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ppaattrriicckk | 4 months ago

Apart from getting 16 sq. km of solar arrays and radiators into orbit - and without jumping to conclusions about whether this is a borderline scam - I can imagine 2 obvious showstoppers:

1) Space debris. This is proposal is several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest things in near-Earth orbits. Thus equally many orders more likely to be hit by, and create, space debris

2) Heat transport - this isn't my home turf, but I can't imagine building something lightweight enough to be launched, yet also capable of transferring enough heat away from the 5 GW core, without it melting/breaking

It's been a while since I read their whitepaper, but I don't recall either of those points being addressed.

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mercutio2|4 months ago

LEO is the last place you should worry about space debris.

Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem.

Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.