Stop moving the goal post. To process satellite images, you need way, waaaaay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less compute than for AI datacenters. We are not arguing about image processing for a single satellite. (Which is still jot a great idea, ideally you’d want to improve throughput instead since you still want the raw images for people to work with, just faster, no?)

No, what you were talking about were data enters for AI (no, you didn’t say AI, but that’s what everyone on Lemmy says is a bad idea in space, and you were referring to everyone on Lemmy, so, we are talking about AI data enters in space).

• putting them in space doesn’t make them faster.
• putting them in space is incredibly expensive
• cooling them in space is way harder than on earth; radiating heat away is a function of the surface area of the cooling modules, and you cannot escape that
• maintenance (remember - things fail) is way harder and astronomically expensive and slow
• and, thanks for reminding me, sending AI output to and from is subject to the same slowness as for images from telescopes

Sorry, “data-center in space” is a stupid idea. Musk yaps about it because a) he’s an idiot and b) enough investors fell for it