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

angadh.com

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

#351

Post by markemer »

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…

Not to mention radiation hardening. The soft error rate alone on these single digit nm chips would be massive.

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

#352

Post by angadh »

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…

Thanks for the thorough comment—yes, the heat pipes etc haven’t been accounted for. Might be a future addition but the idea was to look at some key large parts and see where that takes us in terms of launch. The pipes would definitely skew the business case further. Similarly, the analysis is missing trusses.

Don’t even get me started on the costs of maintenance. I am sweating bricks just thinking of the mission architecture for assembly and how the robotic system might actually look. Unless there’s a single 4 km long deployable array (of what width?), which would be ridiculous to imagine.

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

#353

Post by ricardobeat »

angadh wrote: post #219
ricardobeat wrote: post #162

The launch costs in the article look quite off from the outset. A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg range; Starship’s main purpose is to massively reduce launch costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full reusability is in place. Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not that far. The original “white paper” [1]…

please read Table 1.

What about it? They estimate an unrealistic $5M launch cost, but the point is that it is likely to be ~$25M and not the $100M+ this article suggests.

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

#354

Post by fennecfoxy »

amluto wrote: post #246
fennecfoxy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold. What is this “empty space” you speak of? Genuinely empty space is empty and does not have a clearly defined temperature. If you are in space in our universe, very far from everything else, then the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is what matters, and that’s a few K. If you’re in our solar system in an orbit near Earth, the r…

You know exactly what the term "empty space" means and of course it does not mean empty in absolute terms.

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

#355

Post by monster_truck »

closewith wrote: post #331
monster_truck wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a bit of pointless whataboutism when we're still using leaded fuel in planes and helicopters

At least that's relatively local pollution and isn't raining down on me given it's banned in the entire EU.

Have you looked at the number of exemptions issued after they sunset it? Virtually nothing has changed.

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

#356

Post by yreg »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #334
yreg wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes, exactly. they are going to be absolutely huge and add to launch and engineering costs.

Every part does by definition add to launch and engineering costs…

The point is that heat radiation is not the main deal-breaker regarding this project as some comments in this subthread insinuate.

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

#357

Post by throwawaymaths »

yreg wrote: post #356
throwawaymaths wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, exactly. they are going to be absolutely huge and add to launch and engineering costs.

Every part does by definition add to launch and engineering costs… The point is that heat radiation is not the main deal-breaker regarding this project as some comments in this subthread insinuate.

The point is: the power consumption requirements (quote: considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine) for satellite X is not even close to racks of hyperscaler compute.

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

#358

Post by vidarh »

lumost wrote: post #204
asah wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space? on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...

I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space. Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.

The racks mentioned in the analysis are liquid-cooled.

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

#359

Post by [deleted] »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #126
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.

So, hardware lasts for years except in the cases where it doesn't?

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

meepmorp wrote: post #165
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.

> unless something is wrong like ... vibration so you might have problems if you were to do something that causes a lot of vibration, like launch the entire data center into space?

[deleted]
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