Trails of those low orbit satellites wasn't bad enough.
Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.
xAI joins SpaceX
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
what makes you believe this? radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Shading does work; JWST does this. However I don't see how you can make it work for satellite data centers. You would constantly be engaging attitude control as you realigned the panels to keep the radiators in shade. You'd run out of thruster fuel so fast you'd get like a month out of each satellite
attitude control doesn't need to consume propellant, there's reaction wheels.
but you'd rarely ever need it though: it just needs to rotate at a low angular velocity of 1 rotation per year to keep facing the sun.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#633I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Remember MoviePass, and how they were losing gobs of money by letting people see unlimited movies for $20/month? It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt. The "datacenters in space" thing is…
The pre-IPO timing of this narrative, combined with Musk’s history of Tesla’s stock pumping, leaves no room for doubt. But, that has worked for Tesla, I’m pretty confident it will work for SpaceX, which will IPO for $1T+.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen. Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude an…
This is such a hypebeast paragraph. Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea. Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS).
It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
what makes you believe this? radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
what? the heat is coming from inside the house
which house?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#636Now those dumb articles about AI data centers in space from a couple months back make so much more sense.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only people who never interacted with data center reliability think it's doable to maintain servers with no human intervention.
But … but what if we had solar-powered AI SREs to fix the solar-powered AI satellites… /in space/?
Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.
Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.
By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context missing. This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers. Full paragraph quote comes from: > While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be ca…
Why is it cheaper to ship all of the materials to space, then to the moon for assembly (which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive), then back into space vs just… building them on earth and then shipping them up? We’re not exactly at a loss for land over here.
You can make propellant on the Moon (aluminum based solid fuels), and the energy to get into orbit or into deep space is far, far less that from Earth’s surface.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#639A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…
> It(Solar) works, but it isn't somehow magically better than installing solar panels on the ground
Umm, if this is the point, I don't know whether to take rest of author's arguments seriously. Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land.
Also there is so limited calculations for the numbers in the article, while the article throws of numbers left and right.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#640A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…
It's not just "very challenging", it's "very challenging and also solves no actual problem we face".