To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.
Ekaros 10 days ago [-]
It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.
TheOtherHobbes 10 days ago [-]
Classic misaligned incentives - pretendgineering is far more profitable than building stuff that works reliably and is useful.
We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")
vid 10 days ago [-]
I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.
Zigurd 9 days ago [-]
Google "atoms for peace." You will find an entire multidimensional cluster of hype ranging from Rickover maneuvering to get a nuclear navy, which seems to work pretty well, but on the way there it created a subsidized nuclear reactor business which was never in the money but for subsidies, loss leaders, and underbids. There was no Golden Age of nuclear power. There were fixed bid contracts that masked cost overruns until they didn't anymore. There was FOMO about Soviet gigantism and (subsidized) European nuclear projects.
mangecoeur 10 days ago [-]
Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.
Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.
The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.
smcin 10 days ago [-]
If Arthur C Clarke was still alive, he would be much in demand as sci-fi frontperson for these.
DamonHD 10 days ago [-]
I think that he had more sense...
rsynnott 10 days ago [-]
At the point, it's beginning to feel a bit like the 419 scam (where you make the details deliberately absurd so as to ward off people inclined to be sceptical early, leaving you with only the easiest marks.) SMRs! Data centres in space! "phD level AIs".
eru 10 days ago [-]
You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.
jeltz 10 days ago [-]
No, because to do that and not ruin myself I need to know roughly when the double will burst. Just knowing it is a bubble is not enough.
jnwatson 10 days ago [-]
Exactly. I shorted Sears in 2005 when Lampert took over. I knew he was going to drive that company into the ground.
Sears went bankrupt in 2018. It took a long time for the market to catch on.
datavirtue 10 days ago [-]
Most investors can time this aspect of the market accurately enough. It's tough for these people to stand by and watch profit being left on the table for a year or two, though. So they get back in, seeing how long they can leave their hand on the got plate.
Myself, I made the decision to go to cash a while ago, right before the recent AI pullback. Things were going great for a week until I started seeing all that money go unclaimed. I get back in, and the pullback I predicted happens. It was my own conscious decision to look past the gorilla in the room to get more free treats. I'll be fine but this is a good anecdote for how these things unfold.
vpribish 8 days ago [-]
It is not at all true that "Most investors can time this aspect of the market". This is laughably, absurdly, wrong - as if most people could predict the future. Here's a little advice I sincerely pray you accept : don't trade options.
rsynnott 10 days ago [-]
The market can, as always, remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, or certainly for longer than _I_ can.
Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
datavirtue 10 days ago [-]
Really? Logic wouldn't dictate that if I'm up 300% or more over two years and everyone is starting to get jittery about an AI bubble that perhaps I should pull out now and await the pullback? If it happens in a year, and I can buy back in at a 15-20% discount, that is also a return!! Do you hold for possibly another 5%? That doesn't make any sense. Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
Earw0rm 10 days ago [-]
Yep, taking your winnings if you're up 300% isn't a bad idea, but timing things right on a short is much harder.
rsynnott 10 days ago [-]
Yeah, that you could do, though even then if the timing is sufficiently uncertain you might be in trouble, and it's particularly risky in a time of stubbornly higher-than-ideal inflation. If you happened to have a bunch of Hype-y AI Ltd, then sure, probably. Far less clearly a good idea if you just have the S&P500, though.
It's further complicated by the fact that most of the worst examples of AI hype are not public. Like, if and when the bubble bursts, the hyperscalers will likely get burned, but they're not going to go to zero or anywhere near it.
And that's assuming you already have stocks; it's very different, risk-wise, from shorting or buying puts.
> Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
It really doesn't, due to inflation.
ajjahs 9 days ago [-]
[dead]
mybestday 10 days ago [-]
It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons.
Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?
Is the answer slavery? Once you've been taken to Mars and given your underground living quarters, you're going to be stuck there and not have any option but to carry on working or be thrown out to die on the surface.
wombatpm 9 days ago [-]
They should be doing that somewhere inhospitable to prove out the technology and concept. Set up in the arctic and work only with loads of materials that correspond to a starship load.
But then again no one is really serious about Mars.
JJMcJ 10 days ago [-]
Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?
mercutio2 9 days ago [-]
You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight.
Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.
mr_toad 10 days ago [-]
The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
For 24/7 solar... you are either in a sun synchronous orbit or in a very high orbit.
The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work.
A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k / kg to a polar orbit.
The next option is being far enough out of the way that the earth's shadow isn't an issue. For that, instead of a 500 km sun synchronous orbit, you'd be going to 36,000 km orbit. This is a lot further from the surface, takes a lot more fuel... and it's a geostationary orbit.
However, as a geostationary orbit, these spots are valuable. Slots in this orbit are divided into slots.
> There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.
> Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.
Furthermore, the "out of a nations control" - those slots are owned by nations. Countries would likely be very annoyed for someone to be putting satellites there without authorization. Furthermore, they only work with the countries on those areas. They also require spacing to ensure that you can properly point an antenna to that satellite.
Furthermore, geosynchronous orbits have a 0.5 second round trip lag. This could be a problem for data centers.
Putting things in these orbits is pricy. For LEO, you'd need a lot of them. For geosynchronous, the idea of servicing them is pretty much a "you can't do that" (in 10 - 20 years they use their last fuel and get pushed to a higher orbit and pretty much get forgotten about).
Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are things that need to be especially well behaved because any orbital debris in that area could really ruin everyone's day.
Compute in space doesn't make sense.
DennisP 10 days ago [-]
I think a prerequisite to doing any really big stuff in space would be fully and rapidly reusable launch rockets, which could get costs down by a couple orders of magnitude.
And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.
That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
mr_toad 10 days ago [-]
Launching into polar orbit takes about an extra 5-10% delta-v, depending on the latitude you launch from. It isn’t going to cost 6x as much.
newsclues 10 days ago [-]
The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited
jhgb 10 days ago [-]
There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.
jonah 10 days ago [-]
That seems like it would make the most sense on the "last mile". So, adding caches to the LEO satellite ISP birds would be a good idea. I wonder if Kupiter, StarLink, et. al. do that. (And if not, their reasoning against it since they've surely considered it.)
yoz-y 10 days ago [-]
Is there an orbit which has 24/7 sun and a visibility to same location?
wcoenen 10 days ago [-]
Geosynchronous orbits do not pass through the Earth's shadow as much as you might think. These orbits sit in the same plane as the equator, which is tilted 23.5 degrees when compared to a line from the sun to the earth.
They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow.
That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
10 days ago [-]
adam_gyroscope 10 days ago [-]
The article covers why this doesn’t work in detail.
amanaplanacanal 10 days ago [-]
Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.
more_corn 8 days ago [-]
Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way.
He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai)
Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.
exomonk 10 days ago [-]
Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing)
Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
bigyabai 9 days ago [-]
> Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
SDA’s “Battle Management Layer will provide automated space-based battle management through command and control, tasking, mission processing and dissemination” to support time-sensitive kill-chain closure. https://www.sda.mil/battle-management
Golden Dome and future missile tracking and ISR will depend on real
-time insights, which requires Edge Computing on orbit, running advanced AI/ML algorithms.” https://unibap.com/news/defense-in-the-foreground
sorry can't help you with your user feuds
bigyabai 9 days ago [-]
The only link that you provided mentioning dual-use satellites is from a Swedish defense contractor at an expo.
Is SDA "tracking and targeting" on consumer satellites, or are they not? Let's narrow this down to your initial claim.
exomonk 10 hours ago [-]
They're still physically the same Starlink satellites being used for Golden Dome.
wheels 10 days ago [-]
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
thelastgallon 10 days ago [-]
> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative
Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.
myhf 10 days ago [-]
To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.
titanomachy 10 days ago [-]
Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?
cess11 9 days ago [-]
Yes. Industrialisation and its aftermath has been quite gruesome for a very long time.
abalone 10 days ago [-]
I am skeptical as well BUT on the cooling question, which is one of the main concerns we all seem to have, the article is doing a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between the ISS and a cluster of small satellites.
It cites the ISS's centralized 16kW cooling system which is for a big space station that needs to collect and shunt heat over a relatively large area. The Suncatcher prototype is puny in comparison: just 4 TPUs and a total power budget of ballpark 2kW.
Suncatcher imagines a large cluster of small satellites separated by optical links, not little datacenter space stations in the sky. They would not be pulling heat from multiple systems tens of meters away like on the ISS, which bodes well for simpler passive cooling systems. And while the combined panel surface area of a large satellite cluster would be substantial, the footprint of any individual satellite, the more important metric, would likely be reasonable.
Personally I am more concerned with the climate impact of launches and the relatively short envisioned mission life of 5 years. If the whole point is better sustainability, you can't just look at the dollar cost of launches that don't internalize the environmental externalities of stuff like polluting the stratosphere.
jvanderbot 10 days ago [-]
In theory rocket launches sound bad, with burning fuels all the way up to the top layers of the atmosphere, but it's not clear right away that we're significantly increasing the "burnt up stuff" vs say, the ~100 tons of meteorites that hit every night.
Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?
Starlink v2 Mini has about 35 kW of solar power at peak irradiance. 2 kW is quite far from the limit of how much juice we can pack into modern mass produced satellites.
mjevans 10 days ago [-]
Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?
That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.
mr_toad 10 days ago [-]
Some of the proposals are much much bigger than this. Five GW, and 16 square kilometres.
It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.
mercutio2 9 days ago [-]
There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.
So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:
1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic
Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.
If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.
elonmusk_tweet 9 days ago [-]
Things like Golden Dome ruin it for everyone..
AtlasBarfed 10 days ago [-]
I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue.
Communication might be a bit rough.
xhkkffbf 10 days ago [-]
I think the interest in outer space comes from the lack of an atmosphere to absorb the sunlight/power.
Animats 10 days ago [-]
Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements.
The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.
The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.
mercutio2 9 days ago [-]
Yeah. A City on Mars made me want to throw the book at the window so many times. Building and tearing down straw-men right and left. Almost every legitimate note of caution suffered from the nirvana fallacy.
DennisP 10 days ago [-]
Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.
mjevans 10 days ago [-]
Though it lacks in the headlines, my preference is to send the robots first to bootstrap local production. Unless we really screw up the worst case would be some extra garbage to clean up for future missions, and the best case is any sort of increase in local production capacity.
adastra22 9 days ago [-]
Why though? That’s the interesting part. Pioneers want to be there to experience the challenge of bootstrapping. It’s the whole point.
It’s like saying “why climb Everest? We can send a drone up instead.”
DennisP 9 days ago [-]
If you're climbing Everest, sure. If you're settling a new world, building a place to live with an economy, then the easier the better.
cess11 9 days ago [-]
Right, and now that "climb Everest" is past the "pioneer" stage, what does it look like?
Trash, exploitation and littered with corpses.
adastra22 9 days ago [-]
So? People still want to climb, and if they want to risk their lives, they can.
cess11 9 days ago [-]
Yeah, unlike you I'm not a fan of trash, exploitation and corpses littering the ground.
hollerith 9 days ago [-]
Fine as long as I don't have to pay for it in taxes.
adastra22 9 days ago [-]
Nobody is asking you to.
hollerith 9 days ago [-]
People are asking my elected representatives to, and if those reps say yes, then I have to help pay for it or risk going to jail.
adastra22 9 days ago [-]
The current Mars movement is NASA-independent. We only need FAA authorization to launch, that is all. It's 100% privately funded.
hollerith 9 days ago [-]
Then I'm fine with it. Thanks for your patience with my ignorance.
DennisP 9 days ago [-]
Yeah that makes sense, especially these days. Even Zubrin's original Mars Direct plan sent a methane factory ahead of the people.
Animats 9 days ago [-]
Most future space exploration will probably be robotic, just as it is now.
vee-kay 10 days ago [-]
> The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too.
I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.
> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space
development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could
be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with
the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not
consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with
a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth
would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other
ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.
So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.
amanaplanacanal 10 days ago [-]
I find it hard to believe that launching and operating data centers in space would turn out to be cheaper than solar, wind, and batteries down here on the ground.
Animats 9 days ago [-]
From the rebuttal: "We are at the start of an upward curve of technology development that if
allowed to continue for another 50 years, will make it as easy to reach space as to fly to Australia."
People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001".
And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.
He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.
Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.
I guess these things aren’t literally exclusive, but it’s pretty amusing that elsewhere the rebuttal argues that we’re deep in a great stagnation which we need space exploration to pull us out of. (In the bit where he is arguing against the idea that we should wait a century and then maybe try to colonize space with greater technology)
> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with
seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have
been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.
kmontrose 10 days ago [-]
This rebuttal is... poor, I guess? Not disingenuous or anything, but lots of wishful thinking and (for lack of a better term) "inside baseball"-objections.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.
TheOtherHobbes 10 days ago [-]
"One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."
Hmmm.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
> "One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."
Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.
> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.
> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.
As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.
On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.
RobotToaster 10 days ago [-]
As someone with only a basic knowledge of space technology, my first thought when I read the idea was "how the hell are they going to cool it".
inejge 10 days ago [-]
> On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs
As a sibling post noted, SEUs are possible all the way down to sea level. The recent Airbus mass intervention was essentially a fix for a badly handled SEU in a corner case.
hedora 10 days ago [-]
Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.
The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.
I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.
It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.
sdenton4 10 days ago [-]
It strikes me that neutral network inference loads are probably pretty resilient to these kinds of problems (as we see the bits per activation steadily decreasing), and where they aren't, you can add them as augmentations at training time and they will essentially act as regularization.
ACCount37 10 days ago [-]
If you're using GPUs, you're running AI workloads. In which case: do you care?
One of the funniest things about modern AI systems is just how many random bitflips they can tank before their performance begins to really suffer.
jeltz 10 days ago [-]
Sounds like it would remove a lot of the benefits gain from more solar power.
foobarian 11 days ago [-]
The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"
jcranmer 10 days ago [-]
Strictly speaking, the thermosphere is actually much warmer than the atmosphere we experience--on the order of 100's or even a 1000 degrees Celsius, if you're measuring by temperature (the average kinetic energy of molecules). However, since particle density is so low, the number of molecules is quite low, and so total heat content of the thermosphere is low. But since particle count is low, conduction and convection are essentially nonexistent, which means cooling needs to rely entirely on radiation, which is much less efficient than other modes at cooling.
In other words, a) background temperature (to the extent it's even meaningful) is much warmer than Earth's surface and b) cooling is much, much more difficult than on Earth.
MadnessASAP 10 days ago [-]
Technically radiation cooling is 100% efficient. And remarkably effective, you can cool an inert object to the temperature of the CMBR (4K) without doing anything at all. However it is rather slow and works best if there's no nearby planets or stars.
Fun fact though, make your radiator hotter and you can dump just as much if not more energy then you would typically via convective cooling. At 1400C (just below the melting point of steel) you can shed 450kW of heat per square meter, all you need is a really fancy heat pump!
fsh 10 days ago [-]
Your hypothetical liquid metal heat pump would have a Carnot efficiency of only 25%.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
How much power would a square meter at 1400C shed from convection?
MadnessASAP 10 days ago [-]
I dont have firm numbers for you since it would depend on environmental conditions. As an educated guess though, I would say a fucking shit ton. You wouldn't want to be anywhere near the damn thing.
baobrien 10 days ago [-]
Not much in space; There's almost no matter to convect!
fsh 10 days ago [-]
A sports car radiator has about that size and dumps 1 MW without boiling the coolant.
alextingle 10 days ago [-]
A car's "radiator" doesn't actually lose heat by radiation though. It conducts heat to the air rushing through it. That's absolutely nothing like a radiator in a vacuum.
fsh 10 days ago [-]
That's the point. Forced air cooling is way more efficient than radiative cooling.
tsimionescu 10 days ago [-]
The question was about comparing the 1400KW of radiative cooling to how much convective coolig you could get from the same radiator on Earth.
noselasd 10 days ago [-]
Is it an advantage though ? One of the main objections in the article is exactly that.
There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
I think it is an advantage, the question is just how big, and assume we look only at ongoing operation cost.
- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night
- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation
- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps
Hikikomori 10 days ago [-]
Radiators on earth mainly do it to air, there's no air in space.
noselasd 10 days ago [-]
A typical CPU heatsink dissipates 10-30% of heat through radiation, and the rest through convection. In space you're in a vacuum so you can't disipated heat through convection.
You need to rework your physical equipment quite substantially to make up for the fact you can't shed 70-90% of the heat in the same manner as you can down here on Earth
skywhopper 10 days ago [-]
But the cooling cost wouldn’t be smaller. There’s no good way to eliminate the waste heat into space. It’s actually far far harder to radiate the waste heat into space directly than it would be to get rid of it on Earth.
buildbot 10 days ago [-]
Which is why vacuum flask for hot/cold drinks are a thing/work. Empty space is a pretty good insulator as it turns out.
It’s a little worrying so many don’t know that.
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.
nick238 10 days ago [-]
>99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.
mercutio2 9 days ago [-]
Yes, so?
Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.
“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”
Yes.
“That means you’d need huge radiators!”
Yes.
OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”
We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.
Hikikomori 10 days ago [-]
Now scale the radiator size for your 8MW datacenter.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
How do you propose to get 10MW of heat from the computers out to the radiators?
This question is thoroughly covered in the linked article.
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
Pardon, but the question of "could the operational cost be smaller in space" is almost not touched at all in the article. The article mostly argues that designing thermal management systems for space applications is hard, and that the radiators required would be big, which speaks to the upfront investment cost, not ongoing opex.
andrewflnr 10 days ago [-]
Ok, sure, technically. To be fair you can't really assess the opex of technology that doesn't exist yet, but I find it hard to believe that operating brand new, huge machines that have to move fluid around (and not nice fluids either) will ever be less than it is on the surface. Better hope you never get a coolant leak. Heck, it might even be that opex=0 still isn't enough to offset the "capex". Space is already hard when you're not trying to launch record-breaking structures.
Even optimistically, capex goes up by a lot to reduce opex, which means you need a really really long breakeven time, which means a long time where nothing breaks. How many months of reduced electricity costs is wiped out if you have to send a tech to orbit?
Oh, and don't forget the radiation slowly destroying all your transistors. Does that count as opex? Can you break even before your customers start complaining about corruption?
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
Maintenance will be impossible or at least prohibitively expensive. Which means your only opex is ground support. But it also means your capex depreciates over whatever lifetime these things will have with zero repairs or preventive maintenance.
verzali 10 days ago [-]
But ground support will not be cheap. You need to transfer a huge amount of data, which means you need to run and maintain a network of ground stations. And satellite operations are not as cheap as people like to think either.
cmptrnerd6 10 days ago [-]
Cooling is more difficult in space, yes it's colder, but transferring heat is more difficult.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
Things on earth also have access to that coldness for about half of each day. How many data centers use radiative cooling into the night sky to supplement their regular cooling? The fact that the answer is “zero” should tell you all you need to know about how useful this is.
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC (PUE almost 1 instead of run-of-the mill 1.5 or as low as 1.1 for hyperscalers). But yeah the upfront cost would be immense.
tstrimple 10 days ago [-]
I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into space in order to cool it is like putting a computer inside of a thermos to cool it. It makes zero fucking sense. There is nowhere for the heat to actually radiate to so it stays inside.
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.
>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector
Yes we're talking about radiating not convection
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
At what temperature?
And a kilowatt from one square meter is awful. You can do far more than that with access to an atmosphere, never mind water.
kergonath 10 days ago [-]
> A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.
Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.
A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.
mercutio2 9 days ago [-]
Why are you assuming active heat transfer? Passive is the way to go.
oceanplexian 10 days ago [-]
Look up Tech Ingredients episode on Radiative Paint.
The fact that people aren’t using something isn’t evidence that it’s not possible or even a great idea, it could be that a practical application didn’t exist before or someone enterprising enough hasn’t come along yet.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
When something has been known for millennia and hasn’t been put to a particular use even after decades where it could have been used, that is pretty good evidence that this use isn’t a good idea. Especially when it’s something really simple.
Radiative cooling is great for achieving temperature a bit below ambient at night when you don’t have any modern refrigeration equipment. That’s about all. It’s used in space applications because it’s literally the only option.
dzhiurgis 10 days ago [-]
Breakeven in X years probably makes sense for storage (slow depreciation), not GPUs (depreciates in like 4 years)
foobarian 10 days ago [-]
I think by far the most mass in this kind of setup would go into the heat management, which could probably last a long time and could be amortized separately from the electronics.
tsimionescu 10 days ago [-]
How would the radiators be useful if the electronics no longer are? Unless you can repurpose the radiators once the electronics are useless, which you can't in space, then the radiators' useful lifetime is hard limited by the electronics' lifetime.
mbesto 10 days ago [-]
Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power.
Follow the rationale:
1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three and basically negate any use of crypto.
2. So, if you have data centers that no longer rely on power derived from a nation state, land controller by a nation state or connectivity provided by the nation state's cabling infra, then you can always access your currency and assets.
zbentley 10 days ago [-]
That’s ridiculous. Space is the least nation-state-dependent place to do computing in existence.
All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).
Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.
Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.
dragonelite 10 days ago [-]
That really depends on the cost asymmetry between building + launching sats being cheaper or more expensive than taking down all those sats.
larodi 10 days ago [-]
many a cloud equipment has very short lifespan
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.
bouncycastle 10 days ago [-]
Recently the USA blew out some some boats in international waters and came back to finish off the survivors, despite thin evidence and no due process, while maintaining that it was legal. If those data centers on ships ever become declared as a 'threat to national security' then they might get the same treatment.
collinmcnulty 10 days ago [-]
I think GP's point is that an advanced nation-state could just as easily shoot down an orbiting data center as an oceanic data center and that "international space" offers an equally flimsy defense as "international waters" but a much larger price.
ACCount37 10 days ago [-]
Antisatellite weapons are expensive and rare, and also woefully inadequate for dealing with megaconstellations.
If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system?
Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.
snowwrestler 10 days ago [-]
Swarms of satellites need to maneuver, which includes maneuvering directly toward the atmosphere.
It would take zero anti-satellite weapons to take down Starlink. Just point a good old fashioned gun at the SpaceX engineer who can issue maneuvering commands to the satellites.
verzali 10 days ago [-]
You only need to destroy a few. Then you have a cloud of debris that will take down the rest or at the very least force them to use all their fuel making evasive manoeuvres.
bregma 10 days ago [-]
And they'd get away with it too if it weren't for that pesky orbital mechanics.
ACCount37 10 days ago [-]
Not really. Space is too large.
tsimionescu 10 days ago [-]
On the contrary, orbital positions are quite limited. And space debris is already a large issue.
ACCount37 10 days ago [-]
Only in specific situations like the GEO orbit.
Otherwise? Go wild. The space doesn't lack for space.
And with all the LEO megaconstellations? GEO isn't as vital as it once was.
Apocryphon 10 days ago [-]
A cosmic game of billiards.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
Blow up the ground stations. Or the CEO.
ACCount37 9 days ago [-]
Good fucking luck. Starlink's ground infrastructure is absurdly decentralized. Laser links make that possible.
Starlink can even bounce data P2P, from one client terminal to another.
wat10000 9 days ago [-]
How absurd is absurdly decentralized, here. A hundred ground stations? Thousands? Do they really have more than can be shut down by the FBI domestically and blown up by the USAF internationally?
And how does decentralized ground infrastructure save you from a centralized executive?
ACCount37 9 days ago [-]
Over one hundred ground stations, spread across the world. More on demand - Starlink allows one to use terminals as makeshift ground stations in a pinch.
Uncle Sam could bring Starlink down, probably. For anyone else, that would pretty much require WW3.
Executives don't matter as much as you think they do. No credible executive is going to cave to random death threats, and carrying them out would cause new executives.
Now, would SpaceX eventually become a shell of its former self without Musk calling the shots? Maybe. But if the shell you're worrying about is Starlink orbital shell, and the time you're worrying about is today and not in ten years? Killing Musk doesn't help you much.
wat10000 8 days ago [-]
You think Musk would refuse, and give up his freedom or even his life instead of complying with a US government demand? The point isn’t to actually kill him. The point is that you can, and you use that to force compliance.
AtlasBarfed 10 days ago [-]
Lasers
gpm 10 days ago [-]
This would be equally true in space.
10 days ago [-]
NoMoreNicksLeft 10 days ago [-]
If those ships chose to not fly a flag, they'd even have justification to do so. And if they did choose to fly a flag, then that country would have the responsibility to police them, and is the US complained to that country, that country might just withdraw protection anyway. Data center ships just want to loiter where convenient, they're not cigarette boats flying along at 100mph... no way to evade a navy that wants to blow them out of the water.
echelon 10 days ago [-]
They've always been able to do this.
Microsoft was talking about submarine data centers powered by tidal forces in the early 2000s.
There have been talks of data centers on Sealand-like nation states.
Geothermal ...
Exotic data center builds will always be hyped. Always be within the realm of feasibility when cost is no object, but probably outside of practicality or need.
Next it'll be fusion-powered data centers.
cwal37 10 days ago [-]
Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s.
Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.
Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]
Do you have a source that you can measurably affect drag on satellites using a ground based Ionospheric heater? How much is the atmosphere actually going to heat up from a few megawatts?
3eb7988a1663 10 days ago [-]
Neat. Could this potentially be used to de-orbit space junk?
tetha 10 days ago [-]
This is one of the early tipping points in the background of the game "Eclipse Phase", which I always found interesting:
--- >8 ---
The power of nation states is rooted in control of land and safety, as well as resources, which is an extension of the control of land. But once mining asteroids became economically viable, the connection between land and resources disappeared. Once space habitation in space and secretly developed weapon systems from space became viable, the connection between safety, habitation and land disappeared.
This allowed corporations and new organizations to rise to power large enough to challenge nation states. Those in power did feared to lose their power, which caused the great war which gave rise to the grey mass and destroyed earth.
--- 8< ---
It's a very cool back story, which gives rise to a rogue nanite swarm (the gray mass), which forces an evacuation of earth within days. The only way this was even possible was by uploading human minds onto storage and planting them in robots later on. Naturally, most humans are then forced to work for these corporations. Other humans are still biological and they don't like robots, to say the least.
Analemma_ 10 days ago [-]
I'm sorry, but this is stupid. It's the same dumb thinking behind Sealand: "we're outside state borders! nobody can touch us!", which was only true as long as nobody cared what they were doing. Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that. "Datacenters in space" wouldn't fare any better: multiple nations have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons.
MichaelNolan 10 days ago [-]
> Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that.
What did the royal navy do? There is no mention of the UK using force against sealand in either the Wikipedia page or this BBC article about sealand. (Though obviously the royal navy could retake sealand if they wanted)
If a company were to go on its own and build data centers in space only to avoid nation state jurisdiction, they better be prepares to defend that hardware in space.
If a country doesn't like what is happening they can shoot it down, and with no humans onboard or nations claiming jurisdiction there really isn't much to stop them or to answer for.
snowwrestler 10 days ago [-]
If you can control satellites from the ground, then so can the government governing that ground location. An armed 10-person strike team could force SpaceX to access or even de-orbit the entire Starlink constellation. They don’t because doing so would be illegal and dangerous, not because it is somehow technically difficult.
zie 10 days ago [-]
Except the people that run and manage that satellite will be on earth, under some nation state's rules...
PunchyHamster 10 days ago [-]
corporations will use their knowledge in tax dodging to avoid that too.
MadnessASAP 10 days ago [-]
If they're already well versed in dodging fiscal rules, why do they need a space computer?
suriya-ganesh 10 days ago [-]
Physical location is difficult to dodge unfortunately.
Fiscal rules are sort of man made.
mandevil 10 days ago [-]
The Outer Space Treaty is very very clear: anything launched into space is the responsibility of the country that launched it. Even if a private company payts for it and operates it, it's still the responsibility of the launching nation. Even if you launch from international waters, your operating company is still registered to a specific country, and the company is made up of citizens of one or more countries, and it is those countries which are responsible for the satellites. Those countries, in fact, have the responsibility to make sure that their citizens follow their laws and regulations. Unless you and your entire team are self-sustaining on that datacenter in outer space (maybe possible a century from now? Maybe not possible ever), you will be hunted down by the proper authorities and held to account for your actions. There is no magic "space is beyond the law" rules; it is just as illegal- and you are just as vulnerable to being arrested- for work done on a datacenter in space as work done on a datacenter on the ground.
NoMoreNicksLeft 10 days ago [-]
Spy satellites maneuver so that no one can tell who launched them, or when. If these satellites can do the same, good luck pinning responsibility on someone on the ground. Hell, with Musk's low orbit network, he could probably even provide connectivity to them in a plausibly-deniable manner.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
A data center on an orbit that is only known to the operators makes it difficult to use as a data center in a meaningful way - where do you point your uplink?
Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.
Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.
> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.
These aren't small things. You can't hide it.
> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.
mandevil 9 days ago [-]
No, this is not true. First of all, every nation is required by space law to publish the initial orbits of every object they launch, as part of that taking responsibility I mentioned earlier.
The US Government further publishes tracking on pretty much every single thing in orbit of the earth larger than a few centimeters, to help satellite operators avoid space debris. They do obfuscate the current orbit of their own spy satellites (only publishing their initial orbit), but other countries and even private citizens around the world keep obsessive tabs on these things (e.g. https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/). This sort of thing is easily within the reach of even a medium sized nation state that was interested in the investment: just need a couple of big ole radars and you can do it just like the US does. So if you do try and hide the resources of a nation-state can easily counter.
The solution to oppressive government is not technological, it's political. Prevent countries from going bad, retrieve the ones that have gone bad, it works out a lot better for everyone.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10 days ago [-]
Bitcoin is a great example of something outside of jursidictions. Now look at how much BTC the FBI has seized. In practice, power is gonna power. The US, Russia or China can take out your data centre unless you play by whatever the rules are. If not physically blow up you need to trade, you need a country for ground operations etc. You need a downlink. Being in space meaning no jurisdiction is plain rediculous.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10 days ago [-]
By the same argument Google could start literal star wars by blowing up AWS data centres. Because it is the wild west up there right? No pesky laws.
DennisP 10 days ago [-]
If crypto were the reason for the orbital data centers, then an easier path would be to use crypto that doesn't require huge data centers. That's pretty much any proof-of-stake blockchain, especially the more decentralized ones.
Spooky23 10 days ago [-]
Data centers in space is about leading investors to circumvent their brains and jump on the hype train at worst, and developing technology around data center infrastructure at best.
Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.
AndrewStephens 10 days ago [-]
This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.
dudeinjapan 10 days ago [-]
Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.
hedora 10 days ago [-]
Or just triangulate any signals being sent to it, and fire missiles at the source.
ikiris 10 days ago [-]
Or just blast it with a laser...
titzer 10 days ago [-]
In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time. Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on.
So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines. Have everything fail in place? Have robots do it? What about the regular supply missions to keep replacing all the failing hardware (there's only so many spare HDDs you can have on hand).
The whole thing is farcical.
fragmede 10 days ago [-]
> So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines.
Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!
jasomill 9 days ago [-]
As long as the rotations aren't for more than a month or two, sign me up as well!
hedora 10 days ago [-]
Nah; let it fail in place.
See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.
mbac32768 10 days ago [-]
Yes. Anyone who thinks you can ship a datacenter to space and save has never managed a datacenter.
jeffrallen 9 days ago [-]
Or worked in space.
mc32 10 days ago [-]
Plus, in space, their electronic components would experience much more radiation (and the effects on components). They could build with rad-hardened components but those are both more expensive and several generations older than SOTA found in the habitable zone.
vintermann 11 days ago [-]
Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.
throwaway198846 11 days ago [-]
It is far easier to build them at remote places and bunkers (or both). Even at the middle of the ocean will make more sense and provide better cooling (See Microsoft attempt at that).
bigbadfeline 10 days ago [-]
Not exactly at the middle but close to shore is pretty good too, a lot of solar and wind around to feed the compute.
One of these projects is bonkers IMO: china-has-an-underwater-data-center-the-us-will-build-them-in-space
it is not far easier to distribute content from a bunker than from the space.
jeltz 10 days ago [-]
Did a not accidentally sneak in there? Because serving data from bunkers is done quite a bit right now.
widforss 11 days ago [-]
The reason why we don't see satellite-targeting missiles is not because the problem is hard. All relevant actors are capable of that.
amitav1 10 days ago [-]
All relevant actors are also capable of destroying ground-based data centres, but somehow that's not a huge problem for data centres.
cheema33 9 days ago [-]
You can take out a data center in space with an accidental collision of a small runaway satellite. Taking out a data center in the middle of Oregon would be significantly harder and will invite massive retaliation.
Avicebron 11 days ago [-]
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a non zero number of pitch meetings start with, "in order to not disrupt your life too much as the mobs of the starving and displaced beat down your door"
tomatotomato37 10 days ago [-]
The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb
Spooky23 10 days ago [-]
Who knows what tech is in space already. Maybe an “AI data center in space” would be the equivalent of a flock camera for an entire region.
marcellus23 10 days ago [-]
What makes an orbital facility at less risk of getting bombed?
teeray 10 days ago [-]
Probably needs more delta-v to match orbit than a suborbital ICBM would. Not less risk—just more expensive. Depends how valuable the target is.
tomatotomato37 10 days ago [-]
Nah, they are pretty similar in difficulty for interception - the first US ASAT program used essentially the same Nike Zeus missiles used for ABM duty during the late 50s
XorNot 10 days ago [-]
Except you don't. You only need to match velocities if you want to dock with something.
Hitting something in orbit just requires you to be in the way at the right time.
Basically an intercept is a lot easier.
adgjlsfhk1 10 days ago [-]
not really. Suborbital vehicles achieve orbital heights. It's actually probably easier since you don't need a payload. The velocity alone will do the trick.
ikiris 10 days ago [-]
Because its stupid, not that its hard.
You want to push things out of orbit not turn a massive structure into a supersonic shard field for 20 years
Infinity315 11 days ago [-]
So many ideas involving AI just seems to be built off of sci-fi (not in a good way), including this one. Like sci-fi, there are little practical considerations made.
0_____0 11 days ago [-]
Sci-fi isn't even really about the tech. It's about what happens to us, humans, when the tech changes in dramatic ways. Sci-fi authors dream up types of technology that create new social orders, factions, rifts, types of interpersonal relationships, types of fascism, where the unforseen consequences of human ingenuity hoist us upon our collective petard.
But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.
shigawire 10 days ago [-]
This is a good point and is why I prefer to refer to the genre as Speculative Fiction - not only is it broader but it better gets at the idea behind this type of fiction. Not just space lasers.
jillesvangurp 10 days ago [-]
There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things.
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.
2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.
3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.
5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.
In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.
adastra22 10 days ago [-]
Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse.
Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.
Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)
Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.
fbu 9 days ago [-]
The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.
adastra22 9 days ago [-]
Unfortunately the powdery regolith of an asteroid is a thermal insulator.
KaiserPro 10 days ago [-]
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology.
Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.
> 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.
You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.
That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)
> 5) Learning effects
Great, but it gets us nothing.
mr_toad 10 days ago [-]
> even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.
There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
There is one. It is the sun synchronous dawn/dusk orbit.
> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.
The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.
Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.
Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
KaiserPro 10 days ago [-]
yup, and that means that you only have low latency once a day.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology.
Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.
Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.
calcifer 10 days ago [-]
> In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.
Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.
khalic 10 days ago [-]
Can you please tell me your credentials compared to someone who actually built material that went into space? Like the author of the article
fbu 9 days ago [-]
What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ?
Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.
GMoromisato 10 days ago [-]
There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.
The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.
All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.
And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).
Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).
kaashif 10 days ago [-]
> The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).
So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.
GMoromisato 10 days ago [-]
Starlink cost maybe $10 billion. A 100,000 gpu data center costs between $20 and $40 billion to build.
Also remember that data centers last for about 5 years; after that the gpus are obsolete. That’s no different than the lifetime of a Starlink satellite.
verzali 10 days ago [-]
Starlink solar panels generate at best 200 W/sqm on average. Even with 2.5 million square metres, that is a total of half a gigawatt. And the cost is not to be ignored! Most of the cost of these data centres is in the GPUs themselves, so you need to add that to the cost of building out the constellation. Unless you are arguing that the cost of supporting infrastructure (cooling, power, etc) costs $10bn to support half a gigawatt of GPUs in the typical data centre, then your numbers are simply way off.
runako 10 days ago [-]
Starlink solves for a problem where there is not a good alternative: high-speed Internet access for rural environments. Land-based solutions for this are potentially even more expensive than putting satellites in space.
But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.
An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.
There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)
santoshalper 10 days ago [-]
The facts you quoted just made me even more convinced that space-based datacenters will not be cost effective any time soon. If an entire generation of satellites costing many billions of dollars can't power more GPUs than a single terrestrial datacenter, how could it possibly be cost effective?
GMoromisato 10 days ago [-]
A data center costs $20 to $40 billion! And launch costs keep dropping.
Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.
phsau 10 days ago [-]
>Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink
Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...
GMoromisato 10 days ago [-]
Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
It needs to be scaled up, but there is no obstacle to that (at least none that the article mentions).
The only valid objection is cost, but space prices keep dropping and earth prices keep rising.
qayxc 10 days ago [-]
> Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
It is not. This is like saying your phone is already a small data centre. While technically true, we're not talking about the same scale here. StarLink's compute power is a tiny fraction of a modern data centre GPU/TPU. Most of the power budget goes into communication (i.e. its purpose!).
morshu9001 10 days ago [-]
At what price per MW of load?
GMoromisato 10 days ago [-]
The Starlink constellation cost $10 billion. That’s comparable to a small data center (maybe 50,000 gpus).
If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.
kiba 10 days ago [-]
Land cost will also start to matter, but probably not at the scale that Starlink is doing. Regardless, orbitals are real estate.
morshu9001 8 days ago [-]
Comparable in cost or capacity? Small datacenter is maybe around 20MW of compute.
nish__ 10 days ago [-]
What a ridiculous waste of money.
amitav1 10 days ago [-]
What? Starlink made $72,000,000 in net profit last year. How is that a waste of money?
nish__ 9 days ago [-]
Where are you getting those numbers? SpaceX is a private company.
aftbit 11 days ago [-]
If you think about it, all the existing data centers are in space already. They're just attached to a big ball of rock, water, and air that acts as a support system for them, simplifying cooling and radiation protection.
If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
I'd be most curious to see what type of processing power they would put on such a data center.
> The RAD5545 processor employs four RAD5500 cores, achieving performance characteristics of up to 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and over 3.7 GFLOPS. Power consumption is 20 watts with all peripherals operating.
That's kind of neat... but not exactly data center performance.
Back to the older RAD750...
> The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $349,639 in 2024).
That isn't exactly price performance. Well, unless you're constrained by "it costs millions to replace it."
So... I'm not really sure what devices they'd be putting up there.
The "data centers in space" is much more a "space launch is a hot technology, AI and data centers are a hot technology... put the two together and its too the moon!" (Or at least that's what we tell the investors before we try to spend all their money)
rzerowan 10 days ago [-]
I think the last time they put commodity hardware in orbit was via the HPE[1] project and the results were quite mixed with failure rates for components that were quite high. In addition to running the system in a twin config to get any meaningful work done.
Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.
Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.
Risky/untried things aren't dumb because they're hard, they're dumb when they're more expensive/harder than cheaper/easier alternatives that already exist that do the same thing.
CrossVR 10 days ago [-]
Datacenters in space would make 0 sense because the only way to lose heat is through radiation, which makes for terrible cooling.
If you want to avoid national laws and have great cooling, then submerse your datacenter in the ocean instead.
fbu 9 days ago [-]
Maybe if you build the datacenter inside an asteroid, and use the whole surface as an infrared radiator.
dawnerd 10 days ago [-]
And they've already at least tried datacenters in the ocean.
Google’s paper [1] does talk about radiation hardening and thermal management. Maybe their ideas are naive and it’s a bad paper? I’m not an expert so I couldn’t tell from a brief skim.
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
The only sentence in the whole "paper" about cooling is
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures
Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.
fragmede 11 days ago [-]
Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.
skybrian 11 days ago [-]
Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it?
It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because you need thicker and more expensive vessels the bigger it gets. The problems go on and on.
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
davidgerard 9 days ago [-]
that was in 2020, and so here in 2025 MS has underwater data centres around the world!
wait, no it doesn't. why would that be, d'you think
shagie 9 days ago [-]
Because despite being more reliable and energy efficient the other costs associated with it were higher. It is one thing to dunk 14.3m L x 12.7m D in the ocean for a 240 kW setup in the ocean. It is another to scale that up to a "full scale" data center that is about 200x larger that has additional electrical supply challenges.
Let's say that pod needs to be serviced once every two years. That means having a ship that services one pod every 3 days when scaled up.
From the standpoint of a single pod data center and "does this work?" - the answer is "yes, it works better than we thought it would." From the standpoint of "can we scale this to a full data center?" - the answer is "we'd need a ship servicing a twice a week, with the logistics that entails for the ship (and backup ship)." That second part becomes less practical compared to building a data center on terra firma where it's much easier to walk into a building to service it and hook up the power.
DCs in space will have all the stuff that sucked, but cooling will suck too.
skybrian 10 days ago [-]
Presumably it didn't work well or they wouldn't have shelved it. But do you actually know about what happened or is this all based on your priors?
wmf 10 days ago [-]
I don't think MS ever revealed enough information to answer that. For example, I haven't seen any explanation of how heat is transferred from the servers to the skin of the container. I can guess how they did it but I don't want to make any judgement based on guesses.
They only reported on the positives. The negatives can be intuitively guessed, because they didn't explain how they solved any of them.
dgfl 9 days ago [-]
Look at that, there are all exactly the same problems as space data centers! Although I’m surprised by cooling underwater being hard.
wmf 10 days ago [-]
Orbital data centers are very hard but this isn't a good explanation of why. There really is more light in space since certain orbits are always in daylight. Radiators are no larger than the solar panels so if you can build multi square kilometer solar arrays you can probably also build massive radiators.
0manrho 11 days ago [-]
Only legit thing I can see this being used for is redundant archival storage or just general research into hardening equipment to radiation or micrograv (eg for liquid cooling). But anything that generates significant amounts of heat seems like it'd be a huge problem.
Then again there's lots of space in space, perhaps it's possible to isolate racks/aisles into their own individual satellites, each with massive radiant heatshedding panels? It's an interesting problem space that would be very interesting to try to solve, but ultimately I agree with OP when we come back around to "But, why?" Research for the sake of research is a valid answer, but "For prod"? I don't see it.
thelastgallon 10 days ago [-]
>The first reason for doing this that seems to come up is abundant access to power in space. This really isn't the case. You basically have two options: solar and nuclear.
I guess that rules our any funding from US govt or Saudi money. Unless someone figures out a way to use fossil fuels to run the data centers! It has to be private equity or a new data center coin offering. Offered to the public and take away the pain and suffering of carrying their current paper currency. We need a new messiah (SBF + Musk + WeWork guy) to craft this narrative.
It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.
The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.
E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.
You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.
The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.
zbentley 10 days ago [-]
Selection bias.
Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.
The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.
mlinhares 10 days ago [-]
That doesn't sell though, so people very often ignore it, even when most recent innovations are due to that, like the atomic bomb.
themgt 10 days ago [-]
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”.
This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.
It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.
Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.
dijit 10 days ago [-]
I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.
Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.
I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.
Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.
georgefrowny 10 days ago [-]
Even diffusion into air is too slow for some use cases. The whole complaint of datacentres "consuming" water is due to heating it and dumping it back or evaporating it for cooling. This is done because mass air cooling is much less efficient and requires lots of energy to run the fans to force the air through the heat exchangers, which is also extremely loud. And that is, in turn, much more effective than passive radiation, even if you have a ~3K background.
The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.
So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.
The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
eldenring 10 days ago [-]
The comment you were replying to mentioned this. Yes you cant remove heat via convection, but you can use radiators to emit heat as radiation into space.
mjhay 10 days ago [-]
You need HUGE radiators to emit a lot of low-temp waste heat into space. That kills this idea right there.
eldenring 9 days ago [-]
Depending on how hot/dense/clocked you run your compute, the Radiators take _less_ surface area than the solar panels, so you can have them back to back and the radiators will take less space.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
mangecoeur 10 days ago [-]
The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.
zurfer 10 days ago [-]
I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.
To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.
thelastgallon 10 days ago [-]
> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
capyba 10 days ago [-]
Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
peppersghost93 10 days ago [-]
Counterpoint: oceangate
Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.
thisisauserid 10 days ago [-]
Please don't propagate the myth that Einstein couldn't wrap his head about Heisenberg.
The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).
Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.
computerdork 10 days ago [-]
Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).
When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.
So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
nkrisc 10 days ago [-]
What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.
You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
andreybaskov 8 days ago [-]
Thank you for saying this. It's almost like others are saying we should stop trying things because they are hard and challenging.
I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.
elisbce 9 days ago [-]
When SpaceX came about, they said it was impossible for the rocket to come back from space and get reused. They said it wasn't going to work to combine multiple thrusters to form a big thruster and be reliable enough. When Starlink was introduced, they said it was stupid because the bandwidth is too small to be useful. Where are we now? 10 years ago, AI couldn't even beat a high-rank amateur Go player, let alone the best of pros. Everyone takes the excuse of dimensionality curse. Now what?
People who only look at the past/present and conclude impossibility are never going to be the ones who invent the future. Even math and science evolve, let alone engineering. The problems described in this article don't even remotely feel like the kind of barriers we faced when Go was solved, when protein fold was predicted and when LLM was solving problems with one prompt. If there is a strong NEED for datacenters to be up in the space, there will eventually be datacenters in the space.
api 11 days ago [-]
What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.
Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.
Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
morcus 11 days ago [-]
The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?
api 11 days ago [-]
Not if you bury it in regolith. That’s an idea for a Lunar base too. The design is called “Hobbit holes.” Bury the occupied structures in piles of basically any local mass you can bury them in.
It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
nradov 11 days ago [-]
Lunar regolith is so abrasive that digging holes or tunnels isn't going to be cost effective.
We will need to develop very robust, space-worthy electronics eventually. We can't rely on natural magnetic fields forever.
shagie 10 days ago [-]
We have them. The RAD750 for example (on the JWST and Curiosity rovers https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/08/mars_probe_cpu/ ) costs about $350k, has the architecture of a PowerPC 750 (the blue and white PowerMac G3), and runs at up to 200 MHz.
adastra22 10 days ago [-]
We have robust, space-worthy electronics. They're discussed in the article. You just can't get SOTA performance from them, because of fundamental physics-driven compromises.
fsh 10 days ago [-]
We have been relying on natural magnetic fields for over a billion years, so we can probably continue doing so for a while.
perihelions 10 days ago [-]
It's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation,
(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).
Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.
marcosdumay 11 days ago [-]
You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.
hackeraccount 11 days ago [-]
I had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true.
That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
StephenHerlihyy 10 days ago [-]
It’s not about putting data centers into orbit. It’s about the cost-yield inversion to data centers cooling infrastructure that happens at terawatt scale. All things being equal - a chilled circuit performs better and produces less heat than a hot one. There is a high up front cost to pre-cooling but if you can get in the -60C range, and stay there, you can increase performance and cut energy costs.
When they say data centers in space - they mean data centers you can’t get to because they are flooded with ultra cold dielectric fluid and it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring them back up to human temperatures.
Right now it’s not worth the hassle. At terawatt scale it’s almost mandatory.
When you walk down that line it’s pretty close to putting them in space. No access. Super cold. No air. Tiny, insulated capsule. Thermal management hell. They’ll be buried in mines though, not launched into orbit.
It’s just corporate propaganda to simplify an otherwise insane situation.
rklaehn 9 days ago [-]
This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.
Power:
It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.
The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.
Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.
Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.
A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.
Cosmic radiation:
The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.
Communications:
Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.
This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
cess11 9 days ago [-]
Any honest discussion will conclude that it ought not to be attempted so it doesn't matter for such discussions whether it's possible or not.
jandrese 10 days ago [-]
So if the big idea is to have a data center outside of legal jurisdictions why not build a floating data center in the Southern Pacific Ocean? You can power it with floating solar panels provide data via Starlink or a regular communication satellite and still be outside of the law. You might say that it will be vulnerable to pirates, but practically speaking nobody is going down there. Sure you will have to deal with weather, but overall the problems are way easier to solve than building an orbital data center.
But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.
craighay1 10 days ago [-]
Really the only potential upside to this, and it's a niche one, is for time or security sensitive compute tasks where the raw data originates in orbit. Every happens over inter satellite link and there's no downlink to Earth until the end of the process (downlink is still a problem as Earth is mostly ocean and wilderness)
E.g. one satellite's wide area sensor payload is processed and "potential wildfire detected". The result is passed to another satellite with finer grained sensing capabilities which is due to pass over in the next X minutes which then tees up a capture.
gaigalas 10 days ago [-]
You don't need massive datacenters in space.
You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs.
So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations.
If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica (research focused, still disputed but not armed, probably not lots of shady stuff happening there, costly but still pays off to be there).
mjhay 10 days ago [-]
There’s laws in space. Specifically, those of the country (or country of the subject) that launched the satellite.
gaigalas 9 days ago [-]
There are laws in Cayman Islands too.
deno 10 days ago [-]
This makes no sense. The company will still be on the ground in some country and it has to connect to the Earth internet on the ground in some country. Unless you are talking about actual space pirate station, but in that case it better come equipped with missile defense because it will be attacked sooo fast.
gaigalas 10 days ago [-]
> The company will still be on the ground in some country
But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot.
> it has to connect to the Earth internet
Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be serving React apps or anything like that. Those will be weird, non-typical servers.
Want some zero internet use cases?
- Training a cyber-ops LLM without poking eyes and reduced risk of leaks.
- Illegal data-heavy research (bio, weaponry).
- Storing data for surveillance satellites.
All of those can use private links, can be built by private companies under classified contracts, and you would not dare attack an NRO-launched satellite.
deno 10 days ago [-]
There are wayyyy easier ways to just get some private calculations. You can spin up an encrypted memory VM or wire up an eager physical kill switch. Launching satellites would bring a lot of attention and requires skills, money, multiple people with access. But I can do the former just fine by myself.
gaigalas 9 days ago [-]
> requires skills, money, multiple people with access
I never said it's going to be easy. In fact, I compared it to setting up research stations in Antarctica. Which is costly, and definitely harder than going to the ice vending machine.
davidgerard 9 days ago [-]
this is all infosec mall ninja proposals
james-bcn 10 days ago [-]
>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there.
That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.
amitav1 10 days ago [-]
I think what the parent was saying is that unlike on Earth, there are no zoning laws or environmental regulations or NIMBYs to stall scaling.
gaigalas 10 days ago [-]
I can see you lack imagination. That's good! It indeed makes no sense, you're right.
10 days ago [-]
iDon 10 days ago [-]
Related (posted just 2hours before this article) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086833
"Blimps lifting quantum data centers to the stratosphere? (newatlas.com)"
"... blimps, to lift quantum computers to the stratosphere. There, at an altitude of about 20 km (12.4 miles), temperatures are in the -50 °C range (about -58 °F) and would be cold enough to allow the qubits to function correctly."
jalk 10 days ago [-]
Sounds like the people behind Solar Roadways found a new project.
deviation 10 days ago [-]
I think it's important to be distinct here... These "Space DC" companies are not showing up on some Techy-Shark-Tank (or walking into VC meetings) with a promise to investors that they have an established strategy which will pay off.
IMO, they are just answering the question: "If we pour 100B into R&D, could it have a reasonable chance at succeeding?".
For Nvidia (or these other massive companies) the investment is chump change.
sesuximo 10 days ago [-]
100B is roughly NVIDIA’s yearly profit
est 10 days ago [-]
Datacenters in space have one asymmetrical advantage: FBI cant physically raid them.
And with Direct-To-Cell, content delivery satellites in space are unstoppable.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
“Dear T-Mobile/Verizon/Starlink, cease your illegal operation within 24 hours or we will start imprisoning executives.”
est 10 days ago [-]
You don't need other carrier's permission if the direct-to-cell satellite allows anyone to receive data.
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
The current incarnation of direct to cell is a partnership with cell carriers. I expect that to continue. It’s really hard to get the frequencies you need without that, and you really need a conventional terrestrial network for populated areas. I don’t expect that to change. The bandwidth needed to cover a populated area from space fundamentally requires more size and power than a cell phone can provide.
Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.
jeltz 9 days ago [-]
And government does not need anyone's permission to do direct to prison cell for the executives.
yardie 11 days ago [-]
I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.'
> After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that sentence.
tim333 11 days ago [-]
I tried Google and it pointed me to a ycombinator video about Starcloud https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY They launched a satellite with one H100 in on Nov 2nd.
>I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data
centers are being built in space, that
sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not
to YC. (8:00)
ReptileMan 11 days ago [-]
You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part. In theory.
That's my water bottle. 10/10 would recommend for not passing temperature gradients.
ahartmetz 10 days ago [-]
To be fair, they have mirror surfaces inside. A more realistic prototype would be ultra-black for something like 10-50x better radiative heat transfer. Of course it would still be more like shitty insulation than like good conduction.
RugnirViking 11 days ago [-]
this kind of sarcasm will go over their head. People truly don't understand vacuums
ReptileMan 10 days ago [-]
I absolutely don't understand how vacuum works. So I absolutely cannot model how a Dewar flask which has 15 billion light year thickness between the inner and outer wall - a wall that is very close to absolute zero will behave.
Ekaros 11 days ago [-]
I wonder if there should be levels of "in theory". Yes theoretically black body radiation exist and well stuff cools down to near background radiation via that. But the next level is theoretical implementation. Like actually moving around the heat from source and so on. Maybe this could be the spherical cow step...
Reminds me of the hyperloop. Well yes, things in vacuum tube go fast. Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...
salawat 11 days ago [-]
>Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...
You're worried about rates when we can't even get the ball rolling on safety for human occupancy, maintenance, workability.
I swear, nothing on Earth more dangerous than someone with dollar signs in their eyes.
dayjah 11 days ago [-]
Serious question: how in theory?
I’m under the impression you need to radiate through matter (air, water, physical materials, etc).
Is my understanding of the theory just wrong?
LegionMammal978 11 days ago [-]
Heat conduction requires a medium, but radiation works perfectly fine in a vacuum. Otherwise the Sun wouldn't be able to heat up the Earth. The problem for spacecraft is that you're limited by how much IR radiation is passively emitted from your heat sinks, you can't actively expel heat any faster.
ethmarks 11 days ago [-]
There is some medium in low Earth orbit. Not all vacuums are created equal. However, LEO vacuum is still very, very sparse compared to the air and water we use for cooling systems.
Hot objects emit infrared light no matter the conditions. The hotter the object, the more light it throws off. By radiating this light away, thermal energy is necessarily consumed and transformed into light. It's kind of wild actually
adastra22 10 days ago [-]
No, you can't. You need to radiate away all the heat being received from the sun facing half, AND excess heat from the compute. Even in theory, the non-sun-facing part doesn't give you any benefit. It's already part of the system that accounted for the temperature of the sun-facing side.
Sharlin 11 days ago [-]
Yes. And it's an absolutely terrible way to get rid of heat. Cooling in space is a major problem because the actually effective ways to do it are not available.
Avicebron 11 days ago [-]
It's not the Sun..it's the lack of medium.
jhanschoo 11 days ago [-]
You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part on Earth almost just as well..., though corrosion is an issue.
ffsm8 11 days ago [-]
"just as well"?
I man you totally can radiate excess heat energy on earth, but your comment implies that the parents idea of radiating off excess "energy", specifically HEAT energy in space is possible, which it isn't.
You can radiate excess energy for sure, but you'd first have to convert it away from heat energy into light or radio waves or similar.
I don't think we even have that tech at this point in time, and neither do we have any concepts how this could be done in theory.
ReptileMan 10 days ago [-]
>specifically HEAT energy in space is possible, which it isn't.
I see, yes. I was thinking more along the lines of radiating heat energy at a scale that's useable for cooling, not at the more extreme levels of over 500°C/1k fahrenheit
That's technically correct I guess, at some temperature threshold it becomes possible to bleed some fractions of energy while the material is exceedingly hot.
jhanschoo 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, my comment was intended to be mildly sarcastic in that the proposed heat transmission mechanism already happens on Earth and is yet so dramatically insignificant at usual temperatures that we struggle all the time with managing heat transfer through other means.
morshu9001 10 days ago [-]
Passively yeah. Can't imagine it's anywhere near as fast as evap or chillers
ethmarks 11 days ago [-]
There's no air and negligible thermal medium to convect heat away. The only way heat leaves is through convection from the extremely sparse atmosphere in low Earth orbit (less than a single atom per cubic millimeter) and through thermal radiation. Both of which are much, much slower than convection with water or air.
Space stations need enormous radiator panels to dissipate the heat from the onboard computers and the body heat of a few humans. Cooling an entire data center would require utterly colossal radiator panels.
throaway123213 11 days ago [-]
I'mma guess that AI mixed up "datacenter" with "Dyson" to get nonsensical returns involving both vacuums AND space!
11 days ago [-]
smokel 11 days ago [-]
You could help by using the thumbs down button below the answer.
doctorzook 11 days ago [-]
Why is it my job to train the machines?
Waterluvian 11 days ago [-]
If you would kindly consult your Human HR Universal Handbook (2025 Edition) and navigate to section 226.8.2F, you’ll be gently reminded that it’s the responsibility of any and all employees to train their replacements.
throwaway198846 11 days ago [-]
Where can I find a copy?
Waterluvian 11 days ago [-]
Please consult your Human HR Universal Handbook (2025 Edition) on how to request a new copy of the Human HR Universal Handbook (2025 Edition). I believe it's in Volume III Section 9912.64.1 or thereabouts.
quesera 11 days ago [-]
Typically, these sorts of things are located in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.
So, it makes sense to always start there.
wiz21c 11 days ago [-]
you have to steal it from the HR department. They do have a copy but they won't tell you.
oskarkk 11 days ago [-]
Human Human Resources?
quesera 11 days ago [-]
The Synthetic Human Resources Universal Handbook is in a binary format which is not understood by Organics, but seems to be useful sometimes.
throaway123213 11 days ago [-]
don't you care about maximizing Googles ROI?
yardie 11 days ago [-]
AI is a tool. If it doesn't work I'm not going to fix the tool; I'd rather find another tool that can do the job.
greyadept 10 days ago [-]
I would be tempted to give the thumbs up to terrible answers like that.
smokel 10 days ago [-]
Interestingly, this comment gets a lot of downvotes.
If you don't want to help improve the world, then how are you expecting things to become better?
I understand that people don't like it that this will give Google an advantage. But what is the proper alternative? We have no non-profit organizations who could muster the money to build these systems. I suppose those who are critical of large companies would also be critical of governments building these systems.
So is what you (downvoters) propose here to just complain and do nothing about it? I'd be curious to hear what alternatives you propose.
jauntywundrkind 11 days ago [-]
One thing I haven't seen talked about at all: how quickly would space heat up?
I presume Earth's gravity largely keeps the exosphere it has around it. With some modest fractional % lost year by year. There is a colossal vast volume out there! But given that there's so little matter up in space, what if any temperature rise would we expect from say a constant 1TW of heat being added?
tylerhou 10 days ago [-]
The sun’s radiation hitting earth is 44,000 terawatts. I think we’re fine with an “extra” terawatt. (It’s not even extra, because it would be derived from the sun’s existing energy.)
At sea-level there can be 1.225 kg/m^3 of particles. There's a lot of matter to absorb heat.
In the exosphere we have 1e-13 kg/m^3 of particles.
My point is that the exosphere while huge has an incredibly tiny thermal battery. I'm not convinced that, were we able to dump heat into it, that it really would be insignificant heating over time.
And there's little way for the articles here to cool down. There's no matter to transfer their energy to.
I guess the thing is, it doesn't matter. It seems like the exosphere is actually already >500 degrees: that after you leave the 80km menopause temperatures soar quickly, in what scant air is left. I was still using a model of thermal transfer. But the only cooling possible is passive radiative cooling, is to glow your energy away. Some of this will find other exospheric particles to hit & excite more, but they're already incredibly energetic up there, and there's just not many particles at all, so perhaps a lot of that radiation might escape the exosphere without collision. Again my mistake: thermal transfer is simply not that relevant (aside some shielding against these particles in vulnerable spots), it's all passive radiation being used to cool.
It would still be interesting to me to have some guestimates for what the current energy balance of the exosphere is. What is heating it, how much, and where/how-much is it able to dissipate its energy?
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10 days ago [-]
Not a space geek but would have guessed at all these things. Feels like common sense. How is anything easier in space? None of it makes sense to me either.
The only thing I could think of is maybe 24h sunlight if far enough away from earth.
Maybe is anothet bubble to grab investor money. A bored ape larping as science.
Except you don’t build a data center, you add a GPU to an individual starlink node. If you can do that a couple hundred or thousand times you’ve got a lot of compute in space. The next question is how would you redesign compute around your distributed power and cooling profiles?
The article doesn’t talk about the actual engineering challenges. (Such as scaling down the radiative cooling design, matching compute node to the maximum feasible power profile, etc)
I’m not arguing it’ll be easy or will ultimately work, but articles like this are unhelpful because they don’t address the fundamental insight being proposed.
ianburrell 10 days ago [-]
OpenAI has over 1 million GPU.
Starlink satellites would be pointless for doing computation because they are spread across the Earth resulting in horrible latency. AI companies spend lots of money on super fast connects within a datacenter.
Starlink with GPU might have some advantage for running edge GPU. But most Starlink customers are close to ground station and it makes a lot more sense to have GPUs there. It is a lot easier to manage them than launching new satellites which could take years.
IX-103 10 days ago [-]
One mistake that the article seems to make is to assume that the data center is in one huge satellite.
I think a better model would be a fleet of rack or server level satellites. That significantly reduces the heat and cooling requirements and improves redundancy since losing a single satellite sure to radiation would be less significant. Further, due to economies of scale these satellites could be produced in mass, similar to the starlink satellites of today.
One issue is that these satellites would be to be connected via high bandwidth free space optical links instead of Ethernet, requiring precise formations, but that is currently being tested by multiple companies.
That being said, I don't see this ever being cheaper than terrestrial data centers. I just don't think the idea is as stupid as the article implies - it just requires doing things differently than NASA has done in the past.
lvl155 10 days ago [-]
It works if you figure out a way to have a permanent dark/light side. But really the issue is that we can do compute with light/photon and radiation and not much has been done in those areas.
xnx 11 days ago [-]
Datacenters in Antarctica or floating on the ocean make more sense than space.
ethmarks 10 days ago [-]
Building datacenters in the arctic also has the added benefit that sysadmins would have to take polar bear safety lessons, which would be pretty funny.
It's interesting that there are a bunch of people saying definitely impossible, yet there does seem to be some money behind it like the hn one
jeltz 9 days ago [-]
There was money behind Theranos too so I disagree about it being very interesting.
Fruitmaniac 8 days ago [-]
Underwater datacenters make way more sense
gyb997 8 days ago [-]
The last project to deploy nodes in space was a blockchain project; history often repeats itself.
k_bx 10 days ago [-]
> roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI's upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200
So.. 500 reusable rocket travels in space to match an on-ground datacenter? If this is the central argument then it doesn't hold.
Don't get me wrong. I too think whole idea is so outlandish it's likely to never happen, but mostly because the complexity of the whole project is too high.
jeffrallen 9 days ago [-]
This idea is so spectacularly stupid that it's a shame such a smart guy needed to spend even 5 minutes refuting it.
8 days ago [-]
sebastianconcpt 10 days ago [-]
Well we need like successful technological disruptions like in 7 dimensions before this can be scale and ROI positive.
fguerraz 10 days ago [-]
So what?
Of course it’s stupid and it’s never going to work. The same is true for Carbon Capture and Storage, blue hydrogen, etc. It’s nonsense from the start, but it didn’t stop governments around the world to spend billions on it.
It works like this: companies spend a few millions on PR to market a sci-fi project that’s barely plausible. Governments who really want to preserve the status quo but are pressured to “do something” can just announce that they’re sinking billions in it and voila! They’re green, they’re going to save the world.
It’s just a scam to get public money really.
whoisthemachine 11 days ago [-]
None of these problems seem intractable, just really hard and probably not being solved soon, but one has to start somewhere... so at least the billionaires will fund some scientists and engineers who will do that work?
skywhopper 10 days ago [-]
But for what benefit?
woctordho 10 days ago [-]
What if we deploy reversible computing, which does not produce heat?
kibwen 10 days ago [-]
Shhh, I'm begging people, if brain-dead VCs want to waste their money on things that are obviously farcical (and not actively destructive), please let them and stop doing their due diligence for them. The alternative is that they turn their impossible amounts of capital towards societally-destructive acts like buying up all the real estate in the world and turning us back into land-slaves.
jerdman76 8 days ago [-]
This article was an awesome read! More please!
radar1310 10 days ago [-]
It’s a really ridiculous idea.
steve_taylor 11 days ago [-]
Regardless of how terrible an idea it is, I wouldn't mind some billionaires funding R&D that advances the state of the art in thermal management in space.
The advantage of space is that you have infinite scale. Maybe data centers in space do not work at low scale but you have to think of them at much larger scale.
Elon Musk considered data centers in space simply for the fact that more solar power is available in space than Earth
hk1337 10 days ago [-]
Seems like it would be a nice way to keep the temperatures down.
dragonelite 10 days ago [-]
It probably shouldn't be so hard to find military application for more compute in space. Especially give the global surveillance and communication networks like starlink and intelligence sats.
What better way to cover up such space compute capabilities than the AI madness.
dsign 10 days ago [-]
Even if they are a terrible idea, we should try it out. Specially if paid with private equity. Imagine the things we will learn, the STEM jobs this will create[^1], and the fact we will bootstrap other industries.
[^1]: Provided that ChatGPT doesn't hoard all of them :-)
I know Silicon Valley runs on out there ideas and outright BS because 0.1% of the ideas pan out and pay for the other 99.9%, but this is just laughable for the reasons pointed out in the article.
kwertyoowiyop 11 days ago [-]
“Terrible, horrible, no good” is the new “considered harmful.”
Avicebron 11 days ago [-]
"Mind-bogglingly poorly thought out to the degree of a cynical money-grubbing scheme worthy of the finest cambodian slave camp" was taken and is disrespectful to the hard work and education of said slave camp's operators.
Sharlin 11 days ago [-]
Apparently the book whose title the phrase comes from [1] was published in 1972, four years after Dijkstra published "Considered Harmful".
Additionally, their distributions were different. People who read Dijkstra circa 1968 started using the phrase in their own publications within a decade, whereas people who read Viorst (or had it read to them) in 1972 and following years had at least a few decades of further delay before publishing anything using the corresponding phrase.
aallaall 11 days ago [-]
It’s better than having your DC confiscated (by Putin, in Russia), or bombed (in Ukraine, by Russia). As some hyperscalers realized.
toxicplanes1 10 days ago [-]
[dead]
aunty_helen 11 days ago [-]
I agree with most of this post and think the problems are harder than the proponents are making them seem.
But, 1) literally the smartest people and AI in the world will be working on this and 2) man I want to see us get to a type 2 civilisation bad.
The layout of this blog post is also very interesting, it presents a bunch of very hard items to solve and funny enough the last has been solved recently with starlink. So we can approach this problem, it requires great engineering but it’s possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as CERNs LHC but we have one of those.
Next up then is the strong why? When you’re in space, if you set the cost of electricity to zero, the equation gets massively skewed.
Thermal is the biggest challenge but if you have unlimited electricity, lots of stuff becomes possible. Fluorinert cooling, piezoelectric pumps and dual/multi stage cooling loops with step ups. We can put liquid cooling with piezos on phones now, so that technology is moving in the right direction.
For a thought experiment, if launch costs were $0/kg, would this be possible? If the answers yes, then at some point above $0/kg it becomes uneconomical, the challenge is then to beat that number.
fwip 10 days ago [-]
The problem isn't "how to cool the chips", it's "how to cool the whole friggin data center."
Any active cooling solution you can think of actually makes the problem worse (unless it's "eject hot mass").
tim333 10 days ago [-]
Datacenters in space may not work now but in the future when we get the robots a bit better who knows? From the Google blog:
>The Sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system, emitting more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.
cuuupid 11 days ago [-]
I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work."
There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.
From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.
sollewitt 10 days ago [-]
It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.
It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.
> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.
if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.
Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps
skywhopper 10 days ago [-]
What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?
brandonagr2 10 days ago [-]
The surface area of the earth is the limit (which only gets sunlight half the time) and only gets 1 billionth the energy emitted by the sun vs relatively unlimited surface area of solar panels in space
kaashif 10 days ago [-]
Wouldn't it be easier to build multi storey datacenters than space datacenters?
wat10000 10 days ago [-]
There are things which are difficult and have unsolved problems, and there are things that just fundamentally make no sense.
Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.
Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?
This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.
notahacker 11 days ago [-]
That's not the argument though. The argument is "it can be done, the methods to do it are known, but the claims about space being an optimal location to locate our AI datacenters are false and the tradeoffs and unit economics of doing it makes no sense compared with building a data centre on earth somewhere with power and water, preferably not too hot.
(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)
denkmoon 10 days ago [-]
Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.
wpollock 10 days ago [-]
The obvious solution is for half of the hardware to run on dark energy, counteracting the heat generated by the other half. Venture capitalists, use my gofundme site to give me the millions needed to research this, thanks.
nradov 11 days ago [-]
Cooling data centers in space effectively can't be done right now … or ever.
11 days ago [-]
pfdietz 10 days ago [-]
I'm not impressed by these arguments.
(1) Solar panels can be made much lighter in space. On Earth, panels have to withstand wind and gravity loads, flying debris, and precipitation including hail. The PV material itself doesn't have to be thick: thin film CdTe cells can be ~1 micron thick (the absorption length of the relevant photons in CdTe is something like 0.1 microns.) There has to be a protective layer to prevent solar wind ions from degrading the cells but this doesn't have to be very thick. It's not like shielding against high energy particles.
(2) Heat dissipation can be addressed by refrigeration. Yes, this takes energy, and yes that extra energy also has to be radiated. But the area of the radiator goes down as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. If you radiate 2x as much heat but at 2x the absolute temperature, the area of the radiator declines by a factor of 8. Even with inefficiencies one should be able to come out ahead by pumping the waste heat to higher temperature before radiating it.
(3) Ionizing radiation is dealt with by shielding. The amount of shielding per unit of capacity declines as you make your installation larger, by the square cube law. So this is really just a matter of scale. We're talking about potentially enormous amounts of capacity here so shielding shouldn't be a problem at scale.
thegrim33 10 days ago [-]
"[..] deploying a solar array with photovoltaic cells – something essentially equivalent to what I have on the roof of my house here in Ireland, just in space. It works, but it isn't somehow magically better than installing solar panels on the ground – you don't lose that much power through the atmosphere"
As an armchair layman, this claim intuitively doesn't feel very correct.
Of course AI is far from a trustworthy source, but just using it here to get a rough idea of what it thinks about the issue:
"Ground sites average only a few kWh/m²/day compared to ~32.7 kWh/m²/day of continuous, top-of-atmosphere sunlight." .. "continuous exposure (depending on orbit), no weather, and the ability to use high-efficiency cells — all make space solar far denser in delivered energy per m² of panel."
awei 11 days ago [-]
The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things:
- We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years.
- We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.
Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.
Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.
notahacker 11 days ago [-]
You can't just "leave them there" though. They orbit at high speed, which effectively means they actually take up vastly more space, with other objects orbiting at high speed intersecting those orbits. The orbits that are most useful are relatively narrow bands shared with a lot of other satellites and a fair amount of debris, and orbits tend to decay over time (which is a problem if you're in low earth orbit because they'll decay all the way into the atmosphere, and a problem if you're in geostationary orbit because you'll lose the advantage of stationary bit for maintaining comms links). This is a solvable problem with propulsion, but that entails bringing the propellant with you and end-of-life (or an expensive refuelling operation) when it runs out. The cost of maintaining real estate space is vastly more than out right owning land.
Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.
LegionMammal978 11 days ago [-]
There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.
awei 11 days ago [-]
We also have to build a lot more solar and nuclear in addition of the datacenters themselves, which we need to do anyway but it would compound the land we use for energy production.
LegionMammal978 11 days ago [-]
Yet a colossal number of servers on satellites would require the same energy-production facilities to be shipped into orbit (and to receive regular maintainence in orbit whenever they fail), which requires loads of land for launch facilities as well as processing for fuel and other consumable resources. Solar might be somewhat more efficient, but not nearly so much so as to make up for the added difficulty in cooling. One could maybe postulate asteroid mining and space manufacturing to reduce the total delta-V requirement per satellite-year, but missions to asteroids have fuel requirements of their own.
If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.
awei 11 days ago [-]
It makes sense, I would be curious to see the price computations done by the different space GPUs startups and Big Tech, I wonder how they are getting a cheaper cost, or maybe it is marketing.
moffkalast 11 days ago [-]
Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.
Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.
> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.
There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.
According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.
cactusfrog 11 days ago [-]
We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.
0_____0 11 days ago [-]
Falcon heavy is only $1,500/kg to LEO. This rate is considerably undercut here on Earth by me, a weasley little nerd, who will move a kilogram in exchange for a pat on the head (if your praise is desirable) or up to tens of dollars (if it isn't).
skywhopper 10 days ago [-]
In exchange for what benefit? There is literally no benefit to having a datacenter in space.
brandonagr2 10 days ago [-]
The benefit is capturing a larger percentage of the output of the sun than what hits the earth.
tom_ 10 days ago [-]
Can that really work? The datacentre will surely be measurably smaller than the earth.
ethmarks 11 days ago [-]
Does your transportation system also have a risk of exploding catastrophically mid-flight? 'cause otherwise no deal. /s
skywhopper 10 days ago [-]
Starship is on a fast track to failure. It is not a cheaper way to get to orbit and will never get there at the current pace. And even if it were, it would not make getting to orbit so cheap that it would somehow make it economically viable to put a datacenter there.
You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling solution, radiation shielding, orbital boosting, data transmission bandwidth, and you have to launch all of that.
And then, there are zero benefits to putting a datacenter in space over building it on Earth. So why would you want to add all that extra expense?
tjpnz 10 days ago [-]
It will make getting to orbit cheaper, significantly so, but I can't see it being rapidly reusable. Rapidly refurbishable perhaps if Starship were modular and the heat shield could be quickly swapped out on site where necessary. But being able to top off the methalox and fly again? That's a pipe dream. Orbital spaceflight isn't like air travel in any sense.
creatonez 11 days ago [-]
What use is having lots of space, when to actually build out that space you need mass, which is absurdly expensive to launch?
moomoo11 10 days ago [-]
Why does what it powers matter? As long as it can power something.
The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.
Rendered at 06:36:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")
Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.
The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.
Sears went bankrupt in 2018. It took a long time for the market to catch on.
Myself, I made the decision to go to cash a while ago, right before the recent AI pullback. Things were going great for a week until I started seeing all that money go unclaimed. I get back in, and the pullback I predicted happens. It was my own conscious decision to look past the gorilla in the room to get more free treats. I'll be fine but this is a good anecdote for how these things unfold.
Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
It's further complicated by the fact that most of the worst examples of AI hype are not public. Like, if and when the bubble bursts, the hyperscalers will likely get burned, but they're not going to go to zero or anywhere near it.
And that's assuming you already have stocks; it's very different, risk-wise, from shorting or buying puts.
> Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
It really doesn't, due to inflation.
Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
But then again no one is really serious about Mars.
Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.
The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work.
A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k / kg to a polar orbit.
The next option is being far enough out of the way that the earth's shadow isn't an issue. For that, instead of a 500 km sun synchronous orbit, you'd be going to 36,000 km orbit. This is a lot further from the surface, takes a lot more fuel... and it's a geostationary orbit.
However, as a geostationary orbit, these spots are valuable. Slots in this orbit are divided into slots.
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/wealthy-nations-...
> There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.
> Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.
Furthermore, the "out of a nations control" - those slots are owned by nations. Countries would likely be very annoyed for someone to be putting satellites there without authorization. Furthermore, they only work with the countries on those areas. They also require spacing to ensure that you can properly point an antenna to that satellite.
Furthermore, geosynchronous orbits have a 0.5 second round trip lag. This could be a problem for data centers.
Misbehaving satellites in the geosynchronous orbit are also of concern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_15 ).
----
Putting things in these orbits is pricy. For LEO, you'd need a lot of them. For geosynchronous, the idea of servicing them is pretty much a "you can't do that" (in 10 - 20 years they use their last fuel and get pushed to a higher orbit and pretty much get forgotten about).
Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are things that need to be especially well behaved because any orbital debris in that area could really ruin everyone's day.
Compute in space doesn't make sense.
And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.
That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow.
That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai)
Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.
Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-...
And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
SDA’s “Battle Management Layer will provide automated space-based battle management through command and control, tasking, mission processing and dissemination” to support time-sensitive kill-chain closure. https://www.sda.mil/battle-management
Golden Dome and future missile tracking and ISR will depend on real -time insights, which requires Edge Computing on orbit, running advanced AI/ML algorithms.” https://unibap.com/news/defense-in-the-foreground
sorry can't help you with your user feuds
Is SDA "tracking and targeting" on consumer satellites, or are they not? Let's narrow this down to your initial claim.
Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.
It cites the ISS's centralized 16kW cooling system which is for a big space station that needs to collect and shunt heat over a relatively large area. The Suncatcher prototype is puny in comparison: just 4 TPUs and a total power budget of ballpark 2kW.
Suncatcher imagines a large cluster of small satellites separated by optical links, not little datacenter space stations in the sky. They would not be pulling heat from multiple systems tens of meters away like on the ISS, which bodes well for simpler passive cooling systems. And while the combined panel surface area of a large satellite cluster would be substantial, the footprint of any individual satellite, the more important metric, would likely be reasonable.
Personally I am more concerned with the climate impact of launches and the relatively short envisioned mission life of 5 years. If the whole point is better sustainability, you can't just look at the dollar cost of launches that don't internalize the environmental externalities of stuff like polluting the stratosphere.
Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?
What's the actual atmospheric burden here?
This essentially says "We dont know"
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/04/rockets-affect-...
That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.
It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.
So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:
Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.
Communication might be a bit rough.
The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...
It’s like saying “why climb Everest? We can send a drone up instead.”
Trash, exploitation and littered with corpses.
Very true..
Here's a recent HN link to a chilling documentary about one of the most isolated settlements in the world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040459
https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.
So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.
People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.
He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.
Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296094-nasas-space-launc...
> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.
Hmmm.
Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/why-arent-the...
> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.
> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i... - page 14 shows them extended and testing at Lockheed.
On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.
As a sibling post noted, SEUs are possible all the way down to sea level. The recent Airbus mass intervention was essentially a fix for a badly handled SEU in a corner case.
The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.
I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.
It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.
One of the funniest things about modern AI systems is just how many random bitflips they can tank before their performance begins to really suffer.
In other words, a) background temperature (to the extent it's even meaningful) is much warmer than Earth's surface and b) cooling is much, much more difficult than on Earth.
Fun fact though, make your radiator hotter and you can dump just as much if not more energy then you would typically via convective cooling. At 1400C (just below the melting point of steel) you can shed 450kW of heat per square meter, all you need is a really fancy heat pump!
There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.
- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night
- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation
- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps
You need to rework your physical equipment quite substantially to make up for the fact you can't shed 70-90% of the heat in the same manner as you can down here on Earth
It’s a little worrying so many don’t know that.
Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.
“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”
Yes.
“That means you’d need huge radiators!”
Yes.
OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”
We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
Even optimistically, capex goes up by a lot to reduce opex, which means you need a really really long breakeven time, which means a long time where nothing breaks. How many months of reduced electricity costs is wiped out if you have to send a tech to orbit?
Oh, and don't forget the radiation slowly destroying all your transistors. Does that count as opex? Can you break even before your customers start complaining about corruption?
>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector
Yes we're talking about radiating not convection
And a kilowatt from one square meter is awful. You can do far more than that with access to an atmosphere, never mind water.
Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.
A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.
The fact that people aren’t using something isn’t evidence that it’s not possible or even a great idea, it could be that a practical application didn’t exist before or someone enterprising enough hasn’t come along yet.
Radiative cooling is great for achieving temperature a bit below ambient at night when you don’t have any modern refrigeration equipment. That’s about all. It’s used in space applications because it’s literally the only option.
Follow the rationale:
1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three and basically negate any use of crypto.
2. So, if you have data centers that no longer rely on power derived from a nation state, land controller by a nation state or connectivity provided by the nation state's cabling infra, then you can always access your currency and assets.
All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).
Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.
Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.
If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system?
Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.
It would take zero anti-satellite weapons to take down Starlink. Just point a good old fashioned gun at the SpaceX engineer who can issue maneuvering commands to the satellites.
Otherwise? Go wild. The space doesn't lack for space.
And with all the LEO megaconstellations? GEO isn't as vital as it once was.
Starlink can even bounce data P2P, from one client terminal to another.
And how does decentralized ground infrastructure save you from a centralized executive?
Uncle Sam could bring Starlink down, probably. For anyone else, that would pretty much require WW3.
Executives don't matter as much as you think they do. No credible executive is going to cave to random death threats, and carrying them out would cause new executives.
Now, would SpaceX eventually become a shell of its former self without Musk calling the shots? Maybe. But if the shell you're worrying about is Starlink orbital shell, and the time you're worrying about is today and not in ten years? Killing Musk doesn't help you much.
Microsoft was talking about submarine data centers powered by tidal forces in the early 2000s.
There have been talks of data centers on Sealand-like nation states.
Geothermal ...
Exotic data center builds will always be hyped. Always be within the realm of feasibility when cost is no object, but probably outside of practicality or need.
Next it'll be fusion-powered data centers.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater
Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.
Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
--- >8 ---
The power of nation states is rooted in control of land and safety, as well as resources, which is an extension of the control of land. But once mining asteroids became economically viable, the connection between land and resources disappeared. Once space habitation in space and secretly developed weapon systems from space became viable, the connection between safety, habitation and land disappeared.
This allowed corporations and new organizations to rise to power large enough to challenge nation states. Those in power did feared to lose their power, which caused the great war which gave rise to the grey mass and destroyed earth.
--- 8< ---
It's a very cool back story, which gives rise to a rogue nanite swarm (the gray mass), which forces an evacuation of earth within days. The only way this was even possible was by uploading human minds onto storage and planting them in robots later on. Naturally, most humans are then forced to work for these corporations. Other humans are still biological and they don't like robots, to say the least.
What did the royal navy do? There is no mention of the UK using force against sealand in either the Wikipedia page or this BBC article about sealand. (Though obviously the royal navy could retake sealand if they wanted)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-41135081
If a country doesn't like what is happening they can shoot it down, and with no humans onboard or nations claiming jurisdiction there really isn't much to stop them or to answer for.
Fiscal rules are sort of man made.
Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.
Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.
https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY (from YCombinator)
> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.
These aren't small things. You can't hide it.
> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.
The US Government further publishes tracking on pretty much every single thing in orbit of the earth larger than a few centimeters, to help satellite operators avoid space debris. They do obfuscate the current orbit of their own spy satellites (only publishing their initial orbit), but other countries and even private citizens around the world keep obsessive tabs on these things (e.g. https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/). This sort of thing is easily within the reach of even a medium sized nation state that was interested in the investment: just need a couple of big ole radars and you can do it just like the US does. So if you do try and hide the resources of a nation-state can easily counter.
The solution to oppressive government is not technological, it's political. Prevent countries from going bad, retrieve the ones that have gone bad, it works out a lot better for everyone.
Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.
So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines. Have everything fail in place? Have robots do it? What about the regular supply missions to keep replacing all the failing hardware (there's only so many spare HDDs you can have on hand).
The whole thing is farcical.
Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!
See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.
One of these projects is bonkers IMO: china-has-an-underwater-data-center-the-us-will-build-them-in-space
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suwannagauntlett/2025/10/20/chi...
Hitting something in orbit just requires you to be in the way at the right time.
Basically an intercept is a lot easier.
You want to push things out of orbit not turn a massive structure into a supersonic shard field for 20 years
But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.
2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.
3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.
5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.
In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.
Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.
Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)
Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.
Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.
> 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.
You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.
That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)
> 5) Learning effects
Great, but it gets us nothing.
There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.
The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.
Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.
Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.
Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.
Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.
Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.
The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.
All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.
And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).
Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).
So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.
Also remember that data centers last for about 5 years; after that the gpus are obsolete. That’s no different than the lifetime of a Starlink satellite.
But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.
An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.
There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)
Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.
Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...
It needs to be scaled up, but there is no obstacle to that (at least none that the article mentions).
The only valid objection is cost, but space prices keep dropping and earth prices keep rising.
It is not. This is like saying your phone is already a small data centre. While technically true, we're not talking about the same scale here. StarLink's compute power is a tiny fraction of a modern data centre GPU/TPU. Most of the power budget goes into communication (i.e. its purpose!).
If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.
If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.
For example, the JWST uses a RAD750 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 ) which is based on a PowerPC 750 running at 110 MHz to 200 MHz.
Its successor is the RAD5500 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 )... which runs at between 66 MHz and 462 MHz.
> The RAD5545 processor employs four RAD5500 cores, achieving performance characteristics of up to 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and over 3.7 GFLOPS. Power consumption is 20 watts with all peripherals operating.
That's kind of neat... but not exactly data center performance.
Back to the older RAD750...
> The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $349,639 in 2024).
That isn't exactly price performance. Well, unless you're constrained by "it costs millions to replace it."
So... I'm not really sure what devices they'd be putting up there.
The "data centers in space" is much more a "space launch is a hot technology, AI and data centers are a hot technology... put the two together and its too the moon!" (Or at least that's what we tell the investors before we try to spend all their money)
Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.
Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/updated_hpe_spaceborn...
- More junk whizzing around Earth.
- Inaccessibility for maintenance.
- Power costs.
- Susceptibility to solar storms and cosmic rays.
Risky/untried things aren't dumb because they're hard, they're dumb when they're more expensive/harder than cheaper/easier alternatives that already exist that do the same thing.
If you want to avoid national laws and have great cooling, then submerse your datacenter in the ocean instead.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures
Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
wait, no it doesn't. why would that be, d'you think
Let's say that pod needs to be serviced once every two years. That means having a ship that services one pod every 3 days when scaled up.
From the standpoint of a single pod data center and "does this work?" - the answer is "yes, it works better than we thought it would." From the standpoint of "can we scale this to a full data center?" - the answer is "we'd need a ship servicing a twice a week, with the logistics that entails for the ship (and backup ship)." That second part becomes less practical compared to building a data center on terra firma where it's much easier to walk into a building to service it and hook up the power.
Cooling was great! Everything else sucked.
DCs in space will have all the stuff that sucked, but cooling will suck too.
Then again there's lots of space in space, perhaps it's possible to isolate racks/aisles into their own individual satellites, each with massive radiant heatshedding panels? It's an interesting problem space that would be very interesting to try to solve, but ultimately I agree with OP when we come back around to "But, why?" Research for the sake of research is a valid answer, but "For prod"? I don't see it.
I guess that rules our any funding from US govt or Saudi money. Unless someone figures out a way to use fossil fuels to run the data centers! It has to be private equity or a new data center coin offering. Offered to the public and take away the pain and suffering of carrying their current paper currency. We need a new messiah (SBF + Musk + WeWork guy) to craft this narrative.
https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.
E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.
You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.
The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.
Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.
The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.
This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.
It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.
Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.
Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.
I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.
Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.
The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.
So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.
The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.
Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.
The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).
Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.
When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.
So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.
People who only look at the past/present and conclude impossibility are never going to be the ones who invent the future. Even math and science evolve, let alone engineering. The problems described in this article don't even remotely feel like the kind of barriers we faced when Go was solved, when protein fold was predicted and when LLM was solving problems with one prompt. If there is a strong NEED for datacenters to be up in the space, there will eventually be datacenters in the space.
Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.
Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250000687
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).
Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.
That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
When they say data centers in space - they mean data centers you can’t get to because they are flooded with ultra cold dielectric fluid and it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring them back up to human temperatures.
Right now it’s not worth the hassle. At terawatt scale it’s almost mandatory.
When you walk down that line it’s pretty close to putting them in space. No access. Super cold. No air. Tiny, insulated capsule. Thermal management hell. They’ll be buried in mines though, not launched into orbit.
It’s just corporate propaganda to simplify an otherwise insane situation.
Power:
It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.
The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.
Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...
Cooling:
Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.
A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.
Cosmic radiation:
The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.
Communications:
Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...
This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.
E.g. one satellite's wide area sensor payload is processed and "potential wildfire detected". The result is passed to another satellite with finer grained sensing capabilities which is due to pass over in the next X minutes which then tees up a capture.
You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs.
So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations.
If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica (research focused, still disputed but not armed, probably not lots of shady stuff happening there, costly but still pays off to be there).
But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot.
> it has to connect to the Earth internet
Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be serving React apps or anything like that. Those will be weird, non-typical servers.
Want some zero internet use cases?
- Training a cyber-ops LLM without poking eyes and reduced risk of leaks.
- Illegal data-heavy research (bio, weaponry).
- Storing data for surveillance satellites.
All of those can use private links, can be built by private companies under classified contracts, and you would not dare attack an NRO-launched satellite.
I never said it's going to be easy. In fact, I compared it to setting up research stations in Antarctica. Which is costly, and definitely harder than going to the ice vending machine.
That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.
IMO, they are just answering the question: "If we pour 100B into R&D, could it have a reasonable chance at succeeding?".
For Nvidia (or these other massive companies) the investment is chump change.
And with Direct-To-Cell, content delivery satellites in space are unstoppable.
Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.
> After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that sentence.
>I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data centers are being built in space, that sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not to YC. (8:00)
Reminds me of the hyperloop. Well yes, things in vacuum tube go fast. Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...
You're worried about rates when we can't even get the ball rolling on safety for human occupancy, maintenance, workability.
I swear, nothing on Earth more dangerous than someone with dollar signs in their eyes.
I’m under the impression you need to radiate through matter (air, water, physical materials, etc).
Is my understanding of the theory just wrong?
The main way that heat dissipates from space stations and satellites is through thermal radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation.
I man you totally can radiate excess heat energy on earth, but your comment implies that the parents idea of radiating off excess "energy", specifically HEAT energy in space is possible, which it isn't.
You can radiate excess energy for sure, but you'd first have to convert it away from heat energy into light or radio waves or similar.
I don't think we even have that tech at this point in time, and neither do we have any concepts how this could be done in theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
That's technically correct I guess, at some temperature threshold it becomes possible to bleed some fractions of energy while the material is exceedingly hot.
Space stations need enormous radiator panels to dissipate the heat from the onboard computers and the body heat of a few humans. Cooling an entire data center would require utterly colossal radiator panels.
So, it makes sense to always start there.
If you don't want to help improve the world, then how are you expecting things to become better?
I understand that people don't like it that this will give Google an advantage. But what is the proper alternative? We have no non-profit organizations who could muster the money to build these systems. I suppose those who are critical of large companies would also be critical of governments building these systems.
So is what you (downvoters) propose here to just complain and do nothing about it? I'd be curious to hear what alternatives you propose.
I presume Earth's gravity largely keeps the exosphere it has around it. With some modest fractional % lost year by year. There is a colossal vast volume out there! But given that there's so little matter up in space, what if any temperature rise would we expect from say a constant 1TW of heat being added?
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
In the exosphere we have 1e-13 kg/m^3 of particles.
My point is that the exosphere while huge has an incredibly tiny thermal battery. I'm not convinced that, were we able to dump heat into it, that it really would be insignificant heating over time.
And there's little way for the articles here to cool down. There's no matter to transfer their energy to.
I guess the thing is, it doesn't matter. It seems like the exosphere is actually already >500 degrees: that after you leave the 80km menopause temperatures soar quickly, in what scant air is left. I was still using a model of thermal transfer. But the only cooling possible is passive radiative cooling, is to glow your energy away. Some of this will find other exospheric particles to hit & excite more, but they're already incredibly energetic up there, and there's just not many particles at all, so perhaps a lot of that radiation might escape the exosphere without collision. Again my mistake: thermal transfer is simply not that relevant (aside some shielding against these particles in vulnerable spots), it's all passive radiation being used to cool.
It would still be interesting to me to have some guestimates for what the current energy balance of the exosphere is. What is heating it, how much, and where/how-much is it able to dissipate its energy?
The only thing I could think of is maybe 24h sunlight if far enough away from earth.
Maybe is anothet bubble to grab investor money. A bored ape larping as science.
I’m not arguing it’ll be easy or will ultimately work, but articles like this are unhelpful because they don’t address the fundamental insight being proposed.
Starlink satellites would be pointless for doing computation because they are spread across the Earth resulting in horrible latency. AI companies spend lots of money on super fast connects within a datacenter.
Starlink with GPU might have some advantage for running edge GPU. But most Starlink customers are close to ground station and it makes a lot more sense to have GPUs there. It is a lot easier to manage them than launching new satellites which could take years.
I think a better model would be a fleet of rack or server level satellites. That significantly reduces the heat and cooling requirements and improves redundancy since losing a single satellite sure to radiation would be less significant. Further, due to economies of scale these satellites could be produced in mass, similar to the starlink satellites of today.
One issue is that these satellites would be to be connected via high bandwidth free space optical links instead of Ethernet, requiring precise formations, but that is currently being tested by multiple companies.
That being said, I don't see this ever being cheaper than terrestrial data centers. I just don't think the idea is as stupid as the article implies - it just requires doing things differently than NASA has done in the past.
So.. 500 reusable rocket travels in space to match an on-ground datacenter? If this is the central argument then it doesn't hold.
Don't get me wrong. I too think whole idea is so outlandish it's likely to never happen, but mostly because the complexity of the whole project is too high.
Of course it’s stupid and it’s never going to work. The same is true for Carbon Capture and Storage, blue hydrogen, etc. It’s nonsense from the start, but it didn’t stop governments around the world to spend billions on it.
It works like this: companies spend a few millions on PR to market a sci-fi project that’s barely plausible. Governments who really want to preserve the status quo but are pressured to “do something” can just announce that they’re sinking billions in it and voila! They’re green, they’re going to save the world.
It’s just a scam to get public money really.
Elon Musk considered data centers in space simply for the fact that more solar power is available in space than Earth
What better way to cover up such space compute capabilities than the AI madness.
[^1]: Provided that ChatGPT doesn't hoard all of them :-)
I know Silicon Valley runs on out there ideas and outright BS because 0.1% of the ideas pan out and pay for the other 99.9%, but this is just laughable for the reasons pointed out in the article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...
But, 1) literally the smartest people and AI in the world will be working on this and 2) man I want to see us get to a type 2 civilisation bad.
The layout of this blog post is also very interesting, it presents a bunch of very hard items to solve and funny enough the last has been solved recently with starlink. So we can approach this problem, it requires great engineering but it’s possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as CERNs LHC but we have one of those.
Next up then is the strong why? When you’re in space, if you set the cost of electricity to zero, the equation gets massively skewed.
Thermal is the biggest challenge but if you have unlimited electricity, lots of stuff becomes possible. Fluorinert cooling, piezoelectric pumps and dual/multi stage cooling loops with step ups. We can put liquid cooling with piezos on phones now, so that technology is moving in the right direction.
For a thought experiment, if launch costs were $0/kg, would this be possible? If the answers yes, then at some point above $0/kg it becomes uneconomical, the challenge is then to beat that number.
Any active cooling solution you can think of actually makes the problem worse (unless it's "eject hot mass").
>The Sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system, emitting more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.
There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.
From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.
It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.
> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.
if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.
Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps
Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.
Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?
This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.
But for a more nuanced and optimistic take, this one is good and highlights all the same issues and more https://www.peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/
(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)
(1) Solar panels can be made much lighter in space. On Earth, panels have to withstand wind and gravity loads, flying debris, and precipitation including hail. The PV material itself doesn't have to be thick: thin film CdTe cells can be ~1 micron thick (the absorption length of the relevant photons in CdTe is something like 0.1 microns.) There has to be a protective layer to prevent solar wind ions from degrading the cells but this doesn't have to be very thick. It's not like shielding against high energy particles.
(2) Heat dissipation can be addressed by refrigeration. Yes, this takes energy, and yes that extra energy also has to be radiated. But the area of the radiator goes down as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. If you radiate 2x as much heat but at 2x the absolute temperature, the area of the radiator declines by a factor of 8. Even with inefficiencies one should be able to come out ahead by pumping the waste heat to higher temperature before radiating it.
(3) Ionizing radiation is dealt with by shielding. The amount of shielding per unit of capacity declines as you make your installation larger, by the square cube law. So this is really just a matter of scale. We're talking about potentially enormous amounts of capacity here so shielding shouldn't be a problem at scale.
As an armchair layman, this claim intuitively doesn't feel very correct.
Of course AI is far from a trustworthy source, but just using it here to get a rough idea of what it thinks about the issue:
"Ground sites average only a few kWh/m²/day compared to ~32.7 kWh/m²/day of continuous, top-of-atmosphere sunlight." .. "continuous exposure (depending on orbit), no weather, and the ability to use high-efficiency cells — all make space solar far denser in delivered energy per m² of panel."
Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.
Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.
Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.
If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.
Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.
> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary
There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.
According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.
You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling solution, radiation shielding, orbital boosting, data transmission bandwidth, and you have to launch all of that.
And then, there are zero benefits to putting a datacenter in space over building it on Earth. So why would you want to add all that extra expense?
The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.