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

281–290 of 365 posts

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

#281

Post by aleph_minus_one »

mrguyorama wrote: post #249
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there! Just to make me understand the business plan better: why would people or companies to be willing to pay much more to have their data (or computations) done in space? The only reason that I can imagine is that the satellite which contains the data center also has a lot of sensors mounted (think military spying devices), and either for security, ca…

Except space hasn't been "more secure" for nation states against other nation states in decades. US, Russia, and China all have various capabilities to destroy or steal or manipulate or tamper with satellites. It mostly doesn't happen right now because nobody is at full blown war. Shooting down satellites was expected to be a part of any superpower war since the 80s. Those weapons will be plenty effective against eve…

While I think that you gave some valid considerations that I really have to think about, this makes me question a lot more what the plan for Starcloud then is to make money.

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

#282

Post by diabeetusman »

hartator wrote: post #251

> There, 24/7 solar power is unhindered by day/night cycles, weather, and atmospheric losses (attenuation). Wouldn’t the earth still get in the way of the sun or it’s too far away?

Normally yes, but the L1 Lagrange point always would have an unobstructed view of the sun. Granted, L1 is a lot further away than LEO (~3x the distance to the moon), so that makes it harder and more expensive to get to

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

#283

Post by bevr1337 »

swores wrote: post #275
bevr1337 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All mass has gravity

Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point. But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well". > "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space." - https://medium.com/intuition/what-are-gravity-wells-3c1fb6d6... So they weren'…

Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold reached after certain mass.

"Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas Adams put it best

> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

From an education site:

> Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more massive an object is, the more it bends

They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts far more influence

https://www.howitworksdaily.com/the-solar-system-what-is-a-g...

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

#284

Post by Brian_K_White »

starik36 wrote: post #262
Brian_K_White wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was a video from Scott Manley about this several years back. And he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit. And they haven't yet.

Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.

Here is how to think about them: It doesn't matter how open your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea and working hard and never giving up developing strength and technique to jump higher.

Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping harder.

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

#285

Post by MPSimmons »

HPsquared wrote: post #150
verzali wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really hard, and it is something you need to take into careful consideration when designing a satellite. It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being generated that you somehow have to get rid of.

It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.

Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.

The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.

The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.

That's a lot.

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

#286

Post by yreg »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #157
Robotbeat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (n 150W) and say JUST one H200 DGX (8 700W).

Shouldn't the radiators be directly proportional to the area of the solar panels? (Since there's no one munching on food on board.)

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

#287

Post by happyopossum »

0xTJ wrote: post #223
Robotbeat wrote: post #93

Earlier 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 radiators are significantly smaller than the PV arrays, but not by a massive ratio; looks like about 1:3.6 based on the published area numbers that I could find. It looks like the ISS active cooling system has a maximum cooling capacity that could handle the equivalent of a single-digit number of racks (down to 1 for an AI-focused rack).

if you were looking at a 10' tall spider and a 36' tall spider, yes they'd both be big but it'd be fair to say that the 10' one is much smaller....

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

#288

Post by rtkwe »

0xffff2 wrote: post #259
drewg123 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.

On the ground vibration testing is a standard part of pre-launch spacecraft testing. This would trigger most (not all) vibration/G-force related failures on the ground rather than at the actual launch.

The big question mark is how many failures you cause and catch on the first cycle and how much you're just putting extra wear on the components that pass the test the first time and don't get replaced.

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

#289

Post by rtkwe »

looofooo0 wrote: post #144
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there). > The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the…

Power!? Isnt that just PV and batteries? LEO has like 1.5h orbit.

As mentioned in the article the Starcloud design requires solar arrays that are ~2x more efficient than those deployed on the ISS. Simply scaling them up introduces more drag and weight problems as do the batteries needed to suffice for the 45 minutes of darkness the satellite will receive.

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

#290

Post by c22 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #280
c22 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you just launch it in secret and don't tell anybody?

Unless you invent some new launch method, a dozen or so countries will immediately know. Shortly afterwards, amateur astronomers will spot it. https://gizmodo.com/amateur-astronomer-catches-fleeting-glim...

Oh drat, I thought I'd found the answer.
Post reply on HN