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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#421

Post by innis226 »

mrandish wrote: post #313

> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down. I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit. However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can…

People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#422

Post by greengrassi »

elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#424

Post by ianburrell »

bartread wrote: post #404
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…

All of this and more. For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile. I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. B…

Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#425

Post by tensor »

hirsin wrote: post #310
gpt5 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…

Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size. A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW. When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW. And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not e…

How much of that power is radiated as the radio waves it sends?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#426

Post by metabagel »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #339

Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910. Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research…

I can’t take any of it seriously.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#427

Post by antonvs »

gpt5 wrote: post #235
lancewiggs wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…

> Why is starlink possible and other computations are not?

Aside from the point others have made that 50 MW is small in the context of hyperscalers, if you want to do things like SOTA LLM training, you can't feasibly do it with large numbers of small devices.

Density is key because of latency - you need the nodes to be in close physical proximity to communicate with each other at very high speeds.

For training an LLM, you're ideally going to want individual satellites with power delivery on the order of at least about 20 MW, and that's just for training previous-generation SOTA models. That's nearly 5,000 times more power than a single current Starlink satellite, and nearly 300 times that of the ISS.

You'd need radiator areas in the range of tens of thousands of square meters to handle that. Is it theoretically technically possible? Sure. But it's a long-term project, the kind of thing that Musk will say takes "5 years" that will actually take many decades. And making it economically viable is another story - the OP article points out other issues with that, such as handling hardware upgrades. Starlink's current model relies on many cheap satellites - the equation changes when each one is going to be very, very expensive, large, and difficult to deploy.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#428

Post by yazaddaruvala »

I’m surprised everyone is worried about heat dissipation.

Datacenters in space is ambiguous enough to mean on lunar soil which provides plenty of heat dissipation using geothermal heat pumps.

Similarly mass to orbit is also less problematic if silicon factories (including the refineries) are built on lunar soil as well.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#429

Post by zeofig »

murderfs wrote: post #279
space_fountain wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth. 1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit 2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low 3. Refurbishment is next to impossible 4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have…

> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...

"Planning" is a strong word..

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#430

Post by vulcan01 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #6

It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.

> harder to hit

press x to doubt

> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

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