Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data centers in space makes no sense

civai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 1001 posts

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#281

Post by mlindner »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.

That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.

Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.

By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.

Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.

And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#282

Post by rolph »

where do you put things, so that no one will be able to warrant thier way into access?

entirely out of jurisdiction, where it is prohibitively expensive to travel, and impractical for any physical seizure.

you dont need to compute, just store it and P2P amongst satellites.

essentially an orbital NAS.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#283

Post by typ »

Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?

Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.

I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#284

Post by phire »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #249
phire wrote: post #244

As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres. And nobody ever calls them out on it. Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away…

You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.

I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.

But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#285

Post by adastra22 »

gpt5 wrote: post #224
breput wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment. [0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...

The ISS is designed to emit 126kW of heat radiation between the active cooking systems and the solar array cooling system.

Which is less than a single rack of GPUs.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#286

Post by wat10000 »

A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?

Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.

And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.

This whole concept is baffling to me.

(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#287

Post by xrd »

Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#288

Post by fwip »

scottyah wrote: post #186
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots. So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.

Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.

Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building the Torment Nexus.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#289

Post by sanex »

murderfs wrote: post #279
space_fountain wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth. 1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit 2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low 3. Refurbishment is next to impossible 4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have…

> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...

Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#290

Post by wat10000 »

scottyah wrote: post #206
stouset wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are several companies working on this, and the first generation tech is already proven, working in space on the ISS. Even Paul G is on board. https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779?s=20

Of course it's working. We've had computers operating in space for decades. There's no doubt it can be done.

The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is why you'd do it just for data centers. We put computers in space because they're needed to do things that can only be done from there. Data centers work just fine on the ground. What's so great about data centers in space that makes them worth the immense cost and difficulty.

I know a lot of prominent people are talking about this. I do not understand it. pg says "when you look at the tradeoffs" well what exactly is he looking at? Because when I look at the tradeoffs, the whole concept makes no damned sense. Sure, you can put a bunch of GPUs in space. But why would you do that when you can put them in a building for orders of magnitude less money?

Post reply on HN