> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
And just like that you've added another not never done before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix.
These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost.
Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.
Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?