I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias.
Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
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Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#42I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement.
Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#43Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…
At this scale could you do shielding?
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#44I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias. Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.
> Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space
You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#45What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…
None of it is easy but neither is cooling impossible as many people are saying.
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#46I’d love to see these variables fitted to learning curves. That would give you a forecast for when, if learning continues as predicted, the economics could be competitive. (If it doesn’t, you need a new paradigm first.)
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#47tbh this feels lot like people throwing Drake equation around. You put in whatever random numbers together and you can get any result you want.
The cooling and density challenges of datacenters here on earth are not trivial , but in space this is multiple magnitudes more difficult.
These numbers are just random bullsh*t numbers.
And what problems do orbital datacenters solve? They still need uplink, so not libertarian we can do what we want, you have no jurisdiction here thing.
This is just a sci-fi idea that is theoretically possible and is riding the ai bubble for users and investors that don’t know better.
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#48I'm not really interested in the problems that can come with orbital compute. We've seen them listed ad nauseam.
Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#49I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement. Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At…
Aerospace industry has a long history of missing lower cost/kg to orbit. I'm extremely suspicious of $500/kg, which is about a third of today's cost.
Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
#50François Chollet https://x.com/fchollet/status/1999982683708150014 :
"Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work.
When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become cost-competitive with simply building conventional nuclear-powered (or renewable energy-powered) datacenters on the ground.
In fact we're off by 50-100x. Dramatic launch cost reductions still won't make it work. And of course if you invest a lot in specific lines of tech to make it work you then have to consider that the same can also be invested in better ground-based nuclear, bringing the cost of power down for everyone.