As someone with a vacuum flask, I can assert orbital data centers are definitely NOT a good idea.
Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#12As someone working in aerospace, orbital data centres are almost certainly impossible or very impractical, at least at the scale being sold by the AI salesmen. What would they be cheaper on? Solar panels are a little bit more effective and they will have a 24/7 coverage if placed in the correct orbit. However, they would be much harder to cool (space is cold, yes, but heat transfer in vacuum does not work easily and…
Some of the original hype was similar to the solar in space hype and clearly being pushed by people who wanted funding to build rockets and were prepared to sell magic beans to pay for it.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the math on data transport? If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites. If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge de…
> If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets. How does that introduce a delay?
The distance is greater = higher latency.
It’s why satellite internet was usually pretty terrible. A simple TCP handshake becomes a multi-second endeavor.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the math on data transport? If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites. If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge de…
> If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets. How does that introduce a delay?
[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#15[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#16My back of the napkin math says you need launch prices of about $100/kg to $200/kg for it to make sense.
The cooling problem is vastly exaggerated, you need around 0.5x the area of your solar panels in radiators.
I think AI inference in space is definitely possible, but it's very unlikely we'll get launch costs cheap enough that they make economical sense.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the math on data transport? If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites. If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge de…
> If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets. How does that introduce a delay?
It's radio waves. Takes about 125 mSec for a request to reach the satellite (it's 36,000 km up there) and then the same amount of time to come back down.
If you can reach a terrestrial data center in 10 mSec over fiber, the flying data center is 12x slower. And now, like the other replay said, do a TCP handshake and see how long it takes.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#18It's another hyperloop scam and nothing more. Even if we could put datacenters in orbit, there's no reason to. There is plenty of space here on the planet that doesn't involve launching rockets and then later dropping the decommissioned datacenter back into the atmosphere to burn up and/or impact the ground.
Data is faster, power is cheaper, cooling is free. There's no reason for it other than to juice spacex stock. It's just another Elon scam to pump stocks. I don't know why anyone wastes breath talking about anything he says.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#19The upside is it avoids the power, cooling, connectivity, location, environmental, staffing and physical security complexities of terrestrial data centers.
It doesn’t? > power It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed. > cooling Cooling off in a vacuum is hard. You’ll need radiators to emit the heat, you’ll need a lot of radiators for data center level heat. This is more mass you need to get into orbit > locat…
> It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed.
SpaceX will be putting them in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning always sunlight.
Re: Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?
#20What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit?
You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.