is always visible from the satellite (i.e. on the subset of orbits whose plane is approximately perpendicular on the radius that connects the Sun to the Earth). Without the precession effect, a satellite that sees the Sun for an entire day would lose this property after a few days, because of the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, which alters the direction in space of the radius from the Sun to the Earth.
However, the number of slots that are available in Sun-synchronous orbits with permanent view of the Sun is limited, and many potential users want them. So those who desire to build datacenters would have to compete for such orbital slots. There are much less such slots than for geosynchronous orbits. Other countries would certainly be outraged if USA occupied all the available slots with datacenters.
Improved control of the satellites for collision avoidance could allow smaller slots, but maneuvering heavy datacenters would require a lot of fuel, so they might require periodic refueling, greatly increasing the costs.
I think calling solar a little more performant is underselling it. Once you have LEO getting to a better orbit costs relatively little. Getting from LEO to the moon is only like 30% more than getting from ground to LEO.
They are mostly planning sun synchronous orbits afaik. That means the orbit is tilted so the earth’s deformed shape continually moves the orbital plane so the satellite is always in the sun (or generally the plane has the same angle to the sun).
Sure: which is a higher and less accessible orbit. The relative fuel cost might be small, but in absolute terms the ship carrying payload is carrying a lot more to do it - see the number of Starships to refuel a Starship in LEO.
And here's the thing: all of this is competing with solar+batteries cost on Earth. The power situation is the only advantage here.
Like why not put a datacenter on a barge and run an HVDC line out to it far offshore? That would be expensive...but more expensive then space? It's not even outside of the capability set of SpaceX, who already run drone ships to facilitate Falcon 9 landings.
> Sure: which is a higher and less accessible orbit. The relative fuel cost might be small, but in absolute terms the ship carrying payload is carrying a lot more to do it - see the number of Starships to refuel a Starship in LEO.
No it’s not, it’s not either SSO or LEO. You can have SSO at 600km which is lower than the normal LEO satellite.
I agree that it doesn’t make a lot of sense (look at the root comment of this thread), but you absolutely can make a LEO datacenter with 100% sun coverage if you want to.
You literally just need several oracles which sign hashes at the time they receive them and record that fact.
As a community service you need them to have enough scale that no individual hash or source can be tampered with without being likely to become known as unreliable to everyone else as well ala certificate transparency records.
(You could probably just bootstrap let's encrypt for this - issuing a certificate you use to sign a bunch of data would stamp several minimums on the order anything could have happened).
Sure but conceptually no one should've been able to crack any hashing scheme anyone half-way decent at their job could come up. SHA256 is the default and it's unbroken. Even SHA1 has scant few known collisions. So like...what the heck were they hashing and how that anyone was able to crack it?
It means only 2% of the harmful rays (UVA) are getting through the shirt or alternatively the skin under the shirt can spend 50 times as long in the sun as it could without any protection.
Just from basic logic this has to be false. Maybe there are some translucent t-shirts that are SPF 7 but my skin always reacts much more to sun exposed parts that have SPF applied than it ever did under t-shirt. And no i use high quality SPF50 and reapply.
Can you give an example of an extermination program which was thwarted by a lack of accurate census data?
"The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.
The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.
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