Data centers in space makes no sense • Hacker News Board

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#851

Post by kimixa » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #743

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…

Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full. This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him…

Yup - my example of the Sahara wasn't really a specific suggestion, so much as an example of "The Most Inconvenient Inhospitable part of the earth's surface is still much better than space for these use cases". This isn't star trek, the world doesn't match sci-fi.

It's like his "Mars Colony" junk - and people lap it up, keeping him in the news (in a not explicitly negative light - unlike some recent stories....)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#852

Post by claaams » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

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 benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets. It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15 years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything is more money and power.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#853

Post by cmsj » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

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…

Space doesn't really change it though because the effective bandwidth between nodes is reduced by the overall size of the network and how much data they need to relay between each other.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#854

Post by bravetraveler » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

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.

So, don't take this the wrong way, but basically: https://newsliteracy.wsj.com/news-opinion

I was poorly trying to raise this trite distinction, asserting skepticism falls closer to Opinion than Journalism. The line gets more fine every day. I know. Take it up with them/their peers.

'Rigorous' would be "Billionaire says ''", not "Billionaire says ''... and here's how we feel/think about it".

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#855

Post by elil17 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

matt-p wrote: post #362

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…

(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice. It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming…

Well a few considerations:

- You have to size your cooling towers for your hottest hour. Doing this saves you no capital costs.

- You barely have to run the fans on your cooling towers in the winter because the air is so cold. So often this also won’t save you much operating costs.

- Already there is an essentially unlimited amount of so called “waste heat” from power plants and factories. Building district heating systems is extremely capital intensive, which is why this isn’t done more.

- As a municipality it’s just a horrible idea to make the heating system of your whole city rely on a random company continuing to operate (even worse if said company is in a potential bubble). This is why most district heating systems work with power plants - they already have the government involved in ensuring their continuing operations.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#856

Post by ZebusJesus » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

We really need to stop letting Musk and others just put what ever they want in space we are getting close to the Kessler limit and that could be very very bad if it happens. They have some ideas but this is already and issue, China had an issue after a launch were debris hit the capsule breaking it forcing them to send a second capsule.

https://climatecosmos.com/sustainability/how-close-are-we-to...

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#857

Post by xorcist » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

It's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to be cool and signal that demand for the stock will not go down.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#858

Post by rishabhjain1198 » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #841

rishabhjain1198 wrote: post #838

> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers. This statement is actually completely false. The bottleneck is not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible on the planet. How much we're willing to pay for increasing that is currently very unclear, but it's far more than the current cost of building a terrestrial data center. As Jensen Huang famously…

> This statement is actually completely false. The bottleneck is not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible on the planet. How much of energy will it take to launch the same amount of compute, connectivity, and PV to power it into space?

Good question.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#859

Post by mghackerlady » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

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…

for the chips to both be radiation hardened and as powerful as our current chips they'd need to be massive. There's a reason the mars rover uses a PowerPC G3

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#860

Post by parl_match » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #503

parl_match wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4 requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways). so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensiv…

Pet peeve: T^4 is not exponential in T, it’s polynomial. For exponential, T must be in the exponent, e.g. 2^T or so. Still, pretty effective. Having said that, agree that Elon is full of it.

yes sorry, it's a fourth order exponent but not exponential