First things first, you aren’t shielding solar panels from radiation, you’re shielding the computing components from the radiations. I don’t know how much you know about microprocessors and silicon engineering, but I can promise you they do NOT like ionizing radiation or most other high energy sources of EM radiation, especially while energized. In space, this is a lot of heavy plating that is effectively dead weight and at best can be used as a secondary heat sink, but that’s highly unlikely since it would also be absorbing heat energy while in sunlight.
Additionally, as I pointed out, you’d want to or at least be highly encouraged to pair these lunar data centers with long term colonies, at least as long term as you’d want the data center active. Any unmanned data center is going to fail within 6 months, be it in space, on the moon or some remote valley here on Earth. And while it’s not cheap to sustain life on the moon, it’s even less cheap to do so in orbit when you examine the effects of micro gravity on the human body as well as what it would cost to build a suitable shelter in orbit. There is a reason scientists talk about building long term colonization projects on the moon or Mars, not just putting up orbital space habitats like some gundam series. Earth Orbit may be closer but it’s probably the least hospitable long term to any form of human habitation.
Oh man so much to unpack here.
First things first, you aren’t shielding solar panels from radiation, you’re shielding the computing components from the radiations. I don’t know how much you know about microprocessors and silicon engineering, but I can promise you they do NOT like ionizing radiation or most other high energy sources of EM radiation, especially while energized. In space, this is a lot of heavy plating that is effectively dead weight and at best can be used as a secondary heat sink, but that’s highly unlikely since it would also be absorbing heat energy while in sunlight.
Additionally, as I pointed out, you’d want to or at least be highly encouraged to pair these lunar data centers with long term colonies, at least as long term as you’d want the data center active. Any unmanned data center is going to fail within 6 months, be it in space, on the moon or some remote valley here on Earth. And while it’s not cheap to sustain life on the moon, it’s even less cheap to do so in orbit when you examine the effects of micro gravity on the human body as well as what it would cost to build a suitable shelter in orbit. There is a reason scientists talk about building long term colonization projects on the moon or Mars, not just putting up orbital space habitats like some gundam series. Earth Orbit may be closer but it’s probably the least hospitable long term to any form of human habitation.