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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

#351

Post by wat10000 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #319
wat10000 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things on earth also have access to that coldness for about half of each day. How many data centers use radiative cooling into the night sky to supplement their regular cooling? The fact that the answer is “zero” should tell you all you need to know about how useful this is.

Look up Tech Ingredients episode on Radiative Paint. The fact that people aren’t using something isn’t evidence that it’s not possible or even a great idea, it could be that a practical application didn’t exist before or someone enterprising enough hasn’t come along yet.

When something has been known for millennia and hasn’t been put to a particular use even after decades where it could have been used, that is pretty good evidence that this use isn’t a good idea. Especially when it’s something really simple.

Radiative cooling is great for achieving temperature a bit below ambient at night when you don’t have any modern refrigeration equipment. That’s about all. It’s used in space applications because it’s literally the only option.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#352

Post by [deleted] »

bouncycastle wrote: post #191
wat10000 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.

Recently the USA blew out some some boats in international waters and came back to finish off the survivors, despite thin evidence and no due process, while maintaining that it was legal. If those data centers on ships ever become declared as a 'threat to national security' then they might get the same treatment.

[deleted]

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#353

Post by capyba »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#354

Post by snowwrestler »

ACCount37 wrote: post #218
collinmcnulty wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is that an advanced nation-state could just as easily shoot down an orbiting data center as an oceanic data center and that "international space" offers an equally flimsy defense as "international waters" but a much larger price.

Antisatellite weapons are expensive and rare, and also woefully inadequate for dealing with megaconstellations. If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system? Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.

Swarms of satellites need to maneuver, which includes maneuvering directly toward the atmosphere.

It would take zero anti-satellite weapons to take down Starlink. Just point a good old fashioned gun at the SpaceX engineer who can issue maneuvering commands to the satellites.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#355

Post by xhkkffbf »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #318
abalone wrote: post #212

I am skeptical as well BUT on the cooling question, which is one of the main concerns we all seem to have, the article is doing a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between the ISS and a cluster of small satellites. It cites the ISS's centralized 16kW cooling system which is for a big space station that needs to collect and shunt heat over a relatively large area. The Suncatcher prototype is puny in comparison: j…

I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue. Communication might be a bit rough.

I think the interest in outer space comes from the lack of an atmosphere to absorb the sunlight/power.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#356

Post by wat10000 »

est wrote: post #316
wat10000 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Dear T-Mobile/Verizon/Starlink, cease your illegal operation within 24 hours or we will start imprisoning executives.”

You don't need other carrier's permission if the direct-to-cell satellite allows anyone to receive data.

The current incarnation of direct to cell is a partnership with cell carriers. I expect that to continue. It’s really hard to get the frequencies you need without that, and you really need a conventional terrestrial network for populated areas. I don’t expect that to change. The bandwidth needed to cover a populated area from space fundamentally requires more size and power than a cell phone can provide.

Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#357

Post by larodi »

zbentley wrote: post #268
mbesto wrote: post #120

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power. Follow the rationale: 1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three…

Space is the least nation-state-independent place to do computing in existence. All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y). Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so. Also, space infrastructure is incredibly…

many a cloud equipment has very short lifespan

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#358

Post by JJMcJ »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #197

To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.

Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#359

Post by jnwatson »

jeltz wrote: post #273
eru wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.

No, because to do that and not ruin myself I need to know roughly when the double will burst. Just knowing it is a bubble is not enough.

Exactly. I shorted Sears in 2005 when Lampert took over. I knew he was going to drive that company into the ground.

Sears went bankrupt in 2018. It took a long time for the market to catch on.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#360

Post by jonah »

jhgb wrote: post #328
newsclues wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited

There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-b…

That seems like it would make the most sense on the "last mile". So, adding caches to the LEO satellite ISP birds would be a good idea. I wonder if Kupiter, StarLink, et. al. do that. (And if not, their reasoning against it since they've surely considered it.)
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