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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

andrewmccalip.com

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Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#101

Post by indolering »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
sc68cal wrote: post #24

When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more. It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or v…

> Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.

Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#102

Post by eichin »

nixonpjoshua wrote: post #41

I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias. Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick shut down in 2024 (though apparently it hadn't been in the water since 2020.) It seems like it basically worked, but it wasn't clear that the cooling advantage was all that big relative to the hassle of having them in a difficult-to-maintain environment.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#103

Post by danpalmer »

wmf wrote: post #87
danpalmer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is however operating at ~500km where radiation is less of a concern, but where the lifetime of a satellite is only 2-3 years. The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, b…

I think they last 2-3 years after they run out of argon fuel , so more like 7-8 years total. It looks like some Starlinks from Nov 2019 are still operational.

My understanding was that anything at ~500km needed readjustments every few months in order to not come down. Much less than 2-3 years.

I'd be interested to know what the average lifespan or failure rate of Starlink has been. That's good that some are still up there 6+ years later, but I know many aren't. I'm not sure how many of those ran out of fuel, had hardware failures, or were simply obsolete, but an AFR would be interesting to see.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#104

Post by tekno45 »

wmf wrote: post #38
zozbot234 wrote: post #19

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

they throw those satellites to a fiery doom on a regular cadence.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#105

Post by fanf2 »

jofer wrote: post #39

What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…

This article assumes that no extra mass is needed for cooling, i.e. that cooling is free. The list of model assumptions includes:

• No additional mass for liquid cooling loop infrastructure; likely needed but not included

• Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#106

Post by matheusmoreira »

DonHopkins wrote: post #99
modeless wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH they have achieved many things that experienced people said were impossible or would never make financial sense.

OTOH they have a huge batshit crazy fanbase of boot lickers who are so gullible they'll believe and parrot anything Elon says.

SpaceX created reusable rockets that can fly back to the launch platforms and land gracefully. Hard to blame people for becoming fans. Before them stuff like this only existed in kerbal and sci-fi.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#107

Post by jaccola »

GMoromisato wrote: post #98
nickff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy.” You’re falling victim to the ‘broken windows fallacy’ here; money which is invested is actually more productive in improving medium and long term economic productivity than ‘consumption’ goods. Even ‘retained’ money (under one’s mattress) is not net-negative, as it increases the value of its circulating cou…

Scenario A: Someone breaks a window and the homeowner buys a replacement. Scenario B: A homeowner adds a new window to their home. Scenario C: A homeowner buys an online-course to learn how to make windows and then adds one to their home. Scenario A has approximately no benefit to the economy. The homeowner is no better off (same number of windows) but had to spend money. The window maker might be better off, but onl…

In your original comment, it sounded like you would encourage billionaires to buy yachts, solely "for the good of the economy".

Scenario D: A homeowner adds 10 window to their home because the populous think he is stingy and will send him to the guillotine if he does not start spending his money on new windows!

Scenario D provides no benefit to society.

If the billionaire does want the yacht, then no encouragement is needed.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#108

Post by marcosdumay »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #69
wmf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often. Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip. I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no…

Why make a GW datacenter on the ground if you can make two and pay to launch them into space?

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#109

Post by narrator »

GMoromisato wrote: post #16

> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even…

You should read F.A Hayek's essay on The Paradox of Savings [1]. Creation of capital like factories, education creating new specialists, or new processes lowers the cost of production and leads to real economic progress. Excessive spending without capital creation does nothing except keeping factors of production wastefully employed when they could be put to other uses and always ends in inflation.

[1] https://mises.org/mises-daily/hayek-paradox-saving

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#110

Post by hirsin »

d_silin wrote: post #7
ikiris wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand for what? A sealab like head in the sand view of lack of data regulation requirements?

specific software applications you can run in space that you can't run on Earth or can't run cheaper on Earth.

At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.
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