this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)

Spaceflight

2357 readers
17 users here now

Your one-stop shop for spaceflight news and discussion.

All serious posts related to spaceflight are welcome! JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos, ULA, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, Blue Origin, etc. (Arca and Pythom, if you must).

Other related space communities:

Related meme community:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The property that I'm not seeing being discussed is effective sovereignty. A satellite data center is hardware that no one can physically access without enormous effort and expense. That could put them literally above the law in various respects, impossible to audit or shut down without the encryption keys or use of advanced weapons. If they start doing something especially objectionable to the public, protesters can't do anything to hinder their operation.

[–] burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

The Epstein class would never!

[–] teft@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

Take every other problem away.

These satellites will be hundreds to thousands of meters apart in orbit. Why would anyone want to introduce transmission lag into their datacenters?

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago
[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Surely wouldn't a very fundamental problem be that vacuum is an insulator, hence providing the datacenter no way tk stop overheating?

[–] zener_diode@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

Scott Manley recently made a great video about this. He goes through (and explains it while doing so) a whole lot of rough math, and comes to the conclusion that cooling datacentre satelites is actually pretty doable.

[–] burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Infrared radiators

If you look at pictures of the ISS, that's what the big white panels are for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control#Radiators