It's interesting that there are a bunch of people saying definitely impossible, yet there does seem to be some money behind it like the hn one
Datacenters in space aren't going to work
401–410 of 447 posts
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nobody is asking you to.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#403This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.
Power:
It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.
The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.
Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...
Cooling:
Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.
A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.
Cosmic radiation:
The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.
Communications:
Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...
This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#404Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#405This idea is so spectacularly stupid that it's a shame such a smart guy needed to spend even 5 minutes refuting it.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#406In 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…
Yes. Anyone who thinks you can ship a datacenter to space and save has never managed a datacenter.
Or worked in space.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#407To 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.
> Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#408Earlier 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.
Most future space exploration will probably be robotic, just as it is now.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.
Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?
Yes. Industrialisation and its aftermath has been quite gruesome for a very long time.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#410Earlier 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.”
Right, and now that "climb Everest" is past the "pioneer" stage, what does it look like?
Trash, exploitation and littered with corpses.