41–50 of 67 posts
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There's a difference between "infeasible given materials and manufacturing capabilities of the time" and "infeasible as a scalable solution due to the laws of physics"
There is also the very practical question of "what problem is this trying to solve?"
Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility, as well as making no economic sense. Engineering and the laws of physics get on the way. Just because Scott Manley refuses to call that out, so he can do another eight videos about it, don´t stop listening to somebody with the feet on the ground: "Orbital Data Centers: Spacecraft Constraints and Economic Viability" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27197 "Ho…
Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way. Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.
The advantage is solar power in space. They will never stop getting sunlight.
There's a very narrow band of sun-synchronous orbit with consistent enough sunlight to make orbital data centers viable. Even with a tight constellation of 500,000 to 1,000,000 satellites packed into that band, it still doesn't make economic sense compared to what terrestrial data centers can do. At 500,000 satellites you're looking at maybe 50 GW of solar power. Then factor in the lifespan of LEO at ~5 years you're…
I think there's an oft repeated view that markets only look to the next quarter. That's not really true. Markets (or people) are willing to go in on long term investments as long as they believe they understand the uncertainty. Which leads to crazy 2nd and 3rd order speculation (I think you think that they think...)
Personally putting money into space based datacenters seems crazy to me currently but in a couple of years it'll be more clear as to just how crazy this is. At which point the opportunity (and risk) will be gone one way or the other.
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Energy radiation scales T^4 so physics is really on your side here. If you can engineer GPUs to run a little hotter you get significant decreases in radiator size required.
That will have to wait 10 years, or even a few more years, for a transition from silicon to a semiconductor with a wider bandgap.
I think everyone misses the real point - they're completely outside the jurisdiction of any government. Short of launching an ASAT and the risk of space debris, nobody will be able to shut them down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way. Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.
How does this get them a government contract?
This data center in space stuff is a marriage of the two fields that will likely lead to a lot of contracts and little output, but the not at all secret trick to government contracting is you don't have to successfully deliver to make a lot of money on government contracts, you just have to do well enough to avoid severe penalties and blacklisting.
A demonstration of my point in the last paragraph: https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4465... - Over $6 billion and nothing to show for it. Raytheon will be fine.
have you ever seen a detailed photo of the ISS? * https://images2.imgbox.com/64/4b/GhtUtq1m_o.jpg look at how massive the solar panels and more importantly the thermal radiators are outside compare to the size of the human habitat tubes "AI" in space would demand as much if not even more for each node
The hotter you are, the less radiators you need for the same heat dissipation. The ISS needs to run at human-comfort temperatures, but a datacenter can run much hotter than that (note the "at 60 °C" in the article). I forget the scaling parameter, but it's like T^2 or T^4 or something like that, so running hotter makes a huge difference. Of course, that's offset by the enormous heat output of a datacenter. I'm not sa…
or perhaps a whole new technology invented to vent the heat
will be interesting to see what they come up with
hmm, how do they radiate the heat from the capsule with humans going to the moon, now I am really curious, I've never seen panels like that on the lunar module past or future
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It all depends on how far you are willing to go to make your server invulnerable to a police raid.
The police will just arrest you and/ or anyone who operates the downlinks or connects to you. The server can stay in space.
I think everyone misses the real point - they're completely outside the jurisdiction of any government. Short of launching an ASAT and the risk of space debris, nobody will be able to shut them down.