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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#211

Post by mplanchard »

stephenhandley wrote: post #185
Etheryte wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't litter HN with LLM generated slop. Each and every one of us here is more than capable of doing that themselves if they please. The value of HN is the human discussion.

[flagged]

I thought your question was interesting. The ChatGPT quote was not. If I want to know what an LLM “thinks”, I can ask it. I have more respect for and am more interested in reading people’s thoughts than machine output.

I do appreciate your at least labeling at such, so I could skip over it.

Re: Starcloud

#213

Post by 999900000999 »

ianhowson wrote: post #41

I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…

At this point as long as you say AI 3 times someone will give you money.

I guess you need connections too, and maybe a previous exit.

This idea in particular doesn't make any sense... Currently. Maybe in a decade or so with better technology.

Although the prospect of polluting the stars itself with a bunch of computers generating AI slips... We paved Paradise to put up a parking lot

Re: Starcloud

#214

Post by dgrin91 »

mortoc wrote: post #201
ianhowson wrote: post #41

I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…

If you have continuous sunlight, can't you get away with no battery? Not arguing with your overall point - this company looks ridiculous.

For continuous you need to either go for a polar orbit or go very far in space. Most launch centers & providers are not well situation for polar orbits because its not a common use case, so you need to sacrifice launch mass. The same goes for far away orbits - you need to sacrifice launch mass to go further. Also if you are far then you get latency issues.

So it skews the economics pretty harshly. I think OP is right - you need good batteries somehow.

Re: Starcloud

#215

Post by mplanchard »

gbear605 wrote: post #134
Townley wrote: post #30

It sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs. Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy. Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, an…

Solar energy isn’t that much more efficient in Earth orbit than on Earth - maybe twice as efficient. That sounds nice, but you’re saving half of your solar panel cost while massively increasing every other cost.

The one benefit is being able to be in a synchronous orbit with the sun, so you don’t have to contend with night. However, that’s just another ~doubling of efficiency, which I think still nowhere near makes up for the additional costs.

Re: Starcloud

#216

Post by dilyevsky »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
dilyevsky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

> power is continuous and free via solar array It’s is on earth as well using solar and batteries. What is likely to get cheaper faster? Solar and batteries? Or lifting datacenters to space? The world is almost at the point of deploying 1TW/year of solar, and batteries are catching up. No space required. There aren't a lot of VC investment opportunities speeding the rate of solar and battery deployments though.

The argument probably is that battery advances require not yet existing tech via new chemistry etc while what they are proposing is basically just integrating tech that already exists

Re: Starcloud

#217

Post by matthewfcarlson »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #110
dfabulich wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…

Obviously use the heat pumps to concentrate the thermal energy up to 2700k, then conduct it along a bunch of tungsten filaments, now it's the world's biggest incandescent lightbulb on top of being the first datacenter in space. Maybe get it up to 4000k for a more modern lighting look. Guess we're gonna assume the dark forest hypothesis is false.

I personally love the timeline where I can point out the bright glowing object overhead to my son and say “look buddy, ChatGPT is flying us right now”

Re: Starcloud

#218

Post by nashashmi »

jedberg wrote: post #25

I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel beca…

Microsoft has tried underwater data centers

Re: Starcloud

#219

Post by tonyarkles »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #133
hnuser123456 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously use the heat pumps to concentrate the thermal energy up to 2700k, then conduct it along a bunch of tungsten filaments, now it's the world's biggest incandescent lightbulb on top of being the first datacenter in space. Maybe get it up to 4000k for a more modern lighting look. Guess we're gonna assume the dark forest hypothesis is false.

Could they concentrate the energy and beam it down to earth as a source for electricity generation on the ground?

Look… I played a lot of SimCity 2000 back in the day and that doesn’t turn out well :D

Re: Starcloud

#220

Post by perihelions »

jedberg wrote: post #25

I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel beca…

- "But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult".

Surely you'd want to use satellite constellations as relays? There's thousands of those satellites in line-of-sight all the time.

It's strictly superior on pure geometry anyway (I think). You have a finite channel capacity between your satellite and your ground station; but different satellites, in non-overlapping microwave spots, are in separate spatial channels.

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