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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#811

Post by osigurdson »

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 suspect Musk has a workable plan of some sort, realistically. Clearly, the one thing that is available in space is an abundance of square meters. There is no need whatsoever to conserve space at sufficient orbit. It is a little counter intuitive as we are so used to needing to conserve all the things.

Power input and heat radiation both scale with area so maybe there is some way to achieve this at scale. For instance, maybe it will not look like a traditional data center or even traditional chips.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#812

Post by originalvichy »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #774

Until someone actually launches a prototype, this is not happening. The economy of just doing everything on the ground is underestimated. And the technology simply is still not ready. LEO sats randomly falling down is a daily occurrence. I would love to see the Excel spreadsheet these investors are drooling over. It probably has less than 6 tabs.

This is the same guy that had his followers preach about how cars in tunnels for public transit is better than… trains in tunnels… Do not expect logical arguments when dealing with this guy and his followers.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#813

Post by [deleted] »

titzer wrote: post #747
bravetraveler wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"

I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing out the fact that the moon is not made of blue cheese a kind of "rigorous" reporting? Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the press extra constitutional protections for.

[deleted]

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#814

Post by abalone »

kimixa wrote: post #687
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…

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for…

> using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use

Space changes this. Laser based optical links offer bandwidth of 100 - 1000 Gbps with much lower power consumption than radio based links. They are more feasible in orbit due to the lack of interference and fogging.

> Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric

This is not true for the power generation aspect (which is the main motivation for orbital TPUs). Desert solar is a hard problem due to the need for a water supply to keep the panels clear of dust. Also the cooling problem is greatly exacerbated.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#815

Post by maxdo »

I have my personal reasons to hate Elon. But the article is full of fluff and lacks imagination, typical of the "the world is static and will never change" mindset.

What they are trying to do is an a very ambitious engineering challenge in several highly integrated domains, from spaceships to robotics, gpu, server design , ai. Typical stakes are high margins are high.

Project also pushes boundaries of what human can do the same way starlink did. 20 years ago starlink scale was also an "impossible" thing. Is it possible now to push one gpu and serve it from space? Yes, can you do it at scale? Big question.

Obstacles :

Price per kg to orbit. They aim to go from $150 to $10 per kg. Can they deliver? Big question, but having something that demands so many starship, like GPU heavy tasks, will help them achieve this goal. Benefits? No rent, no cooling issues, cheap sun-powered electricity 24 hours a day, unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Jurisdiction. Servers can't be shut down or taken away by police, etc.

Cooling. Yes, it's a vacuum, but with $10 per kg, you can deliver pipes and coolant, and since you don't have space constraints, you can build these pipes with a robot, making that datacenter extremely cheap.

3. Labor. If a robot can do primitive tasks combined with design that is fully remote, you labor costs goes almost to 0.

the output: with $10 per pg, delivering solar panels, coolant + robot for some urgent fixes. Robots even with current technology can swap a harddrive for example, especially if hardware is built to be mantained by robots not human. You don't need large construction, you invest into design, that once assembled , cost you maybe comparable amount of hardware to deliver. After that it runs for free!

The economy if this obviously beating anything exised on earth.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#816

Post by AlexandrB »

joelthelion wrote: post #528
dathinab wrote: post #322

The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being ve…

> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").

The same thing happened with Hyperloop. Many journalists are simple stenographers of the utterances of others and there's no verification applied to any of the claims.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#817

Post by jollyllama »

Avicebron wrote: post #104
mbb70 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.

Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?

I always assumed they were copying the Wii Miis

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#818

Post by torginus »

osigurdson wrote: post #811
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 suspect Musk has a workable plan of some sort, realistically. Clearly, the one thing that is available in space is an abundance of square meters. There is no need whatsoever to conserve space at sufficient orbit. It is a little counter intuitive as we are so used to needing to conserve all the things. Power input and heat radiation both scale with area so maybe there is some way to achieve this at scale. For instan…

The rumor I heard is that Musk's big issue with SpaceX was that he was only able to employ US citizens with a security clearance, as per the limitations of a rocket company, which he has rallied against multiple times.

One of the motivations behind this whole thing could be that he could make a way for foreign talent to work on space projects without the necessary government signoff.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#819

Post by infinitewars »

maxdo wrote: post #815

I have my personal reasons to hate Elon. But the article is full of fluff and lacks imagination, typical of the "the world is static and will never change" mindset. What they are trying to do is an a very ambitious engineering challenge in several highly integrated domains, from spaceships to robotics, gpu, server design , ai. Typical stakes are high margins are high. Project also pushes boundaries of what human can…

Elon is that you?
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