Re:Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea
by jhgb on Sunday November 30, 2025 @10:45AM
(#46097556)
There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.
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Re:Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea
by jonah on Sunday November 30, 2025 @12:23PM
(#46098553)
That seems like it would make the most sense on the "last mile". So, adding caches to the LEO satellite ISP birds would be a good idea. I wonder if Kupiter, StarLink, et. al. do that. (And if not, their reasoning against it since they've surely considered it.)