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Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

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Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#21
I worked for several years at a company that builds and launches satellites. I worked almost entirely on the ground systems, so I don't claim to be an expert in the design of flight hardware etc, but I picked up quite a bit of general knowledge through osmosis.

the short answer is no, general-purpose space datacenters are a non-starter. eg, you're never going to open the AWS console and decide whether you want to deploy a VM to us-east-2 or leo-1.

however, there is a narrow use case for wanting to run more powerful hardware on satellites that would be launched anyway.

for example - you have 2 countries, Alicetopia and Bobistan. they border each other, separated by a big desert, and are on unfriendly terms. their militaries want to make sure they never get surprised by an invasion force attacking them.

Bobistan launches a satellite (or several) that flies over their border region once a day (or more, depending on orbital geometry) and takes pictures (visual-spectrum at least, possibly also infrared, SAR, etc).

those pictures get downlinked and analyzed to answer the question "is Alicetopia building up a military presence on our border to prepare for an invasion?"

this used to be done manually, with people actually staring at imagery to try to find rectangles that looked like tanks. back in the early Cold War days, this was done using physical film that was dropped from orbit, looking for ICBMs. obviously now it's all done with machine learning algorithms.

downlinking those daily images isn't cheap, especially when the steady-state behavior is "nothing interesting here, just a big stretch of desert".

as a result, there's a desire to run a relatively lightweight ML model on the satellite itself, to answer the question "is any of this imagery worth downlinking at all? and if so, is any of it high-priority for downlinking immediately and flagging for human attention?"

for flight safety reasons, you'd want that on a separate GPU/TPU-like processor, so that your rad-hardened CPU that runs the mission-critical parts of the flight software won't be affected by anything that happens with the ML processing.

but that relatively narrow use case definitely doesn't justify the magnitude of the current hype cycle.

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#22

What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit? You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.

Energy cost can be theoretically lower than on earth IF launch costs and additional hardware costs are low enough. Because solar is about 5x better on space than on earth. That's basically it.

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#23

It's another hyperloop scam and nothing more. Even if we could put datacenters in orbit, there's no reason to. There is plenty of space here on the planet that doesn't involve launching rockets and then later dropping the decommissioned datacenter back into the atmosphere to burn up and/or impact the ground. Data is faster, power is cheaper, cooling is free. There's no reason for it other than to juice spacex stock.…

By that logic, was the Concorde also a "scam"? Are companies not allowed to try out new things without a guarantee that they will work and scale?

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the math on data transport? If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites. If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge de…

> If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets. How does that introduce a delay?

because earth's geosync orbit is at 36k kilometers (function of gravitational force and rotation speed)

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t? > power It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed. > cooling Cooling off in a vacuum is hard. You’ll need radiators to emit the heat, you’ll need a lot of radiators for data center level heat. This is more mass you need to get into orbit > locat…

> It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed. SpaceX will be putting them in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning always sunlight.

How would they handle eclipses?

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#26

What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit? You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.

> What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit?

Applying standard financial metrics (do they make money? Will they ever? What valuation does that justify?) to certain companies.

Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?

#30

It's another hyperloop scam and nothing more. Even if we could put datacenters in orbit, there's no reason to. There is plenty of space here on the planet that doesn't involve launching rockets and then later dropping the decommissioned datacenter back into the atmosphere to burn up and/or impact the ground. Data is faster, power is cheaper, cooling is free. There's no reason for it other than to juice spacex stock.…

By that logic, was the Concorde also a "scam"? Are companies not allowed to try out new things without a guarantee that they will work and scale?

Companies have become so big that an announcement of the CEO of a top 25 capitalization company equates to the one of the G20 countries bar a couple

Hence they should be treated with the same level of skepticism of a politician making a false promise just to get elected, actually more skepticism because the vaporware announcement starts making money from the CEO/Founder the second after they make it

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