Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar regolith simulants

Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by comex on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @01:54PM (#34794147)

With a 2.5 second ping time from the Earth to Moon, data centers seem to me like a limited proposition. Sure, there are some use cases that could tolerate it, but many that can’t, and even where tolerating it is technically possible, it’s annoying enough (e.g. it’s hard to use SSH with that kind of latency) that there’d need to be significant cost savings for anyone to use it. But the cost would depend not just on the cost of raw materials but also the enormous cost of creating the fabs. On Earth that can be amortized with equally enormous production volume; that might be harder on the Moon…

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by riffic on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @02:06PM (#34794330)

it'd be a nice but expensive storage location though.

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by beakergordon on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @03:03PM (#34795149)

If the goal was isolation from natural disasters and the like, then why not just build it in a facility like Yucca Mountain?

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by junipertea on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @03:50PM (#34795751)

Maybe bragging rights. My dog photo collection can survive societal collapse.

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by dylan604 on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:43PM (#34797287)

why would yucca mt be susceptible to societal collapse?

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by sp332 on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:00PM (#34798061)

It's only expensive until the self-replicating drones get into the exabytes/day range.

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by jyrkesh on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:41PM (#34798444)

There are ton of internet use cases that don't need low latency, though, especially if you have super high-bandwidth with lasers[1] (sorry for shit citation, just went with the first thing I found). First one that comes to mind is streaming back raw scientific data you're collecting from the moon. Netflix would be easy, you just gotta wait for 2.5+ seconds of buffering. And you could do voice/video memos and stuff, they'd just be async.

But yes, real-time video chat and gaming will be kinda hard. Full disclosure, Google asked me this on a PM interview once: "knowing these lasers exist, how would you design an internet for Mars astronauts, and what limitations would it have?"

And yes, I failed. So take my words with a grain of salt. (Though I actually felt like this was the one question I nailed.)

[1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220913005840/en/Aal...

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Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ... by yazaddaruvala on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:49PM (#34798514)

> there are some use cases that could tolerate it

Yes, and those usecases that "could tolerate it" will be a super-minority of usecases compared with usecases that "prefer moon-local latency".

Specifically for moon-local activities:

For example, the moon will likely host the largest telescopes and other measurement devices. Think JWST but 10^5x bigger! Including other measurement devices important for deep space exploration.

It'll be significantly cheaper to use AWS' moon-region (with 3 AZs of redundancy) for storage and processing, rather than shipping the data back to Earth for initial processing. Earth based users of the data can get local read-replicas of the post-processed data, with the ability to request transfer of the raw files.

It will also likely host the largest hadron collider, fusion research lab, etc. Anything that requires lots of land, few humans, and would otherwise disproportionately "impact the environment" or "cost too much based on land value" will likely be hosted on the moon. Additionally, anything like anti-matter research that might be considered "too risky for Earth".

Including ofcourse the moon wide Iron Dome's processing needs to protect the upcoming infrastructure from asteroids.

Additionally, coordination of large scale robotics on the moon for infrastructure creation will also be cheaper to host storage and processing on the moon.

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