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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#581

Post by randomNumber7 »

TheDong wrote: post #410
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)…

Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.

Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#582

Post by mike_hearn »

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…

It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.

1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.

2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).

3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.

4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.

5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#583

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

javascriptfan69 wrote: post #368
gpt5 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provides a service that couldn't exist without the satellite infrastructure. Datacenters already exist. Putting datacenters in space does not offer any new capabilities.

This is the main point I think. I am very much convinced that SpaceX is capbable to put a datacenter into space. I am not convinced they can do it cheaper than building a datacenter on earth.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#584

Post by bravetraveler »

joelthelion wrote: post #528
dathinab wrote: post #322

The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being ve…

> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").

I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#585

Post by andix »

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…

I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.

They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.

I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#586

Post by trashb »

As others point out this is a bad idea.

Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.

Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#587

Post by cjfd »

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…

Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#588

Post by lisp2240 »

The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have to make sense. The less sense the better.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#589

Post by PurpleRamen »

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…

A Starlink satellite is mainly just receiving and sending data, the bare minimum of a data center-satellite's abilities; everything else comes on top and would be the real power drain.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#590

Post by jdranczewski »

kamaal wrote: post #401
pokot0 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.
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