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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#211

Post by belter »

croddin wrote: post #135
xupybd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he has rocket company that needs more work. Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company. The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project. I really think it's that simple.

Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to buil…

Nobody colonizing Mars. Get real. The most likely outcome, is him landing on a cell when the full Epstein files come out.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#212

Post by totetsu »

Findecanor wrote: post #195
atleastoptimal wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution

> win the AI race I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean? Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.

It’s a graft to keep people distracted and allow for positioning as we fall off the end of the fossil energy boom.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#213

Post by [deleted] »

tgbugs wrote: post #199

One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry. I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive…

[deleted]

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#214

Post by georgemcbay »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #121
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution

> xAI needs money to win the AI race

Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.

Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#215

Post by tbrownaw »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#216

Post by MillionOClock »

vel0city wrote: post #168
aunty_helen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps. Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nan…

> Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does yours?

Let's just hope the person you are responding to isn't Elon Musk!

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#217

Post by OrvalWintermute »

This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.

Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.

Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!

Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.

Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.

Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.

Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators

Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.

Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#218

Post by strange_quark »

denkmoon wrote: post #160
bagels wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.

Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out the back. Where will they go, nobody knows!

When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#219

Post by duskwuff »

debatem1 wrote: post #198
recursive wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a given. Re enter the atmosphere. Sure. Avoid vaporization? Much harder problem.

There is some evidence to suggest that spacex knows how to reenter an object without burning it up.

Sometimes without even meaning to:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/spacex-cbc-debris-s...

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#220

Post by OrvalWintermute »

breput wrote: post #181
TacticalCoder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?

Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment. [0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...

I agree, all the good papers definitely talk about custom designed radiators being used on the dark sides of data center in space.
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