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Indeed, MS had it easier with a huge, readily available cooling reservoir and a layer of water that additionally protects (a little) against cosmic rays, plus the whole thing had to be heavy enough to sink. An orbital datacenter would be in a opposite situation: all cooling is radiative, many more high-energy particles, and the weight should be as light as possible.
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> In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected

Underwater pods are the polar opposite of space in terms of failure risks. They don't require a rocket launch to get there, and they further insulate the servers from radiation compared to operating on the surface of the Earth, rather than increasing exposure.

(Also, much easier to cool.)

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The biggest difference is radiation. Even in LEO, you will get radiation-caused Single Events that will affect the hardware. That could be a small error or a destructive error, depending on what gets hit.
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Power is solar and cooling is radiators. They did the math on it, its feasible and mostly an engineering problem now.
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Power!? Isnt that just PV and batteries? LEO has like 1.5h orbit.
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It's a Datacenter... I guess solar is what they're planning to use, but the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity well
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All mass has gravity
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Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.

But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well".

> "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space."

- https://medium.com/intuition/what-are-gravity-wells-3c1fb6d6...

So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to get past some boundary below which things don't have gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough gravity to matter.

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