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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#731

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic

This. Like it would make far more sense to colonize the poles than Mars.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#734

Post by phtrivier »

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…

> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

That.

Also, am I the only one to remember when SpaceX was supposed to pivot to transporting people from cities to cities, given how cheap and reusable and sure BFF/Starship was going to be ?

Or how we were all going to earn money by pooling our full self driving cars in a network of robo taxis ?

In all seriousness, what is the number of "unrealized sci-fi pipe dreams" that is acceptable from the owner a company ? Or, to be fair, what is the acceptable ratio of "pipe dreams" / "actually impressive stuff actually delivered (reusable rockets, starlink, decent EVs, etc...)" ?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#735

Post by Dasistmeinname »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #722
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…

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us that radiative power scales to the fourth power of temperature (T^4). While terrestrial cooling is largely linear and dependent on ambient air/water temperature (the "wet-bulb" limit), a radiator in space is dumping heat into a 3-Kelvin sink. That thermal gradient is massive.

This is misleading: - A radiator only “sees” 3 K if it’s perfectly shielded from the Sun, Earth albedo, and Earth IR. In Earth orbit you can easily get hundreds of W/m^2 incident; without sunshields the net rejectable heat is greatly reduced. - You have a "massive" advantage only if the radiator is allowed to run very hot: At 300–310 K with \epsilon \approx 0.9: about 400–500 W/m^2. Effective "radiative heat transfer coefficient" at 300 K: h_rad \approx 4\epsilon\sigma T^3 \approx 5-6 W/m^2K. That's orders of magnitude lower than forced convection in air (\approx 50–500 W/m^2K) or the water side of a heat exchanger (>=1000 W/m^2K).

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#736

Post by handedness »

awakeasleep wrote: post #17
antonymoose wrote: post #10

To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event. To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if…

When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics. The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense. After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational. Heres hopin…

Pseudo-psychoanalyzing someone for explicitly steelmanning a subject seems particularly degrading to discussion.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#737

Post by furyg3 »

This whole thing is Musk just trying to keep the hype train going. Musk has learned one neat trick from all of his (quite admirable) success with Tesla and SpaceX: hype is more profitable than actually doing stuff that generates value now.

Tesla's valuation has been nuts for a while. The music was going to stop playing at some point, so something something robotaxis, something something androids, something something AI. Keep the investors duped while you can move money around and leverage it to stay relevant.

Cars are out, social media as well (especially X), but Space is still in, and even more so AI. So let's move the cost center with world domination potential (AI) over to the one company that's making money and has a still has a cash-out potential via an IPO.

I'm just so tired of it all. I actually think 'boutique' businesses (companies that generate real value to real users and are profitable now) are the only thing that can save our economy medium-term, but investors and the government are having none of it. And the result is that these bait-and-switch scams will continue.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#738

Post by handedness »

awakeasleep wrote: post #403
antonymoose wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heres hoping you have a similar moment. I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab. I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.…

I completely failed to convey my point. It’s not about any of your beliefs. The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out…

> ...you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative...

You're literally describing steelmanning, which GP explicitly set out to do.

> It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play.

Despite attempting to rephrase, you're still coming across as projecting your own internal issues onto GP's comment. Directly addressing the (worthwhile) points they made in their comments rather than attempting to analyze the meta of the basic nature of someone you've never met is the way to go.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#739

Post by diabllicseagull »

pointlessone wrote: post #596
PunchyHamster wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be…

DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room. ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons. You also need to collect that power so you need abou…

if I may add, you can't really launch a station three times the size of ISS with a single rocket so there will be multiple launches. Just the launch costs alone could likely finance multiple similarly sized server rooms on land.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#740

Post by jongjong »

Clearly the desire to have data centers in space is so that AI can control humans remotely without having to worry about backlash and potential dismantling.

Besides this, it's concerning how much stuff we're sending to space. One day we'll have to start worrying about satellite parts falling on us.

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