Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cooling in Space

guille.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 101 posts

Re: Cooling in Space

#71

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mkl wrote: post #46
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the feeling that the only reason that might actually be done is to escape from any kind of jurisdiction. In space no one can hear you compute.

The Outer Space Treaty [1] says "A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object", so no escaping jurisdiction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty , https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

Resurrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) , launch it 'anonymously' from international waters?

Re: Cooling in Space

#72

Post by XorNot »

mkl wrote: post #46
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the feeling that the only reason that might actually be done is to escape from any kind of jurisdiction. In space no one can hear you compute.

The Outer Space Treaty [1] says "A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object", so no escaping jurisdiction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty , https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

It is worth noting that this is also identical to the way in which international waters works as well, so there's plenty of legal precedent.

But it's also irrelevant: all your infrastructure supporting such a thing, including your ability to fund it, is on Earth, in someone's jurisdiction.

The US government is hardly going to say "well the datacenter is in space, guess there's nothing we can do about the owner who lives in California..."

Re: Cooling in Space

#73

Post by simondotau »

XorNot wrote: post #70
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe! blub °Oo.

Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space. And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...

Absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy many hundreds of satellites (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner).

Re: Cooling in Space

#74

Post by echoangle »

XorNot wrote: post #66
echoangle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sure: which is a higher and less accessible orbit. The relative fuel cost might be small, but in absolute terms the ship carrying payload is carrying a lot more to do it - see the number of Starships to refuel a Starship in LEO. 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 lin…

> Sure: which is a higher and less accessible orbit. The relative fuel cost might be small, but in absolute terms the ship carrying payload is carrying a lot more to do it - see the number of Starships to refuel a Starship in LEO.

No it’s not, it’s not either SSO or LEO. You can have SSO at 600km which is lower than the normal LEO satellite.

I agree that it doesn’t make a lot of sense (look at the root comment of this thread), but you absolutely can make a LEO datacenter with 100% sun coverage if you want to.

Re: Cooling in Space

#75

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

XorNot wrote: post #70
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe! blub °Oo.

Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space. And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...

As I understand it the idea is to have many of such sats. Literally clouds of them.

Not necessarily in orbits which are easily reachable for current ASATs, nor 'economical'.

For now...

Re: Cooling in Space

#76

Post by Arodex »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #67
fc417fc802 wrote: post #56

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.

China already has a ground based laser array for military purposes (blinding more or less permanently spy satellites). Some think it could be upgraded to hard killing satellites, which I don't think is yet possible (the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy), but with something heavily constrained by heat dissipation like an orbital datacenter, that last array could overload it and fry it...

Re: Cooling in Space

#77

Post by simondotau »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #56
titanomachy wrote: post #27

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.

Instead of one large floating barge, make it a thousand smaller floating barges connected with Starlink. Monitor vessel activity near them and autonomously move the fleet to make intercepting them as difficult as possible. Rig them to explode upon capture to deter theft.

(Hint to the downvoters: I'm not being serious.)

Re: Cooling in Space

#78

Post by echoangle »

dwroberts wrote: post #34
echoangle wrote: post #6

I still don’t see what the advantage is. Of course it’s physically possible to build a datacenter in space, but I can’t imagine land prices being that high that the same data center on earth wouldn’t be cheaper. Even just due to launch costs and the more sophisticated equipment needed for space.

One advantage that does come to mind in light of the Iran war (and the loss of an AWS DC) is difficulty in attacking it, even when it’s directly above foreign territory. I wonder if one of the intended customers will be gov/military? Conjoined spy satellite/DC for some function maybe?

I don’t know what the end game of the US looks like but surely you’ll always find some territory around the world to relatively safely put datacenters? And if your opponent isn’t Iran but something like russia or china, they’ll just blow up your datacenter in orbit, too.

I see the point to maybe do some onboard data processing on spy satellites etc, but on the other hand, downlink bandwidth seems to be become less of an issue over time, so it doesn’t seem that important to me compared to just sending down the raw data over star link or the military equivalent.

Re: Cooling in Space

#79

Post by Arodex »

andriesm wrote: post #45

If I had a dollar for everytime someone told me they have an advanced physics degree and can unequivocally gaurantee me that it will never be physically feasible to cool GPU's in space.... How soon those people have disappeared!

Advanced physics degree holders are right, the linked article is full of mistakes.

You can bullshit humans but you can't bullshit reality.

Re: Cooling in Space

#80

Post by echoangle »

adrian_b wrote: post #63
Ekaros wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until now only energy sources based on radioactive decay have been used in space, which have very low power, but they can provide it for many decades. 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 mit…

Actually in the Cold War there were some actual nuclear reactors in space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor#TOPAZ-I

> This could be mitigated by sending only components of the reactor and assembling it in space.

How would that help? The main problem if the launch fails is that the radioactive material will spread around (in the worst case, they are encased so exactly that doesn’t happen).

You could maybe spread out the nuclear material in multiple launches but you would just increase the risk of a small contamination in exchange for a smaller risk of a large contamination.

I don’t think the individual parts of the reactor are intrinsically safer than the reactor, it’s not like it’s going to become an atomic explosion during launch.

Post reply on HN