TL;DW:
Does It Make Sense To Put Data Centers In Space?
At some point in the future, yes.
Can They Really Cost Less To Operate?
In theory, yes.
Scott expresses concerns that current startups have not adequately addressed some of the practical challenges, such as cooling.
i agree with the other points you made, but microsoft and others have already solved this with sealed datacenter pods under the ocean.
no repairs, no humans entering the datacenter messing things up. they just build in enough redundancy such that they can turn things off one by one when they go bad. they know statistically how long hardware lasts and can plan for a defined lifecycle.
Yea, this is a solved problem. Look at Hubble with the Gyroscopes problems, hell even voyager problem early this year.
…neither of which are applicable to data centers. they are very different beasts.
It doesn’t sound like they’ve “solved” it. Just that they have a work-around that means that bit by bit their sealed datacenter pod becomes more and more broken. And if their solution for that is to build in redundancy so that even when it’s say 30% broken it operates at 100%, that means they have to ship up something like twice as much hardware as a standard datacenter with most of it being redundant in case something fails. That extra expense may not be too bad if it’s a pod under the ocean, but if you have to pay $5000/kg to put it in orbit, that’s a huge additional expense.