[abalone]

You are again misquoting the article. She did not say soiling was "significantly less of a problem" in the desert. She in fact said it "requires you to clean them off every day or every other day or so" to prevent cement formation.

You claimed it was already a solved problem thanks to wind, which is false. You are unable to provide any source at all, not even a controversial one.

And that's just generation. Desert solar, energy storage and data center cooling at scale all remain massive engineering challenges that have not yet been generally solved. This is crucial to understand properly when comparing it to the engineering challenges of orbital computing.

[Retric]

Now you make me want to come up with a controversial source. The Martian rovers continued to operate at useful power level for decades without cleaning.

But but lack of water…

[Retric]

Anyway here’s some actual science on why going vertical makes a big difference.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-022-19171-5