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India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

arstechnica.com

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Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#211

Post by avmich »

kulahan wrote: post #140
OneDonOne wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just goes to show magical thinking isn't just an American thing.

I can’t imagine how inefficient a country would be if they tamped down all their magical thinking. FFCS, SMILE, and EUVL are all magical thinking if you ask me. Some of the craziest things humans have ever conceived of.

Full-flow staged combustion is a rather logical - and not even particularly useful, we're talking about small percentage points - extension of staged flow combustion, and staged combustion is a rather obvious change to open-cycle schema - and I'm hyperbolizing just a little bit here.

Yes, it brings effects, and it's a cool technology. But saying that at least idea - or results - are fundamentally changing rocket engines... I think that's a stretch.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#212

Post by alephnerd »

WalterBright wrote: post #142
alephnerd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they won't for commercial usecases (which was never the point of an ODC). For C4ISR usecases they solve the latency problem and are worth the spend needed. Everyone on HN is talking about a commercial usecase that isn't under serious consideration.

What I repeatedly read here was it is physically not possible to build an ODC because of heat problems and alpha particle problems.

At 1GW scale, I'd agree. But if you need around 40-50 racks to do image processing and alerting, that's largely a solved problem.

The whole thesis around ODCs is to basically mass deploy a bunch of replaceable racks en masse and consistently, such that any geospatial intel can be processed at the edge.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#213

Post by dyauspitr »

josephjrobison wrote: post #147

Congrats to India - please catch up to China. Regards, the west.

That’s not going to happen anytime soon. The Chinese model doesn’t work for India. China is essentially a benevolent dictatorship where they can tell people what cities they can live in, how many kids to have and when redevelopment is needed they just end the lease early and move everyone out because no one owns anything there. Any change in India is going to be much slower. Even land acquisition for any project is like pulling teeth. They literally had to pare down the terminal at the Mumbai airport because they couldn’t evict slum dwellers that had encroached on land that they don’t even own or have any rights to. The Indian Constitution is very friendly to the under class to the detriment of rapid development.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#215

Post by Dylan16807 »

rayiner wrote: post #193
Dylan16807 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for ultimate speed I don't see how it works. Facilities to make and launch satellites add a lot of delays and need their own permits.

The queue to hook up to the Texas grid is 3-5 years long now.

Good thing this is about off-grid datacenters.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#216

Post by rayiner »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #215
rayiner wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The queue to hook up to the Texas grid is 3-5 years long now.

Good thing this is about off-grid datacenters.

Building an off-grid data center is much easier in space where sunlight exposure is predictable and not affected by weather.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#217

Post by TeMPOraL »

pantalaimon wrote: post #199
rayiner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we have giant nuclear reactors in space? What's the power loss from beaming down power?

We already have a giant fusion reactor in space

Yes, and "beamed power" is exactly about tapping into it some more downwell. As outlined in other comments, it's not currently the best option.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#218

Post by TeMPOraL »

OneDonOne wrote: post #91
alephnerd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Pixxel, Skyroot, and Agnikul are targeting orbital data center launches this year for defense applications (which is what the entire ODC story is about). The US NRO already uses India's Pixxel [0] along with Finland's ICEYE (which is now co-manufacturing synthetic aperture sats in India with Agnikul [1]) for hyperspectral scanning. Edit: can't reply > But.. why? Missile Defense and C4ISR [2]. Seconds matter, so…

This borders on science fiction. 88,000-and 1-million satellite clusters (as claimed in your link) are hard to take seriously, especially with the possibility of Kessler Syndrome. Also: 1. How do you cool your chips? Vacuum is a thermal insulator, so radiators are required to remove heat. nVidia (or even ASICs) require much and specialised cooling. 2. How does one radiation harden a H100? 3. I'm also seeing where TCO…

> 1. How do you cool your chips? Vacuum is a thermal insulator, so radiators are required to remove heat.

This is space 101 and honestly, at this point, I consider bringing this up as disqualifying from giving criticism on the topic.

> nVidia (or even ASICs) require much and specialised cooling.

Whatever. They generate N kW of heat, you need to shed N kW of heat, and you need to fit that within your budget. End of worry.

Pro tip: if you can slice your problem so that individual satellite needs to shed less than M kW of heat, where M corresponds to how much heat some existing, deployed satellite platform handles, you can just do your initial design around that satellite platform, replacing the "business payload" with yours.

This is e.g. how the unfairly criticized recent "satellite swarm TPUs" paper from Google handled it. Everyone who brought up cooling revealed themselves as not having read the first page and not having thought about it seriously for more than 30 seconds.

> 2. How does one radiation harden a H100?

See that paper for some ideas and considerations, as this is part of what they focused on, after solving cooling by sizing the per-satellite payload power needs to Starlink.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#219

Post by Dylan16807 »

rayiner wrote: post #216
Dylan16807 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing this is about off-grid datacenters.

Building an off-grid data center is much easier in space where sunlight exposure is predictable and not affected by weather.

That's an advantage.

"Much easier" overall is quite a claim.

Re: India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch

#220

Post by dang »

pfdietz wrote: post #134
OneDonOne wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, Smaller radiator = bigger heat pump + more batteries and solar panels Satellites have a mass and power budgets. Your scheme only looks at temperature. If you want to build infinitely large AI Data satellites, go ahead.

[flagged]

Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Your account has been posting flamebait lately, and here you crossed into personal attack. Not cool. You can make your substantive points without any of that.

When someone else is wrong (or you feel they are), two options that work are to continue to respectfully provide correct information, or to stop replying. Getting into denunciation, spats, etc. is not a good option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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