Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

angadh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 365 posts

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

#151

Post by HPsquared »

hamburglar wrote: post #77
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

Seems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.

The economics don't work the same on earth.

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

#152

Post by vidarh »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon.

Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect low failure rates for a long period and it's quite likely it'd be cheaper to not replace components and just ensure enough redundancy for key systems (power, cooling, networking) that you could just shut down and disable any dead servers, and then replace the whole unit when enough parts have failed.

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

#153

Post by weinzierl »

nusl wrote: post #145
weinzierl wrote: post #131

I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things: 1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things. 2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radia…

What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?

Room temperature on earth. In physics room temperature is used as a technical term and actually pretty universally defined as 20°C (293.15 K).

Traditionally in European papers it used to be 18°C, so if Einstein and Schrödinger talk about room temperature it is that.

I've heard in chemistry and stamp collecting they use 25°C but that is heresy.

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

#154

Post by HPsquared »

weinzierl wrote: post #138

Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place? Free cooling? Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive. Access to solar energy? Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place? Physical isolation and security? Against manipulation maybe, but not agains…

Speed of light is actually quite an advantage, in theory at least. Speed of light in optical fiber is quite a bit slower (takes 50% longer) than in vacuum.

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

#155

Post by fennecfoxy »

teekert wrote: post #140
weinzierl wrote: post #131

I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things: 1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things. 2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radia…

Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif). Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast... People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of co…

Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.

But I think what people/movies don't understand is that there's almost no conductive thermal transfer going on, because there's not much matter to do it. It's all radiation, which is why heat is a much bigger problem, because you can only radiate heat away, you can't conduct it. And whatever you use to radiate heat away can also potentially receive radiation from things like the Sun, making your craft even hotter.

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

#157

Post by fennecfoxy »

Robotbeat wrote: post #95
throwawaymaths wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there literally is nothing to absorb the heat. Conduction and convection are out, all you got is radiation. new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children of a dead earth

Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e. in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake, tbh. Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law. The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an ov…

There's a difference between a couple humans (n150W) and say JUST one H200 DGX (8700W).

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

#158

Post by vidarh »

westpfelia wrote: post #135
philosophty wrote: post #106

"Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time." This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in constant use. There are definitely failures but they're very low unless something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad batch of hardware.

Backblaze is a perfect example of parts failing. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive... Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space as it stands is a nothing burger.

The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.

Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact cut costs because it allows you to design the space without consideration of humans needing to be able to access and insert/remove servers.

The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance, the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept failures and just disable failed equipment.

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

#159

Post by rajnathani »

vidarh wrote: post #152
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…

Exactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and then simply replace faulty servers around once per year.

Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve crossed 9 points).

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

#160

Post by world2vec »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #67
xnx wrote: post #3

Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.

Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.

SpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back to Earth.
Post reply on HN