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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

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Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like every single kitchen?

You might be thinking of 100F, a toasty summer day. 100C on the other hand (about 212F) is fatal even in zero humidity.

Well, after a while. A decently hot Finnish sauna...

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#272

I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things: 1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things. 2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radia…

Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif). Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast... People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of co…

It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough fluids. I don’t know whether you freeze over or dry out first, but I’m sure someone at NASA has done the math.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#274
post #152

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…

Yes. I think I read a blogpost from Backblaze about running their Red Pod rack mounted chassis some 10 years ago.

They would just keep the failed drives in the chassi. Maybe swap out the entire chassi if enough drives died.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Datacenter... I guess solar is what they're planning to use, but the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity well

All mass has gravity

Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.

But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well".

> "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space."

- https://medium.com/intuition/what-are-gravity-wells-3c1fb6d6...

So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to get past some boundary below which things don't have gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough gravity to matter.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.

SpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back to Earth.

The atmosphere and gravity are only some of the problems with spinlaunch. Spinlaunch rotates at 600 rpm. That means the projectile is tumbling at 600 rpm when let go.

Maybe for solid masses not in an atmosphere, meaning the payload can be a ball and doesn't have to have a pencil shape and doesn't need to point in any particular direction, maybe that can work to simply lob rocks or aluminum ingots into earth orbit.

Except just think about that for a second. Lobbing rocks from the moon towards earth...

And why would we want to do this anyway? What resources are so valuable on the moon that it's worth getting them that way?

The payload would actually have to have rockets, fuel, computers, heat shielding, and a means to reshape itself so that it can: stop it's own tumble after launch, deploy glide wings, and survive reentry to a controlled landing so that we don't have to use rockets from Earth to go collect the payload from orbit.

It's all surely physically doable but why?

Even if orbit was the final usage destination not Earth, like to build stations, that still seems like a stretch.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#277
post #265

Always entertaining to read how some things are so obviously wrong as to be laughable, but this is somewhere between solar roadways being feasible and hyperloop being physically possible. It's a grab for money from idiot investors imo. (fitting in with OpenAI's current strategy to dilute control I'll admit)

[deleted]

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#278
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?

Room temperature on earth. In physics room temperature is used as a technical term and actually pretty universally defined as 20°C (293.15 K). Traditionally in European papers it used to be 18°C, so if Einstein and Schrödinger talk about room temperature it is that. I've heard in chemistry and stamp collecting they use 25°C but that is heresy.

Maybe you did mean heresy, which would be funny (but a perfectly valid opinion to have)...

But I suspect that's a typo, and you meant 'heresay'? :D

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#280
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you’re a stateless person? (Not an easy status to acquire these days, but any US citizen can just renounce their citizenship without getting a new one, for example.)

What if you just launch it in secret and don't tell anybody?

Unless you invent some new launch method, a dozen or so countries will immediately know.

Shortly afterwards, amateur astronomers will spot it. https://gizmodo.com/amateur-astronomer-catches-fleeting-glim...

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