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

Data centers in space makes no sense

civai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#821

Post by Retric »

abalone wrote: post #814
kimixa wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dese…

You don’t need to do anything to keep panels with a significant angle clear of dust in deserts. The Sahara is near the equator but you can stow panels at night and let the wind do its thing.

The lack of launch costs more than offset the need for extra panels and batteries.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#824

Post by pranavm27 »

I had this idea in the beginning of last year and since I wanted to somehow get into space infra started doing some calculations - the area of arrays required kinda made me scrap the whole thing. But kinda curious since this is back as a mainstream topic.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#825

Post by AlexandrB »

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…

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

Total pipe dream. They can't take away your servers, but they can imprison you until you provide access. And SpaceX would still fall under the laws of whichever country it's based in. If lawful access is really a problem, laws will be written to make it SpaceX's problem. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#826

Post by PurpleRamen »

abalone wrote: post #807
PurpleRamen wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.

> Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper. Deserts have good sun exposure and land availability but extremely poor water resources, which is necessary for washing the sand off the panels. There are many challenges with scaling both terrestrial and orbital solar.

I wasn't thinking of going THAT far. Northern Canada/Alaska is in the arctic region, so build the line some thousand miles down to the sunny parts of Canada/USA and call it done. Not like this is particularly hard, probably not even that expensive, compared to a million satellites/future space-debris. Greenland would probably be also a good location.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#827

Post by abalone »

worldsayshi wrote: post #567
abalone wrote: post #561

There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations. However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas wit…

> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning. Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need. More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

I’m all for it — converting just a third of that land to solar would be enough to power the grid in terms of raw output — but there is still a huge, unsolved problem of energy storage that scale. Without that you’re only powering your data center for five hours a day.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#828

Post by PinkiesBrain »

KaiserPro wrote: post #570
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…

Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal networking, its power management (what happens when its in darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration ( https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-vibration... ) What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't jus…

You don't put it in a standard orbit, you put it in a polar orbit with near 100% suntime ... obviously.

Obviously you use the backside of the massive area of PV you need, for an equally massive area for HOPG radiator films with condensor coils (because obviously you use heatpumps for cooling, not pure liquid).

Consider the obvious ways you'd actually do it, not the most naive ways.

The GPU pods obviously won't weigh the same as a terrestrial rack. Space based solar arrays obviously don't weigh the same as your hail and storm resistant panels on your roof (see ROSA, but there might be another 10x weight reduction if using flexible solar in tension from rotation). Noone cares about a couple 100 ms extra for first token.

Solar wind and drag are in my opinion the biggest issue. Problem : it's a giant surface catching drag and solar wind. Solution : it's a giant solar sail. Controlling the angle of PV for useful thrust, that's never really been done for a satellite.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#829

Post by ineedasername »

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…

Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-server communication with correlated work loads than we already have on earth for most needs.

Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good reason to actually do this unless there's a use for all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is happening with immense growth and demand expected for increased pharmaceutical research and various manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.

Post reply on HN