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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

#181

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

The analyses here miss the economic realities of building datacenters. "Just use land", "just use nuclear", "just use water". All of this is contested. A system of lawsuits and regulations turns negative externalities (even ones you aren't convinced of!) into costs you can weigh against. So, like hydrogen vs. RP-1, it's not enough to pick a handful of physical performance metrics. It has to win holistically.

If you can produce any kind of economically productive compute node and add it to (for example) the Starlink network, and launch on a reusable vehicle, you carry on installing them as fast as you can build them.

So, the move is to turn the problem of contested land use into a manufacturing problem.

This is not so easy to pin down on a spreadsheet, and will be decided at the level of the business unit. If SpaceX can put a GPU/TPU on the grid more economically than the other guy, then it doesn't matter if they have ammonia in the pipes instead of water.

Grab your popcorn.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#183

Post by baq »

noosphr wrote: post #150
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…

Space hardware needs to be fundamentally different from surface hardware. I don't mean it in the usual radiation hardenrining etc, but in using computing substrates that run over 1000c and never shut down. T^4 cooling means that you have a hell of a time keeping things cool, but keeping hot things from melting completely is much easier.

if you have a compute substrate at 1300K you don't have a cooling problem - you have an everything else problem

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#184

Post by baq »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #181

The analyses here miss the economic realities of building datacenters. "Just use land", "just use nuclear", "just use water". All of this is contested. A system of lawsuits and regulations turns negative externalities (even ones you aren't convinced of!) into costs you can weigh against. So, like hydrogen vs. RP-1, it's not enough to pick a handful of physical performance metrics. It has to win holistically. If you c…

The article makes pretty much exactly this point somewhere in the middle.

> the list of organizations positioned to even try that is basically one.

Maaaaybe Blue Origin can join once they get a constellation going.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#185

Post by baq »

ted_dunning wrote: post #61
modeless wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.

SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.

...on time.

the first booster landing after delivering a payload to orbit was quite something and made a serious stir in the industry.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#186

Post by notahacker »

viraptor wrote: post #149
rekenaut wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if with the radiators you can just roll out as rolls of aluminum foil, which is very light and very cheap.

Only on a short distance. To effectively radiate a significant amount of heat, you need to actually deliver the heat to the distant parts of the radiator first. That normally requires active pumping which needs extra energy. So now you need to unfold sonar panels + aluminium + pipes (+ maybe extra pumps)

Orbital assembly of a fluid piping system in space is a pretty colossal problem too (as well as miles of pipes and connections being a massive single point failure for your system). Dispersing the GPUs might be more practical, but it's not exactly optimal for high performance computation...

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#187

Post by Yizahi »

fanf2 wrote: post #105
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

Author also forgot batteries for the solar shade transition period and then additional solar panels to charge these batteries during the solar "day" period. then insulation for batteries. Then power converters and pumps for radiators and additional radiators to cool the cooling infrastructure.

Overall not a great model. But on the other hand, even an amateur can use this model and imagine that additional parts and costs are missing, so if it's showing a bad outlook even in the favorable/cheating conditions for space DCs, then they are even dumber idea if all costs would be factored in fully. Unfortunately many serious journalists can't even do that mental assumption. :(

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#188

Post by KeplerBoy »

eldenring wrote: post #135
rswail wrote: post #134

Aside from the economics, the question is why do it in orbit vs on land (or sea)? What are the regulatory/legal gains? Lack of jurisdiction means open slather? What are the national security gains? Redundancy and resiliency by each satellite being a "micro-compute" connected by high speed laser links? So more resilient to attack? Why do it at all?

I think the main draw is its elegance. You have very efficient power from the sun, put that directly into your compute, radiate it out. Energy is ~free, no heavy infrastructure required, just a closed circuit for computing.

We also have very efficient power from the sun here on earth. I don't get how that is an argument.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#189

Post by Schlagbohrer »

For someone engaging in a lot of fun, sci fi utopian thinking, he still falls prey to libertarian thought:

"I'll go one step further and say the quiet part out loud: 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. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to burn its capital like a torch and light up a corner of the future. Fund the ugly middle. Pay for the iteration loops. Build the cathedrals. This is how we advance civilization."

That can be done easily (and has been done many times in the past! And in the present, elsewhere in the world outside the US!) by TAXING the billionaires and using that money for government funded research programs such as DARPA, NSF, national space programs that are actually ambitious and risk taking and held to timelines.

Americans need to get over this idea that billionaires are gods that we must pray to and instead see them as just normal citizens who need to be taxed way more.

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