Yeah. Honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of any substantial benefits. Eventually, okay, sure, there’s a point in time where we can’t create computer structures on Earth if we’re going to scale up, but that is way the hell out there on the list of constraints we have. I also kind of suspect that materials science and manufacturing and computing technologies may change a lot and obsolete anything we create now long before that.
The article has:
“Starcloud’s mission is to move cloud computing closer to where data is generated,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said in a statement.
But most data isn’t generated in space. It’s generated on Earth. Maybe if you have some kind of Earth-observation satellite in low earth orbit and want to add a shit-ton more processing capability to it so you don’t have to send its data back down to datacenters on Earth to chew on? Sounds kind of Orwellian, but maybe I could see that. But it seems like such a niche case.
The high radiation environment and the challenge of doing common maintenance tasks (e.g. disk replacement) seem prohibitively difficult as well…
Yeah. Honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of any substantial benefits. Eventually, okay, sure, there’s a point in time where we can’t create computer structures on Earth if we’re going to scale up, but that is way the hell out there on the list of constraints we have. I also kind of suspect that materials science and manufacturing and computing technologies may change a lot and obsolete anything we create now long before that.
The article has:
But most data isn’t generated in space. It’s generated on Earth. Maybe if you have some kind of Earth-observation satellite in low earth orbit and want to add a shit-ton more processing capability to it so you don’t have to send its data back down to datacenters on Earth to chew on? Sounds kind of Orwellian, but maybe I could see that. But it seems like such a niche case.