this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
1065 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
85998 readers
4535 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I know who Scott Manley is. I'm subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.
That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I'm most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can't treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.
And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they're suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We're already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.
I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/live/4mx9Rp-SMNk