It works if you figure out a way to have a permanent dark/light side. But really the issue is that we can do compute with light/photon and radiation and not much has been done in those areas.
Datacenters in space aren't going to work
361–370 of 447 posts
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. > 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites. Right. First power and heat are a m…
> even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
yup, and that means that you only have low latency once a day.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#363To 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.
Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing)
Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market can, as always, remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, or certainly for longer than _I_ can. Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
Really? Logic wouldn't dictate that if I'm up 300% or more over two years and everyone is starting to get jittery about an AI bubble that perhaps I should pull out now and await the pullback? If it happens in a year, and I can buy back in at a 15-20% discount, that is also a return!! Do you hold for possibly another 5%? That doesn't make any sense. Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
Yep, taking your winnings if you're up 300% isn't a bad idea, but timing things right on a short is much harder.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#365Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't. The worst real estate on Ear…
>"A City on Mars" (2024) I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too. https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
This rebuttal is... poor, I guess? Not disingenuous or anything, but lots of wishful thinking and (for lack of a better term) "inside baseball"-objections.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#366To 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.
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#367I 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…
Starlink v2 Mini has about 35 kW of solar power at peak irradiance. 2 kW is quite far from the limit of how much juice we can pack into modern mass produced satellites.
Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?
That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#368To 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.
It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons.
Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.
Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet , which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.
Though it lacks in the headlines, my preference is to send the robots first to bootstrap local production. Unless we really screw up the worst case would be some extra garbage to clean up for future missions, and the best case is any sort of increase in local production capacity.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite F-15 kill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT
The military have developed other ways to bring down satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an a…
Neat. Could this potentially be used to de-orbit space junk?