"It really seems like anyone with some renders and a white paper written by someone being gassed up by an overly agreeable AI can get VC funding these days."
I know who Scott Manley is. I’m subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.
That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I’m most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can’t treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.
And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they’re suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We’re already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.
I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:
That simply isn’t true, the video I linked explains everything clearly, for a 20kw satellite the cooling area is needed very modest.
Still not a great idea and I am not advocating for it, but people need to stop fighting bullshit with bullshit and start fighting it with truth.
I know who Scott Manley is. I’m subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.
That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I’m most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can’t treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.
And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they’re suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We’re already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.
I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/live/4mx9Rp-SMNk
A 20KW data center is utterly feeble, barely worth the name, by ground-based data center standards, which easily go into tens of megawatts.
It’s a single rack rather than it being a whole data center. The whole constellation of satellites is the data center.
Again, I’m not advocating for this as a good idea, just saying that cooling is not the reason it is a bad one.