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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#711

Post by jnsie »

rockemsockem wrote: post #487
adastra22 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.

Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion is spending most of his time maximizing his money.

Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#713

Post by wendgeabos »

Consider: If you genuinely believe that the only important goal is to make life multiplanetary, (and note I'm not defending this position here, just asserting it as an explanation of behavior)

then anything that drives money towards your work on that goal is worth pursuing particularly if you think time is short.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#714

Post by wendgeabos »

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…

I have reached the same conclusion -- this is perhaps not a distraction but an attempt to gather funds to pursue the One True Goal...

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#715

Post by energy123 »

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…

> 5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth

Sun-synchronous orbit means solar panels collect the same amount 24/7. I guess that's the #1 benefit. Cheap energy.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#716

Post by Nevermark »

lambertsimnel wrote: post #524
MengerSponge wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides. Heat pumps are magic . They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.

I share your enthusiasm about heat pumps, but I wonder what the efficiency of using waste heat is. Couldn't it be competitive with heat pumps? As it's a waste product, isn't it reasonable to also expect it to be more than 100% efficient?

You can’t extract energy from heat by itself. Only from a heat delta.

Think of heat like flowing water or charge. Only an altitude or voltage delta creates the flow needed to harvest energy.

You get no useful energy from heat you are already trying to shed because you have no delta to work with. (The entire problem exists because there is no surrounding environment with high heat capacity and lower heat.)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#717

Post by TechSquidTV »

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…

I have no idea how it compares to the heat being generated, but one advantage of space would be totally efficient radiative cooling, I believe. Assuming you can pump the heat, and can deploy a large enough surface area (the key question I assume), then you have that at least.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#718

Post by skywhopper »

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…

All of those “huge overheads” you cite are nothing compared to the huge overhead of building and fueling rockets to launch the vibration- and radiation-hardened versions of the solar panels and GPUs and cooling equipment that you could use much cheaper versions of on Earth. How many permitted, regulated launches would it take to get around the one-time permitting and predictable regulation of a ground-based datacenter?

Are Earth-based datacenters actually bound by some bottleneck that space-based datacenters would not be? Grid connections or on-site power plants take time to build, yes. How long does it take to build the rocket fleet required to launch a space “datacenter” in a reasonable time window?

This is not a problem that needs to be solved. Certainly not worth investing billions in, and definitely not when run by the biggest scam artist of the 21st century.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#719

Post by inglor_cz »

This being a forum full of engineers, it is not surprising that everyone concentrates on the technical challenges thereof. But that may be a distraction.

I suspect that Musk wants to build space data centers in order to mitigate political and societal problems, which may yet prove more intractable than cooling in space.

The current expansion of terrestrial data centers has already caused a huge backlash. Their adversaries may well try to regulate them out of existence, at least locally. If an important jurisdiction like California or Germany subjects building of new data centers to regulations similar to building, say, a new nuclear power station, they will achieve a de-facto stop on further development there even without banning them outright.

Space, while not entirely lawless, is much harder to regulate this way. Local authorities have no power over it, nor do governments of nations without space capabilities. Big authorities of big nations (the FAA etc.) do, but they will likely be more friendly to already established launch businesses like SpaceX, not least because of the geopolitical dimensions of having a vibrant space sector.

From Musk's POV, this may be worth the additional cost and technical troubles.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#720

Post by snarf21 »

croddin wrote: post #135
xupybd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he has rocket company that needs more work. Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company. The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project. I really think it's that simple.

Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to buil…

Correct, and this is meant to attract the same investors and Bulls that already think Mars colonies is a solved problem, just need a few more years to run some tests. As with all, it is only about making himself richer.
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