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I think the other side of this is just buying Amazon stock based on the daring prediction that big grey buildings full of servers aren't going anywhere.
That still leaves you with the risk that Amazon is replaced by other earth-based data center operators.
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That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?
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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.
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…
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…
> they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load
I mean this is a ridiculous concept. We've never put anything remotely that size into space. To argue that this would be cheaper than putting something underwater or in the middle of nowhere is crazy. I'd rather deal with salt than deal with radiation.
I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…
I agree, this is makes no sense at all. Can I take the other side of this investment? Like an angel funding round, but selling short?
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…
How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Followup question, wouldn't nearly any cooling solution that works in space also work on the ground? Radiative cooling is the most basic/common cooling solution on the ground, the main challenge is just figuring out how to to move heat from the component to the radiator, which I don't think is solved by simply putting it in space?
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> So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load… Starcloud’s whitepaper suggests a 4 km × 4 km radiator. For comparison, the James Web Space Telescope has a sunshield measuring 21 m × 14 m and the International Space Station measures 109 m × 73 m.
James Webb is a trainwreck. It took 20 years of delays to launch it.
Webb took a long time because this stuff is very, very challenging. One of its primary engineering challenges was… cooling!