There is a neat solve for the thermal problem that York Space systems has been advocating (based on Russian tech)… put everything in an enclosure.

https://www.yorkspacesystems.com/

Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes, there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate, but dramatically simplifies things.

> The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.

The analysis is a third party analysis that among other things presumes they'll launch unmodified Nvidia racks, which would make no sense. It might be this means Starcloud are bonkers, but it might also mean the analysis is based on flawed assumptions about what they're planning to do. Or a bit of both.

> IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.

This would get you significantly less redundancy other than against physical strikes than having the same redundancy in a single unit and letting you control what feeds what, the same way we have smart, redundant power supplies and cooling in every data center (and in the racks they're talking about using as the basis).

If power and cooling die faster than the servers, you'd either need to overprovision or shut down servers to compensate, but it's certainly not all or nothing.

Many small satellites also increases the surface area for cooling

even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS, they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April and it happens about once a year.

the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.