Live data from Hacker News

Data centers in space makes no sense

civai.org

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#901
post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

yes... and no. Right now you need a server lets say in france. You are fully in their jurisdiction, for latency etc. What if your server fly over france , but not in France, hence: you don't need to build servers in france, unlike before, you don't need to deal with local government on so many issues, water, electricity etc to be local in france. And , taxes : crypto payments + compute , and same transaction in franc…

And if France decides to jam you until you play nice?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#902

I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.) BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime. People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute…

The problem is that software people are clueless.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#903
post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think. You don't even need to dig. We have myriad wireless internet solutions. We did not need to send satellites into space to fix this problem in a far more cost effective way.

Terrestrial wireless internet solutions are stupid. With a satellite you can be anywhere with line of sight to the southern sky and receive signal. With some shitty tower you're still constrained to your location just as you would be with wired, except that instead of a fast, low latency cable you have a noisy, outage prone wireless tower.

This is not a problem that needed to be solved by satellites. It is a failure of US politics that rural areas don't have broadband. We didn't need some private company to put satellites into low earth orbit for someone to watch a youtube video from their house reliably. The ongoing costs and complexities of running a global satellite network vs running a cable is insane.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#904
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…

As an engineer of the software variety, logically heat dissipation would seem like a difficult problem. But SpaceX has lots of real engineers who are very smart. I’m certain they ran the math on it. Which is more than you or I have done. If they say it can be done, I’m inclined to believe them.

[flagged]

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#905
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…

It doesn't make sense. It is just Musk trying to pump up SpaceX valuation before the IPO.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#906
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#908
post #687
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…

[deleted]

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#909
post #553

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…

I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all o…

Yes, this is the nature of Brandolini's Law.

> I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center

Which is very nice for Musk, who can spend 30 seconds running his mouth, and people jump to assuming that a) it's being designed, b) by skilled people, c) the math and finances works out already, d) that 'completely obvious' problems must simply be your lying eyes, and contort themselves to put all the effort into defending it.

Even though Musk has a history of lying announcements and not being able to deliver and the 'completely obvious' problems were actually problems that nobody solved. Where is the 2017 full self driving car? Where is the Vision-over-LIDAR success? Where is the Hyperloop that "would be able to whisk passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in just 35 minutes"? Where are the 2025 orbital refuelling test flights for the Moon and Mars schedule, and the plans for how to keep cryogenic liquid Hydrogen cold in Space? Where was the "funding secured" Musk lied about for taking Tesla stock private in 2018 when judges found there wasn't any funding and fined him $20M? Where's the person Musk said in 2011 he could "put on Mars in a decade"? Where's the uncrewed Mars ship in 2022 he announced in 2017? The human voyage in 2024?

> "I'm a physicist myself"

And if someone tells you they have found a quantum zero-point free energy room temperature superconducting over-unity perpetual motion machine, do you jump to their defense because you assume the speaker must be very careful and smarter than everyone else? Or do you say "sounds unlikely; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?

> "I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed."

The ISS cost 100-150 billion, is "larger than a 6 bedroom house", and its solar panels can generate 250 kW. NVidia says their AI datacenter costs $50-60 billion, needs 1GW of electricity, and look at the size of it: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nvidia-worth-5-trillion-...

You're looking at that multiple-warehouses-structure which could sink the output of an entire nuclear power station, and going with "it would be cheaper if we launched that into space"?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#910
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more compute.

And 1 ML rack uses the power of like 10 regular racks

Oh and even a non-ML server rack uses more power than a networking rack
Post reply on HN