61–70 of 101 posts
"Cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum."
I don't think that follows. The radiator is only the final heat sink. You still need to move heat from very dense chips into a deployable, space-rated radiator, and handle pumps, loops, leaks, redundancy, radiation damage, replacement, eclipses, Earth IR/albedo, and launch mass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be accomplished by doing this vs placing them basically anywhere else on earth?
It is a comment on the absurdity of orbital data centers. Mountaintop data centers sound absurd, but are more feasible and efficient than orbital ones in nearly every aspect.
But space based dc accomplish something that mountaintop dc do not. The different list of benefits/tradeoffs are why space DC are proposed and mountaintop ones are not. It's a difference of kind, not degree. It's not a meaningful experiment to just try to build DC in hard places and then we can finally validate space.
Stated benefits in particular:
- Power available 24/7 for "free"
- coms w/o interruption using existing infra
- Rideshare (SPX can build out capacity while other lifts pay some of the bill for lift)
- Nonregulation
- Very low latency to "places of interest far from USA mountains"
And no, I do not believe that mountaintop automatically satisfies these benefits in a smooth way such that mountaintop is a meaningful stepping stone towards space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it'll make sense any time soon, but some arguments I can think of are that solar in space can easily be ~50% more efficient at any moment while also being continuous (enough) in the right orbit. An even more radical idea is to put nuclear in space which would sidestep all the earthly hurdles (beyond the launch).
Nuclear is used in space, but my understanding is that it is too low power and not really scalable to computing needs for this use case. Bonus side really is that nuclear power can provide power for very long time.
Nuclear fission reactors, similar to those used on submarines or ships, would enable very different applications.
Until now, they have not been used for fear of what would happen after a failed rocket launch, when the reactor would fall back on Earth.
This could be mitigated by sending only components of the reactor and assembling it in space.
I do not think that routine exploration of the Solar System beyond Mars will ever be possible without using at least nuclear fission reactors, because it is too slow with chemical sources of energy.
This article made me think of a strange claim by Elon Musk at 07:08 in this [1] interview: "Cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum." I don't think that follows. The radiator is only the final heat sink. You still need to move heat from very dense chips into a deployable, space-rated radiator, and handle pumps, loops, leaks, redundancy, radiation damage, replac…
AI sat mini can use a simpler single ammonia loop, since the ISS uses a water loop on the station side to avoid toxicity issues in case of a coolant leak.
It's a far simpler engineering problem to solve compared to other challenges SpaceX is facing (Starship, Raptor, Starlink).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, how could we not have datacenter capacity for the GPUs when Meta has shown that you can go from a bare field to an operational datacenter in about 3 months by using tents instead of buildings?
How hard would it be to weatherproof a GPU computing rack? Like how much more cost would it add? So theoretically you could even forgo tents. Just have them at field. Technically you could even maybe run them in freeports. Thus saving any tariff costs...
The main problem here is that it reduces efficiency (cooling a large datacenter is more efficient per Watt of dissipated heat than a shipping container) and increases initial cost (building in a shipping container is not actually as easy as doing it in a normal-ish building).
Portability (when offline, you can put a shipping container like this on a truck and cart it around) and availability (no need for a new/refit building, only power is required and could be included in the container with a generator (gas/diesel)) are the main reasons for accepting a higher TCO here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real issue is that the power situation in LEO is still actually terrible! Your solar is a little more performant, but you're plunged into hard shade every 45 minutes.
They are mostly planning sun synchronous orbits afaik. That means the orbit is tilted so the earth’s deformed shape continually moves the orbital plane so the satellite is always in the sun (or generally the plane has the same angle to the sun).
And here's the thing: all of this is competing with solar+batteries cost on Earth. The power situation is the only advantage here.
Like why not put a datacenter on a barge and run an HVDC line out to it far offshore? That would be expensive...but more expensive then space? It's not even outside of the capability set of SpaceX, who already run drone ships to facilitate Falcon 9 landings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What advantage does a mountaintop have versus a more accessible earth-based location? I suspect one of the motivations for space datacenters is to try to stay out of the reach of all jurisdictions so you Musk can start to run his companies as an autonomous state.
If the goal is to avoid various national jurisdictions, what about floating a barge out into international waters? Do it near the equator in the middle of the pacific to maximize the difficulty of humans getting there. Use the money saved by not needing to launch into orbit to purchase massive gun turrets to prevent piracy.
blub °Oo.
The incoming power is not the electrical power generated by the solar panels, but the entire power of the light that is absorbed by the solar panels and by the body of the satellite.
Even with a perfectly reflecting body and with SOTA solar panels, the amount of incoming power is at least double in comparison with the electrical power consumed by the datacenter.
Also, the heat radiated is smaller than in TFA, because no radiator is perfectly black at the radio waves in the frequency range corresponding to the ambient temperature.
I am too lazy to make the correct computation, but there was another article linked on HN some days ago where a more plausible computation was done and the conclusion was that the minimum area of the radiators is slightly larger than the area required for solar panels.
This would still be feasible, but in reality the area would have to be even larger, because the radiator cannot have a uniform temperature, the parts where the cooling fluid is incoming will be hotter than the parts where the cooling fluid is outgoing. Moreover, the pumping of the cooling fluid requires extra power that must be added to the power budget.
There is no doubt that it is possible to build a space datacenter, if much more GPUs are installed in it than necessary, to enable to correct the more severe transient errors and to preserve enough capacity after many GPUs become permanently defective, but the cost will not be competitive with terrestrial datacenters any time soon.
The one ESA used to use is called
ESATAN
I used to share office with a colleague who mostly worked with it. This was at a time when the fad of naming products with an initial "e" had just faded. The surviving victim is "ebay" I guess, but at a time there were many like it.
So my natural reading of the huge ASCII art rending on ESATAN's title screen has always been E-SATAN. Sorry ESA.
Joking aside, you can download ESATAN here:
It's not obvious what the download allows but expect restrictions. I remember the version we used had a HW dongle with heavy price tag every month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the goal is to avoid various national jurisdictions, what about floating a barge out into international waters? Do it near the equator in the middle of the pacific to maximize the difficulty of humans getting there. Use the money saved by not needing to launch into orbit to purchase massive gun turrets to prevent piracy.
A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe! blub °Oo.
And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...