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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#401

Post by kamaal »

pokot0 wrote: post #262
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

Can’t you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and dissipates. This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.

>>This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.

On the similar lines, why can't one run a refrigerator in space?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#402

Post by zajio1am »

philipkglass wrote: post #37
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by…

Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma... But it never had an orbital launch capability. Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclea…

You do not need orbital capability to hit an orbital target. Just suborbital missile that reaches target's orbital altitude.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#403

Post by awakeasleep »

antonymoose wrote: post #34
awakeasleep wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics. The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense. After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational. Heres hopin…

> Heres hoping you have a similar moment. I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab. I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.…

I completely failed to convey my point. It’s not about any of your beliefs.

The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out of the noise, it was still just noise.

Where there is actual meaning in life, its kind of obvious, you dont have to rewrite so much to find it.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#404

Post by bartread »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

All of this and more.

For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.

I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.

Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.

Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#405

Post by stackghost »

aunty_helen wrote: post #384
stackghost wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0: - let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W - let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient - let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips. Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. Tha…

Hence the fancy air conditioning pumps

... on satellites?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#406

Post by energy123 »

bartread wrote: post #404
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

All of this and more. For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile. I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. B…

Does that emit more than Elon's terrestrial data centers powered by natural gas, per unit of compute?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#407

Post by gclawes »

gpt5 wrote: post #235
lancewiggs wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…

Starlink satellites also radiate a non-trivial amount of the energy they consume from their phased arrays

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#408

Post by kortilla »

elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?

Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#409

Post by ehnto »

Terr_ wrote: post #31

I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer , and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.) Then they work backwards, trying to figure o…

I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#410

Post by TheDong »

elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!

Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).

The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).

The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.

People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.

Make sense now?

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