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Datacenters in space aren't going to work

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Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#391

Post by fbu »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #227

There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things. 1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions. 2) We'll have Starshi…

What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ?

Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#392

Post by fbu »

adastra22 wrote: post #233
jillesvangurp wrote: post #227

There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things. 1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions. 2) We'll have Starshi…

Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse. Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still. Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency com…

The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#393

Post by fbu »

CrossVR wrote: post #199

Datacenters in space would make 0 sense because the only way to lose heat is through radiation, which makes for terrible cooling. If you want to avoid national laws and have great cooling, then submerse your datacenter in the ocean instead.

Maybe if you build the datacenter inside an asteroid, and use the whole surface as an infrared radiator.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#394

Post by echoangle »

dosbod wrote: post #225
echelon wrote: post #181

Earlier 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…

Do you have a source that you can measurably affect drag on satellites using a ground based Ionospheric heater? How much is the atmosphere actually going to heat up from a few megawatts?

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#395

Post by wat10000 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #382
wat10000 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How absurd is absurdly decentralized, here. A hundred ground stations? Thousands? Do they really have more than can be shut down by the FBI domestically and blown up by the USAF internationally?

And how does decentralized ground infrastructure save you from a centralized executive?

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#396

Post by Coffeewine »

Animats wrote: post #386
Coffeewine wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess these things aren’t literally exclusive, but it’s pretty amusing that elsewhere the rebuttal argues that we’re deep in a great stagnation which we need space exploration to pull us out of. (In the bit where he is arguing against the idea that we should wait a century and then maybe try to colonize space with greater technology)

> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#397

Post by adastra22 »

mjevans wrote: post #369
DennisP wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why though? That’s the interesting part. Pioneers want to be there to experience the challenge of bootstrapping. It’s the whole point.

It’s like saying “why climb Everest? We can send a drone up instead.”

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#398

Post by adastra22 »

fbu wrote: post #392
adastra22 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse. Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still. Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency com…

The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.

Unfortunately the powdery regolith of an asteroid is a thermal insulator.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#399

Post by hollerith »

adastra22 wrote: post #397
mjevans wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why though? That’s the interesting part. Pioneers want to be there to experience the challenge of bootstrapping. It’s the whole point. It’s like saying “why climb Everest? We can send a drone up instead.”

Fine as long as I don't have to pay for it in taxes.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#400

Post by jasomill »

fragmede wrote: post #154
titzer wrote: post #138

In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time . Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on. So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into…

> So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines. Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!

As long as the rotations aren't for more than a month or two, sign me up as well!
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