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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

andrewmccalip.com

61–70 of 282 posts

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aerospace industry has a long history of missing lower cost/kg to orbit. I'm extremely suspicious of $500/kg, which is about a third of today's cost.

OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.

SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#62
AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#63
post #12

tbh this feels lot like people throwing Drake equation around. You put in whatever random numbers together and you can get any result you want.

We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to the Drake equation. The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.

You use of the word "quite" is highly "innovative".

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#64

I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias. Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.

> Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.

The FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US, including stuff which extends beyond spectrum licensing like mandatory 5 year deorbiting capability for newly launched LEO satellites. Europe, China and India are not regulation-free utopias either.

You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres anyway.

Ultimately there are latency and minimise data-transfer arguments for doing certain types of data processing on local machines in space, but the generalised compute and model-training argument only works if the unit economics stack up as sufficiently good to cover the risk and R&D, and they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water even assuming launch costs become minimal. (It's slightly amusing to see how much some advocates of that other controversial futurist vision of spaced-based solar power - whose chances of success equally depend on low launch costs - viscerally hate the latest wave of datacentres-in-space hype...)

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#65

> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even…

He plans to IPO SpaceX and xAI, so this space data center fantasy benefits both:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-net-worth-hits-600-2022...

He is a walking billboard.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#66
post #39

What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…

For some decades now I’ve heard the debunk many times more than the bunk. The real urban myth appears to be any appreciable fraction of people believe the myth.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#67
post #38

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

Your other options of fault tolerance typically achieved by doing everything at least twice and being willing to reboot (and accepting attrition from total ionizing radiation) or lots of shielding are fine for building functioning space hardware but suboptimal for building datacentre business models...

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.

SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.

OTOH they have achieved many things that experienced people said were impossible or would never make financial sense.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#69
post #38

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often.

Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.

I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#70
post #39

What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…

Cooling isn't anymore difficult than power generation. For example, on the ISS solar panels generate up to 75 W/m², while the EATCS radiators can dissipate about 150 W/m².

Solar panels have improved more than cooling technology since ISS was deployed, but the two are still on the same order of magnitude.

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