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

Datacenters in space aren't going to work

taranis.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 447 posts

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#381

Post by wombatpm »

mybestday wrote: post #368
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.

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?

They should be doing that somewhere inhospitable to prove out the technology and concept. Set up in the arctic and work only with loads of materials that correspond to a starship load.

But then again no one is really serious about Mars.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#382

Post by ACCount37 »

wat10000 wrote: post #283
ACCount37 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blow up the ground stations. Or the CEO.

Good fucking luck. Starlink's ground infrastructure is absurdly decentralized. Laser links make that possible.

Starlink can even bounce data P2P, from one client terminal to another.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#383

Post by mercutio2 »

mr_toad wrote: post #282
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…

Some of the proposals are much much bigger than this. Five GW, and 16 square kilometres. It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.

There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.

So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:

  1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
  2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
  3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
  4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic
Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.

If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#384

Post by mercutio2 »

adastra22 wrote: post #235
Animats wrote: post #158

Related" "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…

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.

Yeah. A City on Mars made me want to throw the book at the window so many times. Building and tearing down straw-men right and left. Almost every legitimate note of caution suffered from the nirvana fallacy.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#385

Post by mercutio2 »

nick238 wrote: post #192
foobarian wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.

>99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.

Yes, so?

Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.

“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”

Yes.

“That means you’d need huge radiators!”

Yes.

OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”

We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#386

Post by Animats »

Coffeewine wrote: post #270
schiffern wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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...

I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth. > As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing en…

From the rebuttal: "We are at the start of an upward curve of technology development that if allowed to continue for another 50 years, will make it as easy to reach space as to fly to Australia."

People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#387

Post by mercutio2 »

kergonath wrote: post #349
foobarian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat. >vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector Yes we're talking about radiating not convection

> A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat. Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there. A kilowatt is nothing . The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.

Why are you assuming active heat transfer? Passive is the way to go.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#389

Post by gaigalas »

deno wrote: post #267
gaigalas wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company will still be on the ground in some country But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot. > it has to connect to the Earth internet Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be…

There are wayyyy easier ways to just get some private calculations. You can spin up an encrypted memory VM or wire up an eager physical kill switch. Launching satellites would bring a lot of attention and requires skills, money, multiple people with access. But I can do the former just fine by myself.

> requires skills, money, multiple people with access

I never said it's going to be easy. In fact, I compared it to setting up research stations in Antarctica. Which is costly, and definitely harder than going to the ice vending machine.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#390

Post by gaigalas »

mjhay wrote: post #287
gaigalas wrote: post #251

You don't need massive datacenters in space. You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs. So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations. If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica…

There’s laws in space. Specifically, those of the country (or country of the subject) that launched the satellite.

There are laws in Cayman Islands too.
Post reply on HN