All very interesting, but I'd wait and see what people with real-world experience running Spacecraft can come up with before dismissing the entire endeavor.
Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#52Only a single order of magnitude of cost? So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space? So if you have greater than a 95% operating margin and capacity constraints (either due to nation environmental law, power limits, or other such blockers) then this is a no-brainer - a 95% operating margin becomes a 50% operating margin. The return on capital is much much lower so you have t…
It assumes $44/kg to launch into orbit. Idk where that came from if it's a musk claim or what but it's ludicrous against current costs. Currently still at thousands/kg and dropping but nowhere near $44 and I haven't heard anyone claim that's likely who isn't selling a rocket company.
Musk is deliberately creating a business that needs high volume low cost launch services because in order to get low cost launch high volume is needed, and in order to get high volume a customer is needed. In the same way that Starlink launches were used to create the Falcon 9 economies of scale, the orbital AI will be used to create the Starship economies of scale. He also wants to bet the whole company on this which creates pressure to deliver and not just coast on what they've already accomplished. There are a bunch of related high risk bets but they ultimately connect back to bringing Mars within reach with frequent low cost launch capability.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.
Cost = emmissions
No, cost is not directly proportional to emissions.
Heat emission in space is not problematic for humans
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#54Anyone know why everyone focuses on the radiators, when the solar panels are significantly larger?
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#55I'm not usually an "AI is going to kill us all" kind of person but on the off chance we do get Skynet/etc why would we give the machines the literal high ground?
I think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space.
Though there is a simpler explanation: Some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has an extreme financial incentive to push stories where spending on both things simultaneously is the big new thing.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#56Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.
I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.
A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#57Economics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.
They'll pay the price if it means their data centers are immune to the anger of the commoners who are being surveilled, analyzed, and manipulated by systems running on these data centers.
I'm still expecting a crypto satellite network to phone app now that normal phones have became satellite connectible. Something outside oversight.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#58I'm not usually an "AI is going to kill us all" kind of person but on the off chance we do get Skynet/etc why would we give the machines the literal high ground?
there has been a lot of pushback about building new data centers basically anywhere on earth might as well build them in space.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#59Let's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason.
Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat generation is so significant.
The real problem is failure. When you have a lot of servers, things fail all the time. Hard drives, SSDs, RAM chips, GPUs, motherboard, etc. Servers are designed to be able to quickly replace parts. If your data center is in orbit, these parts will just fail and there is no repair. There's certainly no economic repair.
If I remember my numbers rightly, at a company like Amazon or Google, the ratio is (IIRC) 1 FTE per 10,000 servers, meaning if you have 10,000 servers, 1 FTE will spend their entire time just replacing parts. A good hardware tech will have a pool of known good parts. When a server detects a fault, they'll go and replace probably everything with known good parts and then figure out what's wrong later. In GPU heavy DCs I suspect 1 FTE can cover fewer than that just because the heat management is much more complicated.
I really can't believe we're still talking about this. It borders on journalistic malpractice to even suggest this is a realistic possibility.
Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
#60There's also the issue of scaling. Say you can make the engineering work for building a data center in space.
Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers.
At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about 8000 orbital launches and under 40000 launches that were not orbital but reached the stratosphere.
Orbital rocket emissions have an impact far beyond what you might expect just from looking at the mass of what they emit, because they emit much of it the upper atmosphere. Many things that when emitted near the surface are only a local problem become a global problem if you emit them in the upper atmosphere.