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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

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Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up

You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.

That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.

International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal…

While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#43

Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to? Latency? Highly variable. Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible. Radiation shielding? Not free. Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous! Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and kee…

The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...

Yes, and also just because a space data center isn’t useful today doesn’t mean it won’t be required tomorrow. When all the computing is between the ground and some nearby satellites, of course the tradeoffs won’t be worth it.

But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?

We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#44

Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to? Latency? Highly variable. Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible. Radiation shielding? Not free. Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous! Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and kee…

Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.

:-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.

But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.

You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal…

While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...

Maybe not so much... they'll just grab you. Obligatory XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's still a lifetime supply...

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#46
post #41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.

That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.

You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#47
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal…

While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...

They don't need to do that if they go after your ground station operators.

To escape the law you need to hide or protect something on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother putting the computers in space?

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#48
post #37

My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, a…

If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).

1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#49

Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to? Latency? Highly variable. Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible. Radiation shielding? Not free. Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous! Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and kee…

If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.

The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.

For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.

All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.

Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.

I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.

1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

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