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Datacenters in space aren't going to work

taranis.ie

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Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#161

Post by GMoromisato »

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.

The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.

All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.

And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).

Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#162

Post by mbac32768 »

titzer wrote: post #138

In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time . Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on. So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into…

Yes. Anyone who thinks you can ship a datacenter to space and save has never managed a datacenter.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#163

Post by foobarian »

andrewflnr wrote: post #103
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

This question is thoroughly covered in the linked article.

Pardon, but the question of "could the operational cost be smaller in space" is almost not touched at all in the article. The article mostly argues that designing thermal management systems for space applications is hard, and that the radiators required would be big, which speaks to the upfront investment cost, not ongoing opex.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#164

Post by wpollock »

denkmoon wrote: post #104
cuuupid wrote: post #20

I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work." There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catas…

Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.

The obvious solution is for half of the hardware to run on dark energy, counteracting the heat generated by the other half. Venture capitalists, use my gofundme site to give me the millions needed to research this, thanks.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#165

Post by kaashif »

GMoromisato wrote: post #161

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS. The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million…

> The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).

So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#166

Post by phsau »

GMoromisato wrote: post #161

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS. The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million…

>Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink

Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#167

Post by perihelions »

api wrote: post #8

What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power. Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work. Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.

It's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation,

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...

(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).

Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#168

Post by morshu9001 »

ReptileMan wrote: post #5
yardie wrote: post #4

I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.' > After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that senten…

You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part. In theory.

Passively yeah. Can't imagine it's anywhere near as fast as evap or chillers

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#169

Post by morshu9001 »

GMoromisato wrote: post #161

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS. The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million…

At what price per MW of load?

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#170

Post by kaashif »

brandonagr2 wrote: post #124
skywhopper wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?

The surface area of the earth is the limit (which only gets sunlight half the time) and only gets 1 billionth the energy emitted by the sun vs relatively unlimited surface area of solar panels in space

Wouldn't it be easier to build multi storey datacenters than space datacenters?
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