361–370 of 519 posts
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As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue: https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
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Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground .
All of that has been repeatedly addressed in anything that discusses it, if you care to try to understand. It has ~nothing to do with available space, the US grid can’t handle the current rate of expansion. It’s bad enough that apparently Span, the smart electrical panel company, is pitching a box full of Blackwells that’ll sit outside new construction homes and use all the headroom on residential 200A circuits. Spac…
This is a self defeating argument. Neither can space!
Any scenario in which you can get data centers and power into orbit is easier on land.
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What are you talking about There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
Help me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference. That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets.
Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX.
Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries).
(There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.)
None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
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I acknowledge there's an issue here, but I don't think it makes sense to label it "pollution". When something is polluted it generally means using it can lead to some form of harm, directly or indirectly. I fail to see how confusing satellites for stars stars causes harm, per se (though of course it would suck to be an astronomer).
Starlink constellations will lead to a world where there is absolutely nowhere you can go where you cant see man-made junk. No truly pristine wilderness anywhere without being able to see formations of glowing dots helping "off-grid" idiots stream Netflix. It's spiritually harmful if nothing else. Also who said pollution has to be harmful? Light pollution is a thing, and this is the same class of problem. Why dont th…
Light pollution is borderline, but actually acceptable is it does cause harm. It disrupts sleep quality and sleeping patterns, also generally affecting plants and animals negatively.
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what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro... All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.
Not efficient, and it doesn’t have to be, because the cooling system has 0 opex cost. And capex clearly can be made to wor
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what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist
Space radiators are not very efficient due to lack of airflow in space.