I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I’ve seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible
Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
191–200 of 365 posts
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#192Why 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…
Not every datacenter use case is latency sensitive. Backup storage or GPU compute, for example.
But then why bother with the added expense of launching into space? It's definitely not for environmental reasons.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. F…
> 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. This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand wavy “modular”. I have trained large models on thousands of GPUs, hardware failure happen al…
> 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.
Something tells me that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter - which will also need batteries - into space.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not really. Fiber is more 2/3 of free space propagation and that puts the break-even point of direct fiber connection vs LEO up- and downlink at a geodesic distance of about 12000 km. So, for most data centers you want to reach a fiber is the better option.
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Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time. Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation? I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the…
The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty. For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle.
This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all far more predictable. Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating. Space radiators use a high emissivity…
> The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. Modern solar panels are way more efficient than the ancient ones in ISS, at least 10x. The cooling radiators are smaller than solar panels because they are stacked and therefore effectively 5x efficient. Unless there are at least 2x performance improvements on the cooling system, the cooling system would have to be larger than solar panels in a modern deployment…
This is false. It’s pretty straightforward to prove using Stefan-Boltzmann. Radiating from both sides at 300K, a square radiator that’s 1 meter on a side emits 920W.
Additionally, you wouldn’t use cutting edge 35% triple junction cells for a space datacenter, you’d use silicon cells like Starlink and ISS use. 22% efficient with 90% full factor, given 1350W/m^2 and thus 270W/m^2, to provide enough power for that radiator you’d need a solar panel 3.4 times as big, and that’s if you were in 24/7 sunshine. If you’re in a low orbit that’s obscured almost half the time, it’s 6-7 times as big.
Why do people keep making these obviously wrong claims when a paragraph of arithmetic shows they’re wrong? Do the math.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel). (Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radi…
Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!
Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won’t ever happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn’t viable. But THAT’S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap about size of radiators.
(And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about 10 years ago in 2015).
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation? I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the…
The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty . For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle. This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive…
Then just provide spin gravity for the crew habitat.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t true. The radiators on ISS are MUCH smaller than the solar panels. I know it’s every single armchair engineer’s idea that heat rejection is this impossible problem in space, but your own example of ISS proves this is untrue. Radiators are no more of a problem than solar panels.
The heat load of the ISS is a handful of astronauts and some equipment and whatever it absorbs from the sun. Not an entire data center or a nuclear rocket which is where the radiator discussion comes into play.
The heat load is equal to the load from the solar panels, to first order. So actually yeah, you CAN compare the size of solar panels to the size of the radiators.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#200Why 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…
My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment. Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.
A bit like international waters. I wonder when we'll see the first space pirates.