Tardigrade in orbit?

I just stumbled across this:

This sounds like Tardigrade in orbit (kind of).

I am really wondering if Storjs Tardigrade and Spacebelts space solution could play together in a way. Maybe for customers who still would like to have a ground based backup or something.

This all sounds really cool, but it doesn’t seem at all feasible to me. It’s near impossible to scale. Because they are looking to use only a few LEO satellites, they need to rely on GSO sats to connect because the curvature of the earth prevents connecting to these LEO satellites. But that back and forth adds massive amounts of latency.

But most importantly, they estimate the entire endeavor costs 480 million USD and they end up with only 5PB of storage. Meaning they need to recoup about 100K per TB to even break even… And even after that, they still have centralized storage, managed by a third party, which requires inherent trust.

All of that to solve something that can also be solved with encryption and managing your keys yourself.

The only unique thing is that there is no reliance on earthly laws and governments. That cuts both ways, there is no danger of them trying to spy on your data, but there is also no protection of earthly laws to defend you against others illegally accessing your data. If that’s worth $100K / TB to you, more power to you. But I think Tardigrade already offers pretty much the same level of effective privacy as this system would.

Am I missing something? Apparently investors seem to be at least a little interested. What’s the upside?

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They could speak to the starlink SATs in LEO for low latency comms. If that scales to planned, they should never be far from one.

Radiation… cosmic rays… micro-meteorites…

Storing data in space is not going to be reliable or cheap.

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Sure, but who’s willing to pay 100K per TB even then?

The Darkweb, Botnet/C2 APTs, North Korea? :rofl: I’m struggling to see the upside myself.