Hamilton

There's an underrated part of the AI Sat Mini design that nobody seems to have picked up on. Up until now, the 2 major critiques to Orbital Datacenters have fundamentally been: 1. The Solar Irradiance hitting the satellite in a Dawn-Dusk SSO will make running GPUs on it thermally impractical 2. The Earth Albedo hitting the radiators will make it challenging to dissipate heat The AI Sat Mini config takes care of both. - The Flatsat Bus is pointed perpendicular to the sun load edge-first, minimizing Solar Load. - The Radiator is pointed perpendicular to both the Earth and the Sun Loads, able to dissipate heat to free space on both sides - The Solar Array mounting seems to be fairly thermally isolated, and the massive span allows for a ton of radiative dissipation from the dark rear-face (as is often the case with space SPAs, they don't store that much) These are fairly clever orbit & conops driven geometry choices that become apparent once you start mission design, and de-constrain the design quite simply. Your flatellite + radiator is almost permanently shaded, and the only incentive becomes to run your compute as hot as possible to leverage the Eb = σ• T⁴ scaling. Passive heatpipes conducting heat from the chip pedestal to the radiator may be sufficient, without engaging in the insane exercise of mass producing 0g coolant pumps. Now there seem to be 2 variants here between the images posted, but that may just be render inaccuracy. Vertical Config: Image 1 (with the Starship for scale) shows the solar arrays along the edge of the flatellite. Horizontal Config: Image 4 (the on-orbit render) shows the solar arrays perpendicular to the face of the flatellite. Either scenario supports the earlier observations, as the solar array plane is free to rotate. However as others have noted, the Vertical config may offer a fair degree of gravity gradient stabilization. This is another interesting bit - Orbital Compute will require very little pointing accuracy, compared to most other space applications like EO or Comms that track a target (Imaging AOI or Receivers). As long as the satellite points roughly at the sun, and the gimbaled ISL terminals can maintain a stable connection to Starlink, the pointing requirement is negligibly coarse. You could probably forgo reaction wheels and control this whole thing with magnetorquer pulses. SpaceX has a habit of eliminating broad constraints at architecture level quite cleverly, and I was looking forward to how they think about Orbital Compute. Safe to say I was quite delighted by this design.

I think it will hurt the US, but it will hurt the rest of the world even more, because the US is more insulated from the both the energy shock and the economic slowdown that will result from it. I think all the other stuff will likely not matter a lot one way or another in the long run. As I keep saying, the problem with the US is that it's so rich and powerful that, except in dealing with China, it can do the stupidest shit imaginable and it won't really matter that much to Americans in the grand scheme of things, which is why you never learn.

the US is currently feeding key regional client states that are far, far more economically consequential to it than Israel into a woodchipper for the sake of a war of choice, if your analysis can't at least acknowledge that then it isn't worth much

Giedi Prime sequence in Dune Part Two is still some of the greatest shit Denis has ever done.

Dear Americans, Iran is not your enemy Israel is.

“We are manufacturing a whole new generation of terrorists in the Middle East,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel tells me, saying the Trump administration's conduct of its war in Iran appears to him unprecedented.

BREAKING: U.S. intelligence believes China prefers taking control of Taiwan without force.