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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#661

Post by monooso »

mike_hearn wrote: post #582
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…

I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into whether or not this idea makes sense.

That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point:

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

As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things into space.

That is not the benchmark here.

It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could. It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than running them on earth.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#662

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #14
sheepscreek wrote: post #9

What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary. Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad. But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the re…

> No cooling necessary. This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator. 3 are ways to cool things (lose energy): - Conduction - Convection - Radiation In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.

> In space, only radiation works

it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.

This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C when it's night and +120C when it's day there.

And the sun's radiation also flips bits.

Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#663

Post by killerstorm »

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…

People did the calculation: radiative cooling requires smaller surface area than solar panels. So, basically, a solar panel itself can radiate heat.

Have you done a calculation yourself?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#664

Post by weregiraffe »

bunderbunder wrote: post #236
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…

My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products. Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing h…

>Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense.

Starship can replace Falcon 9 and probably be cheaper, if fully reusable, so more profitable. So at least some economic sense is there already.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#665

Post by danparsonson »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #470
adastra22 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space. Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.

> You are confidently incorrect. No, he's not. Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space. > AWST: So, NASA does not require SpaceX to use radiation-hardened computer systems on the Dragon? John Muratore: No, as a matter of fact NASA doesn't require it on their own systems, either. I spent 30 years at NASA and in the Air Force doing this kind of work. My last job was chief en…

Carrying humans to space is not the same use case as spending long periods of time in orbit.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#666

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

cjfd wrote: post #587
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…

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.

> The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source... What do you mean by "open source"? Can we contribute changes to it?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#667

Post by thephyber »

mike_hearn wrote: post #568
hirsin wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size. A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW. When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW. And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not e…

But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big. T…

There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other.

We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. Yes, space is big, but low Earth orbit is a very tiny subset of all space.

The amount of propulsion satellites have before they become unable to maneuver is relatively small and the more satellite traffic there is, the faster each satellite will exhaust their propulsion gasses.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#668

Post by synctext »

pera wrote: post #565
hirsin wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size. A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW. When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW. And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not e…

New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around ~150kW, can someone confirm? The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously can't imagine something similar being deployed in orbit...

Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.

The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#669

Post by ericmay »

reverius42 wrote: post #492
ericmay wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history

I feel like this is an incredibly fantastic goal-post-moving from the original announcement. SpaceX: "we're going to put datacenters in space" HN comments: "obviously we'll need to move human civilization into space first for this to make sense. checks out."

I wasn’t responding to the original announcement, I was responding to someone who presumed that these data centers need to send data back to earth.

I was making a snide comment that certain ultra wealthy people don’t need these data centers to send data to earth, because they don’t plan on being here.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#670

Post by coliveira »

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…

Jeffrey Epstein's friend Elon Musk is trying to stop a financial disaster in xAi that would expose how irresponsible he is. He's gonna put all that in a company that has real money coming from government and soon will get retail investors money.
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