Heat disposal and special purpose electronics for both reliability and ability to survive both launch vibration and on-orbit heat and radiation will make this impractically expensive.
The question is: why is this being pushed publicly?
You picture a data center as four walls shoved full of servers. You should picture instead a gpu + ram + cpu upgrade for a starlink plus node with compute capabilities. Now rinse and repeat a million times.
Can starlink work? (Proven)
Can starlink increase their solar power and heat distribution capacity by 50% (probably)
Does starlink have fast, redundant data connections within the cluster and between the cluster and the ground (proven)
These things are dead in the water.
Agreed - they'll never get high enough to crash.
Heat disposal and special purpose electronics for both reliability and ability to survive both launch vibration and on-orbit heat and radiation will make this impractically expensive.
The question is: why is this being pushed publicly?
You are laboring under a misconception.
You picture a data center as four walls shoved full of servers. You should picture instead a gpu + ram + cpu upgrade for a starlink plus node with compute capabilities. Now rinse and repeat a million times.
Can starlink work? (Proven) Can starlink increase their solar power and heat distribution capacity by 50% (probably) Does starlink have fast, redundant data connections within the cluster and between the cluster and the ground (proven)
WSJ Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/spacex-google-in-talks-to-explore-d...