[HN Gopher] Starcloud can't put a data centre in space at $8.2M ...
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Starcloud can't put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
Author : angadh
Score : 182 points
Date : 2025-06-26 20:06 UTC (1 days ago)
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| quantified wrote:
| And all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the
| financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night
| sky.
| xnx wrote:
| Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an
| infeasible idea it is.
| wmf wrote:
| That's how you get another Theranos.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the
| SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Coming from someone in this space, SpinLaunch has more legs
| to stand on than Starcloud.
| world2vec wrote:
| SpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back
| to Earth.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The atmosphere and gravity are only some of the problems
| with spinlaunch. Spinlaunch rotates at 600 rpm. That means
| the projectile is tumbling at 600 rpm when let go.
|
| Maybe for solid masses not in an atmosphere, meaning the
| payload can be a ball and doesn't have to have a pencil
| shape and doesn't need to point in any particular
| direction, maybe that can work to simply lob rocks or
| aluminum ingots into earth orbit.
|
| Except just think about that for a second. Lobbing rocks
| from the moon towards earth...
|
| And why would we want to do this anyway? What resources are
| so valuable on the moon that it's worth getting them that
| way?
|
| The payload would actually have to have rockets, fuel,
| computers, heat shielding, and a means to reshape itself so
| that it can: stop it's own tumble after launch, deploy
| glide wings, and survive reentry to a controlled landing so
| that we don't have to use rockets from Earth to go collect
| the payload from orbit.
|
| It's all surely physically doable but why?
|
| Even if orbit was the final usage destination not Earth,
| like to build stations, that still seems like a stretch.
| starik36 wrote:
| There was a video from Scott Manley about this several years
| back. And he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for
| SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit. And they
| haven't yet.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.
|
| Here is how to think about them: It doesn't matter how open
| your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea
| and working hard and never giving up developing strength
| and technique to jump higher.
|
| Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever
| worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by
| just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping
| harder.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| That's the parent's joke
| energywut wrote:
| Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've
| heard in a while.
|
| Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of
| batteries
|
| Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
|
| Latency? Highly variable.
|
| Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
|
| Radiation shielding? Not free.
|
| Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
|
| Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and
| keep them fueled.
|
| There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Given that most of the major powers have satellite shootdown
| ability this isn't worth all that much if you're causing
| enough trouble.
| FredPret wrote:
| Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a
| mess of space junk, angering everybody.
|
| Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each
| major power park their money on that satellite.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a
| mess of space junk, angering everybody.
|
| unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it
| is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
|
| >Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each
| major power park their money on that satellite.
|
| I've long had the idea that there are fashions in
| corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just
| becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being
| honest.
|
| This explains the highly variant history of extreme
| corruption in democracies.
|
| At any rate while the idea that the cure for any
| government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt
| sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works
| out.
|
| If I was a major politician and you had my competitors
| park their money on your satellite it would become
| interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me
| and my competitors on the satellite I might start
| thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here
| and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to
| blow up satellite.
| FredPret wrote:
| By that logic, politicians around the world would make it
| illegal for themselves to trade stock on their insider
| knowledge. I'm not holding my breath.
|
| See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these
| politicians on both sides are very good and consistent
| stock pickers indeed.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| huh?..
|
| I'm sorry but what logic is it you're referring to here?
| Is it the idea that there are fashions in corruption? If
| so by that logic we are probably in an era of high
| corruption.
|
| Is it the idea that if I were a corrupt politician and I
| had equally corrupt enemies I would use my knowledge of
| their corruption to dirty trick them? Because ... dirty
| tricking them and getting them to lose all their finance
| at one time is not quite the same as passing a law making
| it difficult for everyone to get more finance from hereon
| out.
|
| I'm not following exactly what logic of mine you think
| you've defeated with observing that there are a lot of
| corrupt politicians nowadays?
| notahacker wrote:
| The 'Principality of Sealand', anywhere else on the high seas
| or Antarctica have their issues with practicality too, but
| considerably less likelihood of background radiation flipping
| bits...
| psds2 wrote:
| Who would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that
| are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind
| of value?
| edm0nd wrote:
| Dozens upon dozens of illicit shady bulletproof hosting
| providers.
|
| 2026, we will get ransomware from space!
|
| The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in
| theory they actually could get something like that setup if
| they wanted.
| ronsor wrote:
| > 2026, we will get ransomware from space!
|
| Ahem, _cloud_ ransomware.
| ronsor wrote:
| Anyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter
| satellite.
| mandevil wrote:
| International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty
| of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft
| they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-
| governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched
| by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same
| as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same
| ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a
| legal warrant etc.
|
| This is true even if your company moves the actual launching
| to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a
| corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your
| home country, and that country is responsible for your
| actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no
| area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from
| the government" area.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no
| matter whether the government or a non-governmental group
| launches them._
|
| Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has
| changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that
| doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More
| than likely, the people running it will be happy to take
| your money.
| christina97 wrote:
| Generally though, countries don't disappear: they have a
| predecessor and a successor.
| reaperducer wrote:
| A successor may take possession of the land, but that
| doesn't mean it will also take responsibility for the
| previous government's liabilities.
| afiori wrote:
| That is why international treaties come with implicit or
| explicit enforcement options
| mandevil wrote:
| That is not how international law works, you don't get to
| say "we are a new country and therefore not bound by
| treaties that earlier forms did."
|
| This principle was established when Nazis were convicted
| for war crimes at Nuremburg for violating treaties that
| their predecessor state the Weimar Republic signed, even
| after the Nazi's repudiated those treaties and claimed
| they were signed by an illegitimate state, and that they
| were a new Reich, not like the Wiemar Republic.
|
| Basically if territory changes hand to an existing state
| that state will obviously still have obligations, and if
| a new state is formed, then generally it is assumed to
| still carry the obligations of the previous state. There
| is no "one weird trick" to avoid international law. I
| assure you that the diplomats and lawyers 80 years ago
| thought of these possibilities. They saw what resulted
| from the Soviet and Nazi mutual POW slaughters, and set
| up international law so no one could ignore it.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Those kinds of countries don't tend to be the kinds of
| countries with active space programs.
|
| And more critically - they have successor states.
|
| The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the
| USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of
| the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to
| Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
| bigiain wrote:
| While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the
| difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your
| server hardware...
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Maybe not so much... they'll just grab you. Obligatory
| XKCD.
|
| https://xkcd.com/538/
|
| Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime
| supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's
| still a lifetime supply...
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| They don't need to do that if they go after your ground
| station operators.
|
| To escape the law you need to hide or protect something
| on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can
| hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother
| putting the computers in space?
| mulmen wrote:
| Because you need an enormous amount of energy to run the
| servers. You may hide the downlinks but you still need
| power.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations
| while providing a commercial service that justifies many
| $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch
| permission.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah exactly. We're riffing on how implausible that is,
| right?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations
| while providing a commercial service that justifies many
| $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch
| permission.
|
| Who said that Starcloud's business model is about
| commercial services? At
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I rather
| speculate that Starcloud's business model is about
| getting big money defense contracts.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| ASAT missiles have existed since the 80s and multiple
| countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy
| something in space.
|
| Meanwhile, you, the actual human being the government
| wants to coerce, are still on the earth, where someone
| can grab you and beat you with a wrench
| notpushkin wrote:
| What if you're a stateless person? (Not an easy status to
| acquire these days, but any US citizen can just renounce
| their citizenship without getting a new one, for example.)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Being stateless has an end result of "literally anyone
| can fuck with you" more than "no one can fuck with you".
| c22 wrote:
| What if you just launch it in secret and don't tell
| anybody?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Unless you invent some new launch method, a dozen or so
| countries will immediately know.
|
| Shortly afterwards, amateur astronomers will spot it.
| https://gizmodo.com/amateur-astronomer-catches-fleeting-
| glim...
| c22 wrote:
| Oh drat, I thought I'd found the answer.
| paxys wrote:
| Unless the company blasts its HQ and all its employees into
| space, no, they are very much subject to the jurisdiction of
| the countries they operate in. The physical location of the
| data center is irrelevant.
| peterbonney wrote:
| Exactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making
| their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not
| subject to their jurisdiction.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| :-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.
|
| But if international waters isn't enough (and _much cheaper_
| ) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for
| legal control knows no bounds.
|
| You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever
| _does_ get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major
| nations on the universe will have preceded them.
| runako wrote:
| [Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]
|
| > Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
|
| Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple
| pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's
| a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up
| dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
|
| Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as
| the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway
| through.)
| nkrisc wrote:
| Pretty worthless unless the execs live in space too.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Why? Its not like we put execs in jail for allowing their
| companies to do terrible things under their watch.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I know there's the fantasy of orbital CSAM storage able to
| beam obscenity to any point on the ground with zero
| accountability, but that is not going to survive real world
| politics.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Would be cheaper to do in international waters, even if you
| needed security to protect it.
| notahacker wrote:
| The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups
| is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other
| space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-
| hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too
| unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...
| chatmasta wrote:
| Yes, and also just because a space data center isn't useful
| today doesn't mean it won't be required tomorrow. When all
| the computing is between the ground and some nearby
| satellites, of course the tradeoffs won't be worth it.
|
| But what about when we're making multi-year journeys to Mars
| and we need a relay network of "space data centers" talking
| to each other, caching content, etc?
|
| We may as well get ahead of the problems we'll face and solve
| them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to
| discover some novel failure scenario when we're nearing
| Mars...
| XorNot wrote:
| We'd build it then? The problems of a space data center are
| extremely generic and only worth solving when you actually
| need one. Which would never be in low earth orbit.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > what about when we're making multi-year journeys to Mars
| and we need a relay network of "space data centers" talking
| to each other, caching content, etc?
|
| How would this work? Planets orbit at different speeds, so
| you can't build a chain of relays to another planet. I can
| imagine these things orbiting planets, but is that worth it
| compared to ground-based systems?
| kolbe wrote:
| Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight
| plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of
| the time, with deterministic shade.
| energywut wrote:
| Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate
| into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
| notahacker wrote:
| It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy
| for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous
| orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need
| rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which
| is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its
| usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems
| brought up
| energywut wrote:
| Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but
| it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an
| expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
| malfist wrote:
| You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates
| the need for large battery systems.
| mook wrote:
| That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of
| painful though; I suppose that would work for a server
| that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems
| like a rather small market.
| malfist wrote:
| You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1
| would do nicely
| riknos314 wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| If starcloud integrated with something like starlink,
| using the laser inter satellite links to distribute
| ground comms across a network of satellites, then the
| datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is
| probably a non-issue for most purposes.
| paxys wrote:
| Bandwidth - negligible
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes cooling is difficult. Half the "solar panels" on the ISS
| aren't solar panels but heat radiation panels. That's the only
| way you can get rid of it and it's very inefficient so you need
| a huge surface.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| seems oddly paradoxical. ISS interior at some roughly livable
| temperature. Exterior is ... freakin' space! Temperature
| gradient seems as if it should take of it ...
|
| ... and then you realize that _because_ it is space, there 's
| almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| there literally is nothing to absorb the heat. Conduction
| and convection are out, all you got is radiation.
|
| new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their
| founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children
| of a dead earth
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| I'd settle for at least a high school physics education.
| This idea seemed insane when I first heard about it a few
| weeks back. This analysis just makes it that much more
| crazy.
|
| If YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I
| can think of some more enjoyable ways.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| they got the sun synchronous orbit part right.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying
| to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e.
| in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake,
| tbh.
|
| Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law.
| The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the
| radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have
| massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt
| wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an overblown gotcha, considering
| every satellite still has to dump heat and works just
| fine.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| The problem is not that radiators don't work. The problem
| is the need for liquid cooling. The heat prduced per area
| in the GPU/CPU is much bigger than the cooling capacity
| per area of your radiator.
|
| Even here on earth, contemporary GPU racks for AI have
| had to move to liquid cooling because it is the only way
| to extract enough heat. At 120 kW for 18x 1U servers
| (GB200 NVL72), the power density is waaay beyond what you
| can do with air even.
|
| The last time Starcloud was doing the rounds on HN, I
| estimated that they need to be pumping water at a flow
| rate of 60 000 liters per second, if you use the numbers
| in their whitepaper. That's a tenth of the Sacramento
| river, flowing in space through a network with a million
| junctions and hoping nothing leaks.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| There's a difference between a couple humans (n _150W)
| and say JUST one H200 DGX (8_ 700W).
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| yes. in general as a rule of thumb your radiator size
| must scale proportionally to your solar panel size, as
| parent says:
|
| > The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the
| radiators.
| yreg wrote:
| Shouldn't the radiators be directly proportional to the
| area of the solar panels? (Since there's no one munching
| on food on board.)
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| A great interactive example of this is the game Oxygen Not
| Included. By the late game, you're biggest problem is your
| base getting too hot from the waste heat of all your
| industry.
| thwarted wrote:
| There's nothing paradoxical about it. There's no such thing
| as a temperature gradient in a vacuum, there's nothing to
| hold or measure temperature against. And thus a vacuum is a
| really good insulator. Which is why a vacuum flask, which
| ultimately became one of Thermos' most well known products,
| is used to control temperature both in and outside the lab.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Except a thermos has a really low emissivity, otherwise
| (if it had high emissivity), it'd be a poor insulator due
| to thermal radiation, the same reason why ISS's radiators
| are much smaller than its solar panels.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This isn't true. The radiators on ISS are MUCH smaller than
| the solar panels. I know it's every single armchair
| engineer's idea that heat rejection is this impossible
| problem in space, but your own example of ISS proves this is
| untrue. Radiators are no more of a problem than solar panels.
| e_y_ wrote:
| The heat load of the ISS is a handful of astronauts and
| some equipment and whatever it absorbs from the sun. Not an
| entire data center or a nuclear rocket which is where the
| radiator discussion comes into play.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The heat load is equal to the load from the solar panels,
| to first order. So actually yeah, you CAN compare the
| size of solar panels to the size of the radiators.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| The radiators are significantly smaller than the PV arrays,
| but not by a massive ratio; looks like about 1:3.6 based on
| the published area numbers that I could find.
|
| It looks like the ISS active cooling system has a maximum
| cooling capacity that could handle the equivalent of a
| single-digit number of racks (down to 1 for an AI-focused
| rack).
| happyopossum wrote:
| if you were looking at a 10' tall spider and a 36' tall
| spider, yes they'd both be big but it'd be fair to say
| that the 10' one is much smaller....
| ggreer wrote:
| If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive
| batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed
| in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional
| lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.
|
| The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that
| don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI
| model training and other big offline tasks.
|
| For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that
| allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If
| launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter
| into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching
| replacement modules.
|
| All satellites launched from the US are required to have a
| decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other
| words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create
| orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these
| satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need
| thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and
| deorbit in a controlled manner.
|
| Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future
| cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries
| get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an
| off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point
| in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the
| ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg
| plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have
| a chance. If not, they're sunk.
|
| I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be
| very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can
| see why some people would.
|
| 1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
| quantified wrote:
| Of course, they're soft targets in space war too, they could
| generate lots of debris.
| hellisothers wrote:
| Man I read "AI training in a high latency self sufficient
| satellite orbiting earth" as the start of a Sci-Fi novel...
| raverbashing wrote:
| Just another good proof of paper being an ideal medium for
| fiction
|
| Any purported advantages have to contend with the fact that
| sending the modules costs millions of dollars. Tens to
| hundred millions
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Let me alert all the NIMBY folks, let them know that data
| centers will be blocking their view of the moon and casting
| shadows on their backyards.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Just give all those astronomers mockup telescopes with
| little screens creating the fancy images they want inside
| them.
|
| They will calm down.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| You can also drink from a shoe. It's absolutely possible.
| jand wrote:
| And it enjoyed some popularity. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_boot
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| And there you've cut to the chase.
|
| I was implying an unspoken obvious "but why would you?"
|
| But of course the answer I missed was you don't, you make
| money from people who, for whatever reason, want to drink
| from shoes.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Same with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, inventing a detour
| because it sounds cool and ultimately don't work out because
| Occam's Razor.
| ggreer wrote:
| Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are a little different because
| there are safety, economic, and physical constraints that
| mean they will always be worse than battery electric or gas
| cars. I and many others correctly predicted this.[1] For
| hydrogen to succeed, batteries would have to get more
| expensive and/or have worse energy density than they did in
| 2015.
|
| Satellite data centers seem unlikely to me, but at least
| their feasibility doesn't require that existing stuff get
| more expensive/worse. Starcloud is a bet that three things
| will happen in the next decade:
|
| - SpaceX Starship will succeed and drastically reduce
| launch costs.
|
| - Batteries will not get 10x cheaper.
|
| - There will be valuable applications for high latency,
| high performance compute (eg: AI training).
|
| If any one of these things does not happen, Starcloud is
| doomed (or will have to pivot). If they all happen,
| Starcloud has a chance at success.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875749
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture
| that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete
| servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for
| launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to
| allow for launching replacement modules.
|
| This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand
| wavy "modular". I have trained large models on thousands of
| GPUs, hardware failure happen all the time. Last example in
| date: an infiniband interface flapping which ultimately had
| to be physically replaced. What do you do if your DC is in
| space? Do you just jettison the entire multi million $ DGX
| pod that contains the faulty 300$ interface before sending a
| new one? Do you have an army of astronauts + Dragons to do
| this manually? Do we hope we have achieve super intelligence
| by then and have robots that can do this for us ?
|
| Waving the "Modular" magic key word doesn't really cut it for
| me.
| danans wrote:
| > Whether or not their business is viable depends on the
| future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries.
| If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically
| feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground.
| There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space
| if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar +
| batteries.
|
| Something tells me that the price of batteries is already
| cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more
| economic sense than launching a datacenter - which will
| also need batteries - into space.
| ggreer wrote:
| The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh.
| Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a
| 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover
| the dark period, costing $50 million. Realistically you'd
| need at least 16 hours worth of batteries to cover winter
| months when the night is longer, raising your battery
| costs to $65 million. You'd also need [?]5x more solar
| panels than in space, and these panels would be more
| expensive due to shielding from weather. 120MW of ground-
| based solar panels would cost around $100 million.
|
| Assuming the $165M of panels and batteries last for a
| decade, and there are no maintenance costs, they'll
| provide 3,504,000MWh over that time for an energy cost of
| 4.7 cents per kWh. This is competitive with grid power in
| some places. It also has the advantage of not needing
| backup generators. But maintenance costs do exist, and it
| makes more financial sense to buy power as you use it
| rather than pay upfront.
| danans wrote:
| https://www.wesa.fm/environment-
| energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
|
| > Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a
| 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover
| the dark period, costing $50 million.
|
| A 40MW data center doesn't run constantly at 40MW. That's
| its load rating. Like any industrial facility, actual
| peak loads are probably around 80% and average loads are
| lower.
|
| Also, why do you assume that the data center has to be
| off-grid? That's a constraint of a space-based
| datacenter, not a ground based datacenter.
|
| Datacenters with storage can complement grid power.
|
| > The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh.
|
| If you going to compare ground based data centers to
| hypothetical space based ones, then consider that grid
| scale iron air batteries are coming soon at $20/kWh.
|
| https://www.wesa.fm/environment-
| energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| reliable energy is the only (maybe valid) reason. you can get
| yourself into a sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit and avoid
| shading by the earth.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| You're making lots of assumptions. They can put like 1000
| Raspberrypi's which don't need all that much cooling and
| relatively little energy requirements.
|
| For your other concerns, the risks are worth it for customers
| because of the main reward: No laws or governments in space!
| Technically, the datacenter company could be found liable but
| not for traffic, only for take-down refusals. Physical security
| is the most important security. For a lot of potential clients,
| simply making sure human access to the device is difficult is
| worth data-loss,latency and reliability issues.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Sounds like a great investment for SoftBank
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I think the upside is that it's VC fodder. I imagine their
| thinking went about as far as "wow, what if we like....did
| AI...but in space?!"
| oceanplexian wrote:
| We're probably thinking of it the wrong way. Instead of a
| single datacenter it's more likely we build constellations and
| then change the way we write software.
|
| There will probably be a lot more edge computing in the future.
| 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code
| into a dozen regions (If you didn't have a massive datacenter
| footprint) but now startups do it casually like it's no big
| deal. Space infrastructure will probably have some parallels.
| rtpg wrote:
| > 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying
| code into a dozen regions (If you didn't have a massive
| datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like
| it's no big deal.
|
| Are there many startups actually taking real advantage of
| edge computing? Smaller B2B places don't really need it,
| larger ones can just spin up per-region clusters.... and then
| for 2C stuff you're mainly looking at static asset stuff
| which is just CDNs?
|
| Who's out there using edge computing to good effect?
| rambl3r wrote:
| That sounds like the Guoxing Aerospace / ADA Space "Three-
| Body Computing Constellation", currently at 12 satellites
| (out of a planned 2,800).
|
| The Chinese project involves a larger number of less powerful
| inference-only nodes for edge computing, compared to
| Starcloud's training-capable hyperscale data centers.
|
| [1] Andrew Jones. "China launches first of 2,800 satellites
| for AI space computing constellation". Spacenews, May 14,
| 2025. https://spacenews.com/china-launches-first-
| of-2800-satellite... [2] Ling Xin. "China launches satellites
| to start building the world's first supercomputer in orbit".
| South China Morning Post, May 15, 2025. https://www.scmp.com/
| news/china/science/article/3310506/chin... [3] Ben Turner.
| "China is building a constellation of AI supercomputers in
| space -- and just launched the first pieces". June 2, 2025.
| https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-is-
| bu...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since
| you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all
| far more predictable.
|
| Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You
| use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators
| are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos
| bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating.
| Space radiators use a high emissivity coating. Literally every
| satellite manages to deal with heat rejection just fine, and
| with radiators (if needed) much smaller than the solar arrays.
|
| Latency is potentially an issue if in a high orbit, but in LEO
| can be very small.
|
| Equipment upgrades and maintenance is impossible? Literally,
| what is ISS, where this is done all the time?
|
| Radiation shielding isn't free, but it's not necessarily that
| expensive either.
|
| Orbital maintainence is not a serious problem with low cost
| launch.
|
| The upside is effectively unlimited energy. No other place can
| give you terawatts of power. At that scale, this can be cheaper
| than terrestrially.
| friendzis wrote:
| > The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays.
|
| Modern solar panels are way more efficient than the ancient
| ones in ISS, at least 10x. The cooling radiators are smaller
| than solar panels because they are stacked and therefore
| effectively 5x efficient.
|
| Unless there are at least 2x performance improvements on the
| cooling system, the cooling system would have to be larger
| than solar panels in a modern deployment.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This is false. It's pretty straightforward to prove using
| Stefan-Boltzmann. Radiating from both sides at 300K, a
| square radiator that's 1 meter on a side emits 920W.
|
| Additionally, you wouldn't use cutting edge 35% triple
| junction cells for a space datacenter, you'd use silicon
| cells like Starlink and ISS use. 22% efficient with 90%
| full factor, given 1350W/m^2 and thus 270W/m^2, to provide
| enough power for that radiator you'd need a solar panel 3.4
| times as big, and that's if you were in 24/7 sunshine. If
| you're in a low orbit that's obscured almost half the time,
| it's 6-7 times as big.
|
| Why do people keep making these obviously wrong claims when
| a paragraph of arithmetic shows they're wrong? Do the math.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
|
| It's outside of any jurisdiction, this is a dream come true for
| a libertarian oligarch.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's not, all objects in space fall under the jurisdiction of
| the country that launched the rocket.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| > Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of
| batteries
|
| I can see it now - orbiting crypto mines power on at dawn, die
| off at dusk, Oscar-7 style
| ericyd wrote:
| This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried
| multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I
| can't scroll or zoom to fit.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Same for me.
|
| But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
| angadh wrote:
| should be fixed now.
| kemotep wrote:
| Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a
| datacenter in orbit would face.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o
| trhway wrote:
| My napkin is with Starcloud
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship
| $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and
| cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in
| the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto
| where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the
| regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for
| 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same
| weight and launch cost.
|
| Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the
| ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example
| physical security.
| ggreer wrote:
| If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a
| dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar
| panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which
| would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to
| use these data centers for AI training).
|
| 1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
| __m wrote:
| $10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, the idea is
|
| 1. YOLO. Yeet big data into orbit!
|
| 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up
| there!
|
| 3. Profit!
|
| It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely
| modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs
| to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet
| destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module)
| docks and mirrors the data.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way
| up there!
|
| Just to make me understand the business plan better: why would
| people or companies to be willing to pay much more to have
| their data (or computations) done in space?
|
| The only reason that I can imagine is that the satellite which
| contains the data center also has a lot of sensors mounted
| (think military spying devices), and either for security,
| capacity or latency reasons you prefer the sensor data to be
| processed in space instead of transferring it down to earth,
| process it there, and sending the results back to space.
|
| In other words: the business model is getting big money defense
| contracts (somewhat ignoring whether the idea really makes
| military sense or not).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Except space hasn't been "more secure" for nation states
| against other nation states in decades. US, Russia, and China
| all have various capabilities to destroy or steal or
| manipulate or tamper with satellites. It mostly doesn't
| happen right now because nobody is at full blown war.
| Shooting down satellites was expected to be a part of any
| superpower war since the 80s. Those weapons will be plenty
| effective against even massive installations in space.
|
| Meanwhile, space gets you zero protection from the infosec
| threats that plague national security installations.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| While I think that you gave some valid considerations that
| I really have to think about, this makes me question a lot
| more what the plan for Starcloud then is to make money.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Space roboticist here.
|
| As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the
| maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail _and
| get replaced_ all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which
| appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn 't including any
| mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure
| you would need to have to replace failed components.
|
| As a first cut, this would require:
|
| - an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
|
| - a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic
| manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in
| every server in the system, which usually means a system of
| relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the
| plant
|
| - CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
|
| - importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system to _to
| replace itself_. In other words, it would need to be at least two
| fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors,
| redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and
| compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems
| that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of
| replacing each other.
|
| - regular launches containing replacement hardware
|
| - ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
|
| The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive
| number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the
| chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would
| probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Seems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth
| before doing it in space. I know, I'm a real wet blanket.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| If mass is going to be as cheap as is needed for this to work
| anyway, there's no reason you can't just use people like in a
| normal datacenter.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able
| to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen
| like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth
| every time.
|
| Also, making something suitable for humans means having
| lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or
| float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
| switknee wrote:
| Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone
| operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do
| you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space
| datacenter job on a 3 month rotation?
|
| I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space
| and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire
| and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back
| to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the
| materials later.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The problem isn't health "risk", there are risks but
| there are also health effects that will come _with
| certainty_. For instance, low gravity deplete your
| muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you
| 're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle.
|
| This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while
| in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount
| of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Then just provide spin gravity for the crew habitat.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| "just"
|
| It's theoretically possible for sure, but we've never
| done that in practice and it's far from trivial.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Good points. Spin "gravity" is also quite challenging to
| acclimatize to because it's not uniform like planetary
| gravity. Lots of nausea and unintuitive gyroscopic
| effects when moving. It's definitely not a "just"
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, "just."
|
| Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car
| driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well.
| It's a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn't
| decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a
| mystery.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 1g of acceleration is enormous compared to a child in a
| merry go round actually.
|
| > And Gemini tested it once as well.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| _They were able to generate a small amount of artificial
| gravity, about 0.00015 g_
|
| So yes, you need an effect 60 000 times stronger than
| this.
|
| And you want that to be relatively uniform over the size
| of an astronaut so you need a very big merry go round.
|
| Nuclear fission is also a basic feature of physics, that
| doesn't mean engineering a nuclear power plant is
| straightforward.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's not, actually. I've swung my kids around at multiple
| gees.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The economics don't work the same on earth.
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| What makes the economics better in space?
|
| Are there any unique use-cases waiting to be unleashed?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Regular maintenance methods are cheap on earth and
| infeasible in space.
|
| Keep in mind economics is all about allocation of scarce
| resources with alternative uses.
| protocolture wrote:
| Did Microsoft do any of that with their submersible tests?
|
| My feeling is that, a bit like starlink, you would just
| deprecate failed hardware, rather than bother with all the
| moving parts to replace faulty ram.
|
| Does mean your comms and OOB tools need to be better than the
| average american colo provider but I would hope that would be a
| given.
| protocolture wrote:
| >The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive
| number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from
| the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that
| would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
|
| And once you remove all the moving parts, you just fill the
| whole thing with oil rather than air and let heat transfer
| more smoothly to the radiators.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| First, oil is much heavier than air.
|
| Second: you still need radiators to dissipate heat that is
| in oil somehow.
| sagarm wrote:
| Does using oil solve the mass problem? Liquids aren't
| light.
| protocolture wrote:
| I would wager that its lighter than:
|
| Repair robots
|
| Enough air between servers to allow robots to access and
| replace componentry.
|
| Spare componentry.
|
| An eject/return system.
|
| Heatpipes from every server to the radiators.
| junon wrote:
| I would wager it isn't.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| Oil, like air, doesn't convent well in 0G, you'll need
| pretty hefty pumps and well designed layouts to ensure no
| hot spots form. Heat pipes are at least passive and don't
| depend on gravity.
| qmr wrote:
| Mineral oil density is around 900kg / cubic meter.
|
| Not sure this is such a great idea.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Why does it need to be robots?
|
| On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If
| the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it's not that absurd
| to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space
| datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever
| we have in the future.
| monster_truck wrote:
| That isn't going to last for much longer with the way power
| density projections are looking.
|
| Consider that we've been at the point where layers of
| monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans
| get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite
| some time now.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| You mean like every single kitchen?
| dweinus wrote:
| You might be thinking of 100F, a toasty summer day. 100C
| on the other hand (about 212F) is fatal even in zero
| humidity.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Well, after a while. A decently hot Finnish sauna...
| monster_truck wrote:
| No, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to
| death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you
| within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside
| of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans.
|
| DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do
| occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim
| hundreds of lives a year.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Bingo.
|
| It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in
| launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't
| really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to
| air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).
|
| (Especially irritating is the continued assertion that
| thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that
| every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a
| radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)
| weq wrote:
| Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship
| rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!
| Nevermark wrote:
| And in the meantime, he has responsibly redistributed and
| recycled their mass. Avoiding any concern that Earth's
| mass could be negatively impacted.
| mavhc wrote:
| How will he overtake all the other reusable rockets at
| this rate?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won't ever
| happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn't viable.
| But THAT'S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap
| about size of radiators.
|
| (And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching
| far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world
| combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet
| has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital
| rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about
| 10 years ago in 2015).
| verzali wrote:
| It is really hard, and it is something you need to take
| into careful consideration when designing a satellite.
|
| It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being
| generated that you somehow have to get rid of.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of
| (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the
| thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than
| other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower
| (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator
| system might need to be large. But large isn't the same
| as difficult.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat
| are easy.
|
| The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would
| need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the
| ISS for that datacenter.
|
| The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia
| in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2.
| Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2
| of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate
| to.
|
| That's a lot.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, just attach a Haven module to the data center.
| verzali wrote:
| If you want to have people you need to add in a whole lot of
| life support and additional safety to keep people alive.
| Robots are easier, since they don't die so easily. If you can
| get them to work at all, that is.
| intended wrote:
| Life support can be on the shuttle/transport. Or it can be
| its own hab... space office ? Space workshop ?
| kranke155 wrote:
| What about food, water and air filtration needs?
| Mtinie wrote:
| Presumably those needs are handled on the habitat where
| the orbital maintenance team lives when they aren't
| visiting satellite data centers.
|
| Treat each maintenance trip like an EVA (extra vehicular
| activity) and bring your life support with you.
| tokai wrote:
| Thats life support.
| monster_truck wrote:
| I suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use
| some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc
| that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em
| out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the
| landing bit
|
| I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of
| e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for
| parted out supercomptuers)
| closewith wrote:
| Spreading heavy metals in the upper atmosphere. Fun.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| seems to be an industry standard
| monster_truck wrote:
| Seems like a bit of pointless whataboutism when we're still
| using leaded fuel in planes and helicopters
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the
| least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw
| lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be
| a key factor there).
|
| > The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus
| the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of
| 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It
| equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.
|
| 6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch
| the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways)
| and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add
| a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail.
|
| That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they
| figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.
| nine_k wrote:
| Indeed, MS had it easier with a huge, readily available
| cooling reservoir and a layer of water that additionally
| protects (a little) against cosmic rays, plus the whole thing
| had to be heavy enough to sink. An orbital datacenter would
| be in a opposite situation: all cooling is radiative, many
| more high-energy particles, and the weight should be as light
| as possible.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Power!? Isnt that just PV and batteries? LEO has like 1.5h
| orbit.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| It's a Datacenter... I guess solar is what they're planning
| to use, but the array will be so large it'll have its own
| gravity well
| bevr1337 wrote:
| All mass has gravity
| swores wrote:
| Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its
| own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.
|
| But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity
| well".
|
| > _" First, let us simply define what a gravity well is.
| A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe
| the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in
| space."_
|
| - https://medium.com/intuition/what-are-gravity-
| wells-3c1fb6d6...
|
| So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to
| get past some boundary below which things don't have
| gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough
| gravity to matter.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be
| metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a
| gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture
| other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and
| relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold
| reached after certain mass.
|
| "Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas
| Adams put it best
|
| > Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how
| vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you
| may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist,
| but that's just peanuts to space.
|
| From an education site:
|
| > Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more
| massive an object is, the more it bends
|
| They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a
| bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts
| far more influence
|
| https://www.howitworksdaily.com/the-solar-system-what-is-
| a-g...
| rtkwe wrote:
| As mentioned in the article the Starcloud design requires
| solar arrays that are ~2x more efficient than those
| deployed on the ISS. Simply scaling them up introduces more
| drag and weight problems as do the batteries needed to
| suffice for the 45 minutes of darkness the satellite will
| receive.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Power is solar and cooling is radiators. They did the math on
| it, its feasible and mostly an engineering problem now.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| The biggest difference is radiation. Even in LEO, you will
| get radiation-caused Single Events that will affect the
| hardware. That could be a small error or a destructive error,
| depending on what gets hit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates
| than expected
|
| Underwater pods are the polar opposite of space in terms of
| failure risks. They don't require a rocket launch to get
| there, and they further insulate the servers from radiation
| compared to operating on the surface of the Earth, rather
| than increasing exposure.
|
| (Also, much easier to cool.)
| intended wrote:
| It sounds like building it on the moon would be better.
| vidarh wrote:
| I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we
| just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space,
| and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a
| year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally
| viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time
| horizon.
|
| Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in
| the hardware before launch, you'd expect low failure rates for
| a long period and it's quite likely it'd be cheaper to _not_
| replace components and just ensure enough redundancy for key
| systems (power, cooling, networking) that you could just shut
| down and disable any dead servers, and then replace the whole
| unit when enough parts have failed.
| rajnathani wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up
| "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is
| easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and
| not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and
| then simply replace faulty servers around once per year.
|
| Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL
| and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially
| as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching
| on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve
| crossed 9 points).
| btown wrote:
| https://accendoreliability.com/the-bath-tub-curve-
| explained/ is an interesting breakdown of bath tub curve
| dynamics for those curious!
| rtkwe wrote:
| Wonder if you could game that in theory by burning in the
| components on the surface before launch or if the launch
| would cause a big enough spike from the vibration damage
| that it's not worth it.
| vidarh wrote:
| I suspect you'd absolutely want to burn in before launch,
| maybe even including simulating some mechanical stress to
| "shake out" more issues, but it is a valid question how
| much burn in is worth doing before and after launch.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Vibration testing is a completely standard part of space
| payload pre-flight testing. You would absolutely want to
| vibe-test (no, not that kind) at both a component level
| and fully integrated before launch.
| btown wrote:
| PSA: do not vibe-code the hardware controller for your
| vibration testing rig. This does not pass the vibe test.
| dapperdrake wrote:
| Maybe they are different types of failure modes. Solar
| panel semiconductors hate vibration.
|
| And then, there is of course radiation trouble.
|
| So those two kinds of burn-in require a launch ti space
| anyway.
| dapperdrake wrote:
| Ah, the good old BETA distribution.
|
| Programming and CS people somehow rarely look at that.
| Coffeewine wrote:
| It would be interesting to see if the failure rate across
| time holds true after a rocket launch and time spent in
| space. My guess is that it wouldn't, but that's just a guess.
| vidarh wrote:
| I think it's likely the overall rate would be higher, and
| you might find you need more aggressive burn-in, but even
| then you'd need an extremely high failure rate before it's
| more efficient to replace components than writing them off.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The bathtub curve isn't the same for all components of a
| server though. Writing off the entire server because a
| single ram chip or ssd or network card failed would limit
| the entire server to the lifetime of the weakest part. I
| think you would want redundant hot spares of certain
| components with lower mean time between failures.
| vidarh wrote:
| We _do_ often write off an entire server because a single
| component fails because the lifetime of the shortest-
| lifetime components is usually long enough that even on-
| earth with easy access it 's often not worth the cost to
| try to repair. In an easy-to-access data centre, the
| component most likely to get replaced would be hot-
| swappable drives or power supplies, but it's been about 2
| decades since the last time I worked anywhere where
| anyone bothered to check for failed RAM or failed CPUs to
| salvage a server. And lot of servers don't have network
| devices you can replace without soldering, and haven't
| for a long time outside of really high end networking.
|
| And at sufficient scale, once you plan for that it means
| you can massively simplify the servers. The amount of
| waste a sever case suitable for hot-swapping drives adds
| if you're not actually going to use the capability is
| massive.
| asah wrote:
| serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from
| the physical transition to space?
|
| on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole
| rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement
| and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration
| of the flight and loss of gravity...
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yes, an orbital launch probably resets the bathtub to some
| degree.
| lumost wrote:
| I suspect the thermal system would look very different from
| a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake
| loose - but do nothing in space.
|
| Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally
| conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the
| thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external
| radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Connectors have to survive the extreme vibration of a
| rocket launch. Parts routinely shake off boards in
| testing even when using non-COTS space rated packaging
| designed for extreme environments. That amplifies the
| cost of everything.
|
| The Russians are the only ones who package their unmanned
| platform electronics in pressure vessels. Everyone else
| operates in vacuum, so no fans.
| 83 wrote:
| >>immersed in a thermally conductive resin
|
| sounds heavy
| VectorLock wrote:
| The original article even addresses this directly. Plus
| hardware returns over fast enough that you'll simply be
| replacing modules with a smattering of dead servers with
| entirely new generations anyways.
| dapperdrake wrote:
| Really? Even radiation hardened hardware? Aren't there way
| higher size floors on the transistors?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or
| support systems.
|
| Redundancy is a small issue on Earth, but completely changes
| the calculations for space because you need more of
| everything, which makes the already-unfavourable space and
| mass requirements even less plausible.
|
| Without backup cooling and power one small failure could take
| the entire facility offline.
|
| And active cooling - which is a given at these power
| densities - requires complex pumps and plumbing which have to
| survive a launch.
|
| The whole idea is bonkers.
|
| IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper,
| simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a
| radio or microwave comms mesh.
|
| I have no idea if that's any more economic, but at least it
| solves the most obvious redundancy and deployment issues.
| conradev wrote:
| Many small satellites also increases the surface area for
| cooling
| tessierashpool wrote:
| even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space
| as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris
| left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a
| very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is
| projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS,
| they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April
| and it happens about once a year.
|
| the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens,
| and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone
| around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of
| space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.
| vidarh wrote:
| > The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or
| support systems.
|
| The analysis is a third party analysis that among other
| things presumes they'll launch unmodified Nvidia racks,
| which would make no sense. It might be this means Starcloud
| are bonkers, but it might also mean the analysis is based
| on flawed assumptions about what they're planning to do. Or
| a bit of both.
|
| > IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of
| cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats
| connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
|
| This would get you significantly less redundancy other than
| against physical strikes than having the same redundancy in
| a single unit and letting you control what feeds what, the
| same way we have smart, redundant power supplies and
| cooling in every data center (and in the racks they're
| talking about using as the basis).
|
| If power and cooling die faster than the servers, you'd
| either need to overprovision or shut down servers to
| compensate, but it's certainly not all or nothing.
| aerophilic wrote:
| There is a neat solve for the thermal problem that York
| Space systems has been advocating (based on Russian
| tech)... put everything in an enclosure.
|
| https://www.yorkspacesystems.com/
|
| Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things
| at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes,
| there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate,
| but dramatically simplifies things.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| A new meaning to the term "space junk"
| drewg123 wrote:
| I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration,
| G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been
| working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish
| number of failures on initial bringup in space.
| Retric wrote:
| Electronics can be extremely resilient to vibration and g
| forces. Self guided artillery shells such as the M982
| Excalibur include fairly normal electronics for GPS
| guidance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| On the ground vibration testing is a standard part of pre-
| launch spacecraft testing. This would trigger most (not
| all) vibration/G-force related failures on the ground
| rather than at the actual launch.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The big question mark is how many failures you cause and
| catch on the first cycle and how much you're just putting
| extra wear on the components that pass the test the first
| time and don't get replaced.
| geon wrote:
| Yes. I think I read a blogpost from Backblaze about running
| their Red Pod rack mounted chassis some 10 years ago.
|
| They would just keep the failed drives in the chassi. _Maybe_
| swap out the entire chassi if enough drives died.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Don't you need to look at different failure scenarios or
| patterns in orbit due to exposure to cosmic rays as well?
|
| It just seems funny, I recall when servers started getting more
| energy dense it was a revelation to many computer folks that
| safe operating temps in a datacenter should be quite high.
|
| I'd imagine operating in space has lots of revelations in
| store. It's a fascinating idea with big potential impact... but
| I wouldn't expect this investment to pay out!
| lumost wrote:
| I used to build and operate data center infrastructure. There
| is very limited reason to do anything more than a warranty
| replacement on a GPU. With a high quality hardware vendor that
| properly engineers the physical machine, failure rates can be
| contained to less than .5% per year. Particularly if the
| network has redundancy to avoid critical mass failures.
|
| In this case, I see no reason to perform any replacements of
| any kind. Proper networked serial port and power controls would
| allow maintenance for firmware/software issues.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think what you actually do is let it gradually degrade over
| time and then launch a new one.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| What, why would you fly out and replace it? It'd be much
| cheaper just to launch more.
| spullara wrote:
| you don't replace it, you just let it fail and over time the
| datacenter wears out.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| good use case for bitcoin mining?
|
| - lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them
| fail as they go
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| No. Too much heat to dissipate. Plus there's no benefit to
| mining in space.
| BruSwain wrote:
| If you are out of the magnetosphere, wouldn't your data be
| subject to way more cosmic ray interference, to the point that
| its actually a consideration?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| ECC everything?
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| Yes. And most server hardware is already at least ECC ram.
| You may still want some light radiation shielding to prevent
| the worst, maybe some heavier shielding for solar flares. But
| beyond that, simple error correction can be baked into the
| software - ecc the bootloader and filesystem and you are
| mostly good to go
| josefx wrote:
| Isn't ECC only applied to RAM? Do any current gen CPUs have
| ECC cache?
| axoltl wrote:
| I can't comment on AMD or Intel but Apple Silicon
| definitely uses ECC for at least the system level cache. On
| top of that it performs cache healing (swapping out bad
| lines for spares) on every cache level every time the
| system boots.
| dumah wrote:
| Geostationary orbiters operate there during the day but this
| concept would position systems 100x closer to earth and well
| inside the protective envelope.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| In LEO, there is a lot of testing and mitigation you can do
| with your design to help reduce the chance and impact of
| radiation single events. For example, redundancy for key
| components, ECC for RAM, supervisor hardware, RAID or other
| storage tooling, etc.
| philosophty wrote:
| _" Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all
| the time."_
|
| This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once
| it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in
| constant use.
|
| There are definitely failures but they're very low unless
| something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad
| batch of hardware.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| So, hardware lasts for years except in the cases where it
| doesn't?
| westpfelia wrote:
| Backblaze is a perfect example of parts failing.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
|
| Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only
| harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes
| to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in
| space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space
| as it stands is a nothing burger.
| vidarh wrote:
| The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low
| enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can
| plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.
|
| Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact _cut
| costs_ because it allows you to design the space without
| consideration of humans needing to be able to access and
| insert /remove servers.
|
| The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance,
| the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of
| the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept
| failures and just disable failed equipment.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > unless something is wrong like ... vibration
|
| so you might have problems if you were to do something that
| causes a lot of vibration, like launch the entire data center
| into space?
| hughes wrote:
| Who's asking for datacenters in space?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Who's asking for datacenters in space?
|
| At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate
| that in particular militaries might be interested.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of
| my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I
| shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I
| learned two things:
|
| 1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have
| to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things.
|
| 2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat
| generation and actively radiating surfaces need to be in harmony
| during the whole mission.
|
| Preventing the vehicle from getting too hot is usually a much
| bigger problem than preventing it from getting too cold. This
| might be surprising because laypeople usually associate space
| with cold. In reality you can always heat if you have energy but
| cooling is hard if all you have is radiation and you are
| operating at a fixed and relatively low temperature level.
|
| The bottom line is that running a datacenter in space makes not
| much sense from a thermal standpoint and there must be other
| compelling reasons for a decision to do so.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| They address that issue in the link; The propose a 63m^2
| radiator for heat dissipation.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Sure it is doable. My point is that at room temperature
| convection is a so much more efficient heat transfer
| mechanism that I wonder why someone would even think about
| doing without it.
| teekert wrote:
| Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi
| movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the
| vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif).
|
| Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so
| realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit.
| I wonder what would really would happen and how fast...
|
| People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead
| of complaining about her sudden use of the force where
| previously she did not show any such talents.)
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so
| that's pretty cold.
|
| But I think what people/movies don't understand is that
| there's almost no conductive thermal transfer going on,
| because there's not much matter to do it. It's all radiation,
| which is why heat is a much bigger problem, because you can
| only radiate heat away, you can't conduct it. And whatever
| you use to radiate heat away can also potentially receive
| radiation from things like the Sun, making your craft even
| hotter.
| amluto wrote:
| > Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so
| that's pretty cold.
|
| What is this "empty space" you speak of? Genuinely empty
| space is empty and does not have a clearly defined
| temperature. If you are in space in our universe, very far
| from everything else, then the temperature of the cosmic
| microwave background is what matters, and that's a few K.
| If you're in our solar system in an orbit near Earth, the
| radiation field is wildly far from any sort of thermal
| equilibrium, and the steady state temperature of a passive
| black body will depend strongly on whether it's in the
| Earth's shadow, and it's a _lot_ hotter than a few K when
| exposed to sunlight.
| singron wrote:
| Wouldn't a body essentially freeze dry as a wet being exposed
| to vacuum? I.e. the temperature of the space is still
| irrelevant and the cooling comes from vaporization.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 2001 did it pretty close to right, but watch it with normies
| and they'll laugh at it because it doesn't meet their
| expectations.
| maxander wrote:
| It's not _that_ dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the
| water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to
| evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get
| you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you're giving up enough
| fluids. I don't know whether you freeze over or dry out
| first, but I'm sure someone at NASA has done the math.
| nusl wrote:
| What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space
| it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?
| weinzierl wrote:
| Room temperature on earth. In physics room temperature is
| used as a technical term and actually pretty universally
| defined as 20degC (293.15 K).
|
| Traditionally in European papers it used to be 18degC, so if
| Einstein and Schrodinger talk about room temperature it is
| that.
|
| I've heard in chemistry and stamp collecting they use 25degC
| but that is heresy.
| swores wrote:
| Maybe you did mean heresy, which would be funny (but a
| perfectly valid opinion to have)...
|
| But I suspect that's a typo, and you meant 'heresay'? :D
| rwmj wrote:
| It's like a thermos flask where the spaceship is the contents
| and space is the insulating vacuum.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| The caveat to this is that that this also dependent on where in
| the lifecycle of the satellite you are at. For example after
| launch, you might just have your survival heaters on, which
| will keep you within generally an industrial range (e.g.
| >-40c), and you might not reach higher temps until you hit
| nominal operations. But a lot of the hardware specs for
| temperature often are closer standard "industrial" specs rather
| than special mil or NASA specs.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first
| place?
|
| Free cooling?
|
| Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the
| radiators need to me massive.
|
| Access to solar energy?
|
| Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does
| that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space
| in the first place?
|
| Physical isolation and security?
|
| Against manipulation maybe, but not against denial of service.
| Willfully damaged satellite is something I expect to see in the
| news in the foreseeable future.
|
| Low latency comms?
|
| Latency is limited by distance and speed of light. Everyone with
| a satellite internet connections knows that low latency is not a
| particular strength of it.
|
| Marketing and PR?
|
| That, probably.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Thought of another one:
|
| Environmental impact?
|
| No land use, no thermal stress for rivers on one hand but the
| huge overhead of a space launch on the other.
| rwmj wrote:
| Ability to raise money from gullible investors.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Speed of light is actually quite an advantage, in theory at
| least. Speed of light in optical fiber is quite a bit slower
| (takes 50% longer) than in vacuum.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not really. Fiber is more 2/3 of free space propagation and
| that puts the break-even point of direct fiber connection vs
| LEO up- and downlink at a geodesic distance of about 12000
| km. So, for most data centers you want to reach a fiber is
| the better option.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Not every datacenter use case is latency sensitive. Backup
| storage or GPU compute, for example.
| danans wrote:
| But then why bother with the added expense of launching into
| space? It's definitely not for environmental reasons.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment.
|
| Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other
| sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from
| pretty much any national regulations.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A bit like international waters. I wonder when we'll see the
| first space pirates.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > A bit like international waters.
|
| Which is a good analogy; international waters are far from
| lawless.
|
| You're still subject to the law of your flag state, just as
| if you were on their territory. In addition to that, you're
| subject to _everyone 's_ jurisdiction if you commit certain
| crimes - including piracy.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction
| itsoktocry wrote:
| This might be true, but unrealistic.
|
| If you run amiss of US (or EU) regulators, they will never
| say, "well, it's in space, out of our jurisdiction!".
|
| They will make your life hell on Earth.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Space is terrible for that. There's only a handful of
| countries with launch vehicles and/or launch sites. You
| obviously need to be in their good graces for the launch to
| be approved.
|
| If you want permissive regulatory environment, just spend the
| money buying a Mercedes for some politician in a corrupt
| country, you'll get a lot further...
| nilamo wrote:
| Quick, we need a new Cryptonomicon, in space!
| neom wrote:
| I've talked to the founder of Starcloud about this, there is
| just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the
| future, and further and further out into space. He thinks now
| is the right time to learn how to compute up there because
| people will want to process, and maybe orchestrate processing
| between many devices, in space. He's fully aware of all of the
| objections in this hn comments section, he just doesn't believe
| they are insurmountable and he believes interoperable compute
| hubs in space will be required over the next 20/30 years. He's
| in his mid 20s, so it seems like a reasonable mission to be on
| to me.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Seems far more likely that the "data generative stuff" will
| get smaller and cheaper to run (like cell phones with on-
| device models) much faster than "run a giant supercomputer in
| orbit" will become easy.
| neom wrote:
| My headlights aren't good enough so I'm unsure but
| generally that maps. To me the interoperability part is
| what is interesting, your data and my data in real time
| being consumed by some understanding agent doing automated
| research? I could imagine putting something like a Stoffel
| MPC layer in there, then nations states can more easily
| work together? I presume space data/research will be highly
| competitive, even friendly nations may want to combine data
| without knowing the underneath. We're so far out here that
| it's kinda silly, but I don't think we're out to lunch?
| Have a great weekend Chris! :)
| badcryptobitch wrote:
| There are certainly nation states that are looking for
| ways to 1) prevent their satellites colliding with one
| another (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/850.pdf) and 2)
| being able to do forms of computation that might be risky
| to do on earth for national security reasons.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > forms of computation that might be risky to do on earth
| for national security reasons
|
| Such as...?
| dieortin wrote:
| > there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in
| space in the future
|
| Why?
| neom wrote:
| Because near all analysts have it on somewhere between a 5%
| and 7% CAGR.
| nessbot wrote:
| That didn't answer the question but just repeat the
| original claim differently. Where are they getting those
| numbers?
| neom wrote:
| The Forrester report I'm using to invest in this stuff,
| I've read some Gartner on it also.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Earth is the closest spot for most of space. It makes most
| sense for satellites to send data back to Earth. They would
| have to find a use where with lots of compute but latency
| really matters.
|
| For farther out, computer on ships, stations, or bases makes
| sense, but that is different than free floating satellites.
| They already have power, cooling, and maintenance.
|
| It is like saying there should be compute in the air for all
| the airplanes flying around.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first
| place?
|
| At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate
| that in particular militaries might be interested.
| russdill wrote:
| On the environmental front, when it comes to the of life the
| entire data center is incinerated in the Earth's upper
| atmosphere
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| One of the answers in OP is
|
| > A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which
| contributes to climate change--so migrating to space would
| alleviate the toll on Earth's thermal budget. This seems like a
| compelling environmental argument. TDCs already consume about
| 1-1.5% of global electricity and it's safe to assume that this
| will only grow in the pursuit of AGI.
|
| The comparison here is between solar powered TDCs in Space vs
| TDCs on Earth.
|
| - A TDC in space contributes to global warming due to
| mining+manufacturing emissions and spaceflight emissions.
|
| - A comparable TDC on Earth would be solar+battery run. You
| will likely need a larger solar panel array than in space. Note
| a solar panel in operation does not really contribute to global
| warming. So the question is whether the additional Earth solar
| panel+battery manufacturing emissions are greater than
| launching the smaller array + TDC into space.
|
| I would guess launching into space has much higher emissions.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Apparently the only way to make renewable energy cool is to
| _put it in space_
| fooker wrote:
| Cooling things in space is insanely difficult, as there's no
| conduction or convection.
|
| Cooling is one of the main challenges in designing data centers.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| This is such a gloriously stupid fucking idea.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The launch costs in the article look quite off from the outset.
|
| A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg
| range; Starship's main purpose is to massively reduce launch
| costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a
| failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full
| reusability is in place.
|
| Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not _that_ far.
|
| The original "white paper" [1] also does acknowledge that a
| separate launch is needed for the solar panels and radiators at a
| 1:1 ratio to the server launches, which is ignored here. I think
| the author leaned in a bit too much on their _deep research_ AI
| assistant output.
|
| [1] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
| angadh wrote:
| please read Table 1.
| t1E9mE7JTRjf wrote:
| I wonder what the implication on data protection / privacy laws
| and the like would be. Would it be as simple as there'd be no
| laws, or is the location of the users still relevant?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Laws definitely still apply.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
|
| > Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international
| responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-
| governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and
| other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and
| continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the
| Treaty" and that States Party shall bear international
| responsibility for national space activities whether carried
| out by governmental or non-governmental entities.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Starcloud's target is to achieve a 5 GW cluster with solar
| arrays spanning 4 km by 4 km
|
| Doesn't this massively surface area also mean a proportionately
| large risk of getting damaged by orbital debris?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes. You'd have to design them to be able to take a certain
| level of hits.
|
| This is already a thing on the ISS, Shuttle, Voyager probes,
| etc.
| perihelions wrote:
| I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute
| circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a
| fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-
| conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required
| thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular
| grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide
| those heat sources (from few large sources, into many, small
| ones). At fixed areal power density, if the unit heat source is
| Q, the plate thickness d [?] Q^{-3/2}. (This is intuitive: the
| asymptotic limit is a uniform, continuous heat source exactly
| matched to a uniform radiation heat sink; hence heat conduction
| is zero). So: could one contemplate an array of very tiny CPU
| sub-units, grided evenly over a thin Al foil--say at the
| milliwatt scale with millimeter-scale separation? It'd be mostly
| empty space (radiator area) and interconnect. It'd be thermally
| self-sufficient and weigh practically nothing.
| api wrote:
| Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have
| a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the
| outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate
| layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that,
| and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds
| (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay
| oriented this way or an L point. Free compute for the life span
| of the chips powered by the sun.
|
| A lot of these is a supercomputing Dyson swarm.
|
| Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just
| exposed on that back layer?
| perihelions wrote:
| I understand that the multi-layer insulation idea doesn't
| accomplish much unless you're trying to reach deep cryogenic
| temperatures passively (as infrared telescopes do!) It's a
| difficult structural design which would only cut your heat
| budget by a small constant factor. Remember that much of that
| heat on the solar side is making its way over to the cold
| side by way of electricity--the compute units are a heat
| "source" of similar magnitude as the solar input itself.
|
| edit: I think the optimal packing could be a simple rolled-up
| scroll, that unfurls in space into a ribbon. A very lazy
| design where the ribbon has no orientation control, randomly
| furls and knots; and only half of it is (randomly) facing the
| sun at any given time. And the compute units are designed
| work under those conditions--as they are to be robust against
| peers randomly disappearing to micrometeorites, to space
| radiation, and so forth.
|
| Because, you could make up for everything in quantity. A
| small 3x5 meter cylinder of rolled-up foil stores--at the mm-
| thickness scale, 10's of gigawatts of compute; at the micron
| scale, 10's of terawatts. Of course that end is far-future
| sci-fi stuff!
| Sanzig wrote:
| > Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be
| just exposed on that back layer?
|
| Even in LEO they benefit tremendously from radiation
| shielding, even a couple millimeters of aluminum greatly
| reduces the total ionizing dose. Also LEO has the issue of
| monatomic oxygen in the thermosphere which tends to react
| aggressively with the surface of anything it touches. An
| aluminium spacecraft structure isn't really affected, but I
| don't think it'd be very good for a semiconductor wafer.
| dumah wrote:
| Radiation at desirable operating temperatures is a relatively
| weak means of heat transport, hence spreaders.
|
| Only a big power-efficient chip like M2 Ultra could survive
| if it could _only_ radiate from one side of the wafer into
| CMB.
|
| The rest of the silicon will become molten at 100% TDP: H100,
| Xeon, Core, EPYC, Ryzen.
|
| Most would be over 400C at 1% TDP.
|
| Conduction and convection are linear or close and are
| effective at desirable temperatures, whereas thermal
| radiation is quartic and highly convex.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Let's start by acknowledging that there is no Starship and it's
| likely that the current iteration of that system is not viable.
| It will need to be redesigned, and no one even knows if it's
| possible not to mention economically feasible.
| happyopossum wrote:
| That's... bold. Yeah, the development process is different from
| what we're used to seeing with government-led programs, but so
| far most stages of starship have proven viable (ie they've
| worked at least once) and each launch gets closer.
|
| This claim also seems to ignore historical context - people
| said the same things about Falcon, then Falcon Heavy but those
| launch every few days now. You're basically saying that either
| you know more than the single most successful and experienced
| team of engineers in reusable space launch vehicle world, or
| they're busy burning their own cash by committing some sort of
| fraud.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| There is 0 reason to put a data center in space. For every single
| reason beyond "investor vibes" you can accomplish the same thing
| on earth for a significantly lower cost.
| Havoc wrote:
| I'm mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I've
| seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible
| mrguyorama wrote:
| But but but they release a "whitepaper"! Surely that's worth at
| least ten million dollars!
|
| BRB, buying a copy of Microsoft Word so I can retire.
| rob_c wrote:
| > I'm mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding.
|
| The track record here I think explains "moonshot" investments
| on wild promises by VCs looking to cash out mid-track. It's a
| financial grift, not a technical challenge to actually be
| overcome.
| ZiiS wrote:
| They can get highly qualified space engineers to do a lot of pre-
| qualification work for free though! (Cunningham's law)
| hotpotatoe wrote:
| This is putting the cart before the horse in the most literal
| sense, SpaceX can't even get a Starship into space without it
| breaking apart.
| hartator wrote:
| > There, 24/7 solar power is unhindered by day/night cycles,
| weather, and atmospheric losses (attenuation).
|
| Wouldn't the earth still get in the way of the sun or it's too
| far away?
| diabeetusman wrote:
| Normally yes, but the L1 Lagrange point always would have an
| unobstructed view of the sun. Granted, L1 is a lot further away
| than LEO (~3x the distance to the moon), so that makes it
| harder and more expensive to get to
| qayxc wrote:
| You don't need to go that far. That's what sun-synchronous
| orbits are for.
| rob_c wrote:
| Always entertaining to read how some things are so obviously
| wrong as to be laughable, but this is somewhere between solar
| roadways being feasible and hyperloop being physically possible.
| It's a grab for money from idiot investors imo. (fitting in with
| OpenAI's current strategy to dilute control I'll admit)
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is way sillier than putting data centers under water.
|
| https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-cente...
| gloosx wrote:
| Hmm, so you could launch a 100 tonne bitcoin mining rack and
| basically mine it with free energy 24/7? Another crazy idea for
| Elon, need to calc how long will it take to payback the launch
| cost.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember
| that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and
| the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes,
| all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given
| sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just
| having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland
| or a cold place. Makes no sense
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| My facile policies would fix this
|
| > Data centres require tremendous amounts of energy
|
| Set up a pollution tax on losers like coal, oil, methane, and let
| the market pick winners like solar, wind, nuclear
|
| > A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which
| contributes to climate change
|
| Pollution tax would fix this
|
| > Real estate for data centres is a massive bottleneck and this
| land could be used for other purposes
|
| Not really. They're super high density. A land value tax would
| fix this.
|
| People will really put computers in space before reading Henry
| George. What has this country come to?
| sellmesoap wrote:
| A random thought, having server units spring loaded, when a unit
| fails eject it and use the stored energy as an orbital boost.
| Ablative servers!
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