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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Don’t overlook the changes required for electronics that are able to operate in space. Since there’d be no atmospheric sheilding from radiation, the amount of additional silicon for error correction used per unit of compute is much higher. The capacity for cooling is also much lower on the moon, you’d essentially have to slap huge heatsinks on every component since you basically rely on radiation for heat dissipation. You’ll also constantly be fighting with the fact that every electrically conductive trace serves as an antenna, so the trace length vs component density for heat dissipation is going to be a constant battle. Then there is the limited availability of power.

    It all adds up to an entirely different class of device being able to be deployed in space. On earth we can just chuck high precision components around, throw swathes of power and cooling at it and call it a day. Rain and weather are a footnote compared to the design challenges space deployments represent.