[HN Gopher] Data centers in space makes no sense
___________________________________________________________________
Data centers in space makes no sense
Author : ajyoon
Score : 1027 points
Date : 2026-02-03 19:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (civai.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (civai.org)
| Bender wrote:
| AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in
| space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-
| centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non
| theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming
| from?
|
| If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two
| redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked
| out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision
| issues.
| shetaye wrote:
| I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the
| data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth
| is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths
| [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh
| being a cluster.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-
| la... (and this is two years ago!) [2]
| https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...
| reactordev wrote:
| This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of
| magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of
| magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear
| reactor to it. It's just such a fever dream at this stage
| that he's really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate
| debts from Grok failures.
| kuschku wrote:
| For AI training, latency is one of the limiting factors,
| which needs to be kept in the nanoseconds. And a light-
| nanosecond is famously almost exactly 1 foot.
|
| That's why Lumen/Starcloud's designs all assume it'll be a
| space station with all containers connected to one central
| networking spine.
| vitaflo wrote:
| This is the thing I don't get. Everyone talking about the "how"
| but nobody talking about the "why"? It makes literally no
| sense.
| Bender wrote:
| The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull
| is something "data-center sized" _whatever that means to
| them_ could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser,
| Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun _to quickly
| eradicate other satellites_ , Off-Planet archives of stuff,
| Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all
| the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
|
| Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain
| the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations.
| It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and
| that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Snake oil, like bitcoin.
|
| A lot of people will invest in this because "it's the future"
| and a few will make a lot of money on that.
| alansammarone wrote:
| Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math
| for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about
| how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets
| in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough
| computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI
| specifically).
| Starman_Jones wrote:
| Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling
| with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to
| get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst
| possible place to put a data center.
| palmotea wrote:
| That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in
| space is definitely an idea.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas
| that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data
| centres in space is most certainly one of them.
| emchammer wrote:
| Just ask this scientician.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Uhhhh
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
|
| >Uhhhh
|
| Thanks, I wouldn't have noticed how wrong that was
| otherwise ;)
|
| It's most certainly _two_ of them.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail
| he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace
| engineering company, just an ideas guy.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every
| detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace
| engineering company, just an ideas guy.
|
| Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have
| multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip
| through the company.
|
| The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod
| along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get
| back to real engineering and design things such that they
| make sense.
|
| The folks working there are under no delusion that he has
| any business being involved in rocket science, it's
| fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that
| way.
| ta988 wrote:
| Or you are actively trying to have the meetings when you
| are sure he cannot be present because he keeps derailing
| them.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
| Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar
| in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than
| yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire
| people.
| lokar wrote:
| Shedding the very slow process of "legacy"
| defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving
| faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you
| need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody
| else out of the PC operating system and office software
| sectors: everybody else was even _less_ competent.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Bill Gates was also pretty good
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| More capable at programming or kicking people out of
| contention?
| robocat wrote:
| I always felt that Microsoft's winning move was to be
| consistently mediocre. They just waited until competitors
| screwed up. Now they're following in IBMs or Intel's
| footsteps - concentrating everything on the enterprise
| market and slowly dying.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
|
| Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and
| bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's
| not much competition.
|
| > Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty
| similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables
| than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire
| people.
|
| Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are
| successful due to his micromanagement. In reality,
| they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful
| engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented
| people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies
| that hold the whole thing together.
|
| There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that
| he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed
| him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor
| to even understand how what was implemented differs from
| his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality
| adjacent ideas.
|
| The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to
| influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is
| up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten
| past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
| robocat wrote:
| > NASA/JPL/defense contractor
|
| Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has
| nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has
| RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states
| and is only for small payloads yet.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has
| nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has
| RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states
| and is only for small payloads yet.
|
| And which of those is also an American institution, with
| American educated employees and American cultural values,
| operating in an American legal and business framework?
|
| Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is
| laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th
| grade STEM class down the street!
|
| Russia would've been a much better comparison given the
| history of the world we live in, but still not apples to
| apples.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Have you ever worked at a company? Was how profitable the
| company was directly related to how high-functioning it
| was? Not in my experience.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| This is so true.
|
| When you boil it down though, sometimes more than one
| company is built using almost the same exact mold, and
| the only major difference between them is the _idea_ that
| the business plan is bult around.
|
| More profitable ideas are good to have.
|
| High-functioning or not.
| oblio wrote:
| > Why has Tesla been successful?
|
| Survivor bias. He's had how many failed businesses? 10?
| Probably more.
| lokar wrote:
| I have heard similar things
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Any cool kid in uni has had the same views as you do for
| ten years.
|
| What do you and them know that the countless extremely
| successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do
| not?
|
| https://erik-engheim.medium.com/is-elon-musk-just-a-
| sales-gu...
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > What do you and them know that the countless extremely
| successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do
| not?
|
| Did you read my comment?
|
| "I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken
| a trip through the company."
|
| I am literally referring to extremely successful
| engineers who have worked directly with Elon.
|
| I'm going to need more than a puff piece on some random
| Elon stan's medium page to outweigh what I've heard from
| my friends.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _Very confused by this plan._
|
| How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
| general1465 wrote:
| Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of
| excessive heat in space.
| reactordev wrote:
| It's a vacuum
| floren wrote:
| Vacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we
| use it to keep our coffee hot
| reactordev wrote:
| which is why the whole idea of data centers in space is
| ridiculous.
| floren wrote:
| I'm glad to realize we're in violent agreement, I thought
| you were implying cooling would be easy due to the
| vacuum!
| reactordev wrote:
| It can be solved with radiator fins and cold plates but
| yeah, it's not an easy task.
| avmich wrote:
| What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to
| existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites
| generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most
| of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do
| that successfully - what is the specific problem you're
| talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
| nilamo wrote:
| Are there many of those current satellites running gpus
| and actually generating lots of heat?
| avmich wrote:
| Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite
| receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and
| often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the
| question is, how much energy is received in the first
| place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of
| solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we
| know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In
| practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites
| which together aggregate the compute to the necessary
| lever and power to the corresponding level.
| vel0city wrote:
| > We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar
| panels of ISS
|
| It's average outbut is like half of that though. So
| something the size of the space station, a massive thing
| which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like
| 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you
| used the entire power budget on GPUs.
|
| And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Even the buses for giant communications satellites are
| still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current
| state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.
|
| So you're talking about an entirely different scale of
| power and needed cooling.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to
| radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data
| centers in space in the GW range.
|
| Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense
| because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates
| for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200
| metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per
| 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.
| verytrivial wrote:
| The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an
| tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the
| order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so
| something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU
| compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed
| or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble
| competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in
| SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive
| for lots of reasons.
| avmich wrote:
| > it's going to have trouble competing with even a single
| current DC
|
| This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon
| mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd
| version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60
| satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches
| for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per
| year of today's Falcon 9...
|
| The argument about problems of dissipating heat still
| stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also
| "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of
| this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically,
| out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics
| and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on
| LEO.
| protocolture wrote:
| I mean you have this around the wrong way.
|
| The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is
| because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing
| density on communication satellites, if we could
| dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue
| they would have like triple the capacity and could just
| drop everything back to the US (like their fans think
| they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of
| satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to
| a ground station usually in the same country as the
| source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the
| problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an
| unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely
| unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.
|
| I have actually argued this from the other side, and I
| reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a
| thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable
| problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor
| and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.
|
| IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get
| geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due
| to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get
| into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the
| component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its
| heavy again, and several space engineering types want to
| slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg
| copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems
| to be preferred.
|
| I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears
| the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical
| engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then
| other, better people step in to actually do it. Also
| triple the time he says it will take to solve the
| problem.
|
| And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing
| returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take
| the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped
| in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as
| possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a
| few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will
| likely trigger significant market volatility.
| 93po wrote:
| yes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer
| with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any
| day now
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Clearly 200 forward P/E and three consecutive quarters of
| missed earning is a sign of profitability.
|
| It's a stock worth $50-60 with generous valuation. The
| premium is the Elon bullshit and grift. That isn't gonna
| last forever.
| light_triad wrote:
| Here's some context: Tesla, BYD, and Xiaomi Are Playing
| Different Games https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/tesla-byd-
| and-xiaomi-are-pl...
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > with the worst profit margins
|
| The 2025 profit margin for Telsa was 4.6%. Toyota's was
| 9.4%. Telsa is famously on a multi-year sales and revenue
| decline.
| tokai wrote:
| Keep up.
| oblio wrote:
| > Sales of Tesla's electric Cybertruck fell 48% in 2025,
| new data shows.
|
| > Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in 2025, down from 38,965
| the previous year, according to figures from Kelley Blue
| Book's annual electric vehicle (EV) sales reports.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-
| mus...
|
| > A federal safety report shows that Tesla is recalling
| 63,619 of its futuristic pickups, and this seems to be the
| total number of Cybertrucks built since the first one was
| delivered at the end of 2023.
|
| https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_latest_recall_reveals_real_c
| y...
|
| > Musk said that it's time to put the Model S and Model X
| vehicles to rest. Now it's not that huge of a change, given
| that 97% of Tesla's sales consist of Model 3 and Model Y
| cars, but the Model S is still the original car delivered
| by Tesla.
|
| https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_discontinues_the_model_s_and_
| m...
|
| > The financial report paints a grim picture for the
| company. Tesla's total profit for 2025 was EUR3.24 billion.
| That is a lot of money, whichever way you look at it, but
| it is actually 46 percent less than what the company made
| in 2024. The profit margin, which is the percentage of
| money the company keeps after paying expenses, fell to just
| 4.9 percent. In 2022, that number sat at 23.8 percent.
|
| > One of the most interesting parts of the financial report
| is how Tesla made its money. A large chunk of its profit
| did not come from selling EVs to people. Instead, it came
| from selling "regulatory credits" to other car companies
| that need help meeting pollution rules. These credits
| brought in EUR2 billion.
|
| > That means 52 percent of Tesla's entire profit for the
| year came from these credits, not from selling vehicles. If
| Tesla did not have those credits, the financial results
| would look much worse. And the problem the company is
| facing? Those credits are gone; they won't be part of
| Tesla's business model this year since they were cancelled
| by the current administration.
|
| https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_profits_drop_as_automaker_sta
| r...
|
| Tesla is betting on long shots like humanoid robots and
| self driving taxis everywhere. There are other desperation
| moves like merging Tesla (profitable) with SpaceX (I think
| it's also profitable? but most of its business is
| governments: risky markets) and xAI (most likely wildly
| unprofitable, just like Twitter).
| general1465 wrote:
| Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is
| cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of
| space, it will tell you:
|
| _The average temperature of deep space is approximately
| -270.45degC or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero.
| This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave
| Background (CMB) radiatio..._
|
| Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that
| solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for
| why it made sense.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Space is cold because there isn't anything there.
|
| There is also no matter to wick the heat away.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a
| temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story,
| just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree
| water than in 50 degree air.
| emkoemko wrote:
| but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual
| read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a
| space based server it would have to deal with the energy
| coming from the sun
| iancmceachern wrote:
| There is no matter.
|
| It's cold there because there isn't anything there.
|
| So there is nothing to conduct or convect the heat away.
|
| It's like a giant vacuum insulated thermos.
|
| Is putting data centers in thermos' a good idea?
| emkoemko wrote:
| i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because
| you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense
| for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from
| having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure
| it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more
| then 0K?
|
| plus you would have to insulate the servers from the
| sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its
| just way easier to run a server on the ground
| ambicapter wrote:
| Why did you say "eventually" in your original post? That
| answers your question.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's a rate problem
| legohead wrote:
| what thermometer would you use to measure the temperature
| of space?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Thermocouples
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| If you had a thermometer that had no heat generation then
| yes.
|
| If you have a resistor or other heat generating circuit
| then you need to have the needed surface area to radiate
| the heat away. If you don't, it will heat up. It's a rate
| problem.
| guluarte wrote:
| I'm not a scientist but i am also sure it will be fucking
| hard to dissipate heat in a vacuum
| jfengel wrote:
| Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody
| temperature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
|
| It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just
| with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that
| eventually, any object left in space will reach that
| temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which
| is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is
| emitting heat.
| drowsspa wrote:
| That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal
| equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's
| the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K
| in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic
| Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate
| heat away. So it does have a temperature.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Does this mean that if Earth stays a fixed distance from
| the sun then its equilibrium temperature is fixed? I
| remember people saying things like that the albedo of the
| ice caps affected the Earth's temperature.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers.
| Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible
| solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to
| radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat.
| We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is
| already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that
| they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this
| challenge.
|
| Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if
| that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use
| for that) it becomes an optimization problem.
|
| This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but
| ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is
| too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you
| actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly
| is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues?
| What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also
| all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't.
| You can't say something is too hard or too costly without
| making assertions about what is worth paying for and what
| isn't.
|
| The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga
| tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What
| happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude?
| What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some
| engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is
| roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it
| still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put
| numbers on your assertions.
|
| There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but
| we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order
| of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens
| of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a
| big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase
| of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds
| to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years
| to work up to a million satellites.
|
| I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when
| it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that
| scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Nobody is saying that building a data center in space is
| impossible. It's merely expensive.
|
| Who is going to pay the money to rent capacity in space when
| they could rent the same capacity on Earth for a fraction of
| the cost?
| Starman_Jones wrote:
| You make some good points, but when there are cheaper
| alternatives, engineering problems ARE showstoppers, and for
| good reason! If Musk announced that he wanted to build a
| datacenter inside an active volcano, my response would be
| pretty much the same - "Why?"
| izzydata wrote:
| How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space
| instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy
| ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
| 0x53 wrote:
| Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more
| practical. Several companies working on it:
| https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
| grim_io wrote:
| I don't quite believe this.
|
| Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a
| heat pump?
| pidge wrote:
| > Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that
| we've combined with a panel system to improve the
| efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system
|
| A heat pump is a " vapor-compression based cooling system"
| so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.
|
| Whether it's better probably depends on how expensive the
| additional efficiency is in practice.
|
| > SkyCool's Panels save 2x - 3x as much energy as a solar
| panel generates given the same area.
|
| So if you're area constrained maybe.
| grim_io wrote:
| That's very hard to believe. Radiative cooling is really
| bad compared to any kind of fan in front of aluminum
| fins.
|
| Air itself is an isolator, there is a reason you need to
| shove in fresh air to take on more energy from the heat
| source.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| This looks like it depends on the outside air to cool the
| coolant. "Radiative" can mean that too, not just IR
| radiation.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| We had one. It was that sulphur used in shipping fuel.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to
| hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear
| EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be
| able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to
| wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on
| Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically
| hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that
| plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even
| if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then
| whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will
| likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great
| military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states
| in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real
| conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of
| much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any
| moderate level industrial nation.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also
| be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into
| LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO._
|
| South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma.
| ..
|
| But it never had an orbital launch capability.
|
| Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability
| but it does have nuclear weapons.
|
| Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic
| orbital launch capability at present though it has had
| ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
|
| At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-
| assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system
| that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb
| now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents
| wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and
| inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
| blibble wrote:
| presumably the UK could figure out how to remove the top of
| a trident missile and replace it with a load of ball
| bearings
| mr_toad wrote:
| Tridents can reach mach 19. Orbital velocity is more like
| mach 100.
|
| Not that the UK manufactures trident missiles anyway.
| blibble wrote:
| if only you could put some sort of explosive charge on
| the top
| eeL3bo1mohn7pee wrote:
| 27720km/h orbital velocity is Mach 22.4 at a sea level
| speed of sound
| adastra22 wrote:
| Orbital velocity is nowhere near mach 100.
| kuschku wrote:
| You don't need orbital velocity to blow satellites away.
| Just do a well-timed suborbital launch against the
| satellite's orbit, and the satellite will provide most of
| the kinetic energy.
| zajio1am wrote:
| You do not need orbital capability to hit an orbital
| target. Just suborbital missile that reaches target's
| orbital altitude.
| proggy wrote:
| Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don't seem to
| intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of
| magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being
| able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to,
| or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened
| buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting
| constellations.
| reactordev wrote:
| They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB
| canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in
| orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| No?
| IcyWindows wrote:
| LEO is big, really big. Even at the smaller radius of
| ground level, large volcanos, forest fires, etc. Don't
| affect the whole earth.
| nvader wrote:
| Isn't the eventual plan to park these data centers out by the
| Lagrange points?
| general1465 wrote:
| You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the
| avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range.
| Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and
| solar panels.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| > harder to hit
|
| press x to doubt
|
| > on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in
| Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard
| Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
| shishcat wrote:
| how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?
| wmf wrote:
| With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| What's there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No
| cooling necessary.
|
| Put those three together and _maybe_ it's possible to push
| physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity
| per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper
| to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
|
| But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and
| can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There's only one
| company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing
| in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means
| their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Why is there no cooling necessary?
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
| grim_io wrote:
| Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince
| anyone of anything.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| I don't care about convincing anyone. A question was
| asked and I answered the best I could with the time I had
| at hand.
|
| Also read by comment above that discusses WHY
| superconductors could be the key to cooler electronics in
| space.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Space is not cold. Space is not hot either. Temperature is
| a property of matter. Empty space does not have a
| temperature. It is also a perfect insulator for conduction
| and convection, and as for radiation: it's a problem
| because of the sun _heating up_ objects via its radiation.
|
| This is the basics, I'm not an expert. But I don't think
| that you have anything useful at all to say here.
| pgalvin wrote:
| Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to
| be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier
| to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don't understand
| either claim, if so.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
| cyberax wrote:
| Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the
| equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin
| (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
| I don't understand what's with the arrogance and
| skepticism.
|
| Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just
| the general "air" around this in all the comments.
|
| I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open
| minded. There's a trillion dollar merger happening the
| sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of
| those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its
| own dime.
|
| It's not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those
| satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter
| in space.
| cyberax wrote:
| > There are people literally working on accomplishing
| this.
|
| They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just
| use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good
| enough for the MVP.
|
| For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire
| datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and
| earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide
| the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit
| the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to
| keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-
| keeping.
|
| There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a
| balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point.
| Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly
| evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
|
| > I don't understand what's with the arrogance and
| skepticism.
|
| Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas
| should be laughed out.
|
| I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do"
| but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
| thinkcontext wrote:
| The problem you are encountering is how you are
| discussing superconductors. If you want to convince
| people that they are relevant you should explain how they
| would be used. You haven't done that at all, you just
| keep repeating "superconductors".
|
| And it would be helpful if you showed some uses of
| superconductors in space similar to what you propose and
| not some vague proposal for research that would take
| decades to realize. I'm not familiar with any use of them
| relevant to this application and I take the other people
| responding to you are not either.
| emkoemko wrote:
| you do know about the Sun? Earth? and the Moon? where would
| you get this 4 kelvin?
| sfink wrote:
| The computer hardware only needs to run enough AI compute to
| be smart enough to convince Musk that it's working. It should
| be fine.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| > No cooling necessary.
|
| This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space
| (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
|
| 3 are ways to cool things (lose energy): -
| Conduction - Convection - Radiation
|
| In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of
| those 3 options.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Superconductors.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Magnets.
|
| (We're just saying random physics things right?)
| emkoemko wrote:
| i think so, next is Quantum right?
| whh wrote:
| Could we use a constant stream of micro-asteroids as a
| heatsink?
| sheepscreek wrote:
| No, just you. Superconductors don't get hot. There is 0
| resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you
| could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting
| medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind
| will superconduct in space (because it's so cold).
|
| Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does
| get produced.
| ben_w wrote:
| If/when we get high-performance superconducting
| computers, we wouldn't need to put the computers in space
| in the first place.
| sfink wrote:
| Right. You build your computers out of superconductors,
| and they don't get hot.
|
| Sadly, they also don't compute.
|
| > Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space
| (because it's so cold).
|
| Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone
| claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold?
| Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
|
| Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's
| shadow and the sun hits you.
| haddonist wrote:
| You've invented a room-temperature superconducting
| material? No?
|
| Didn't think so.
|
| Currently available superconductors still need liquid
| nitrogen cooling, meaning they're not feasible for in-
| orbit installations.
| shagie wrote:
| > Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space
| (because it's so cold).
|
| Space is not cold or hot - it isn't. It's a vacuum.
| Vacuum has no temperature, but objects in space reach
| temperatures set by radiative balance with their
| environment. This makes it difficult to get rid of heat.
| On earth heat can be dumped through phase change and
| discharged (evaporation), or convection or any number of
| other ways. In space the only way to get rid of heat is
| to radiate it away.
|
| Superconductors don't have any resistance - and so
| heating from resistance isn't present. However, no super
| conducting computers have been created.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing
|
| And yes, it is really impressive - but we're also talking
| about one chip in liquid helium on earth. One can
| speculate about the "what if we had..." but we don't. If
| you want to make up technologies I would suggest becoming
| a speculative fiction author.
|
| Heating of the spacecraft would get it on the warm side.
|
| https://www.amu.apus.edu/area-of-
| study/science/resources/why...
|
| > The same variations in temperature are observed in
| closer orbit around the Earth, such as at the altitudes
| that the International Space Station (ISS) occupies.
| Temperatures at the ISS range between 250deg F in direct
| sunlight and -250deg F in opposition to the Sun.
|
| > You might be surprised to learn that the average
| temperature outside the ISS is a mild 50deg F or so. This
| average temperature is above the halfway point between
| the two temperature extremes because objects in orbit
| obviously spend more time in partial sunlight exposure
| than in complete opposition to the Sun.
|
| > The wild fluctuations of 500deg F around the ISS are
| due to the fact that there is no insulation in space to
| regulate temperature changes. By contrast, temperatures
| on Earth's surface don't fluctuate more than a few
| degrees between day and night. Fortunately, we have an
| atmosphere and an ozone layer to insulate the Earth,
| protect it from the Sun's most powerful radiation and
| maintain relatively consistent temperatures.
|
| If you want solar power, you've got to deal with the 250
| degF (121 degC). This is far beyond the specification for
| super conducting materials. For that matter, even -250
| degF (-156 degC = 116 K) is much warmer than the super
| conducting chip range of 10 K.
|
| Furthermore, the cryogenic material boils off in space
| quite significantly (I would suggest reading https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot#LEO_d... or
| https://spacexstock.com/orbital-refueling-bottlenecks-
| what-i... "Even minor heat exposure can cause fuel to
| boil off, increasing tank pressure and leading to fuel
| loss. Currently, the technology for keeping cryogenic
| fuels stable in space is limited to about 14 hours.") You
| are going to have significant problems trying to keep
| things at super conducting temperatures for a day, much
| less a month or a year.
|
| Even assuming that you can make a computer capable of
| doing AI training using super computers this decade (or
| even the next) ... zero resistance in the wire is not
| zero power consumption. That power consumption is again
| heat.
|
| ---
|
| > Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the
| electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor.
|
| Theoretically you can do whatever you want and run it on
| nuclear fusion. Practically, the technologies that you
| are describing are not things that are viable on earth,
| much less to try to ship a ton of liquid helium into
| space (that's even harder than shipping a ton of liquid
| hydrogen - especially since harvesting it is non-
| trivial).
|
| ---
|
| Computing creates heat. Maxwell's demon taught us that
| doing 1 & 1 and getting one creates heat. Every bit of
| computation creates heat - superconductor or no. This is
| an inescapable fact of classical computation. "Ahh," you
| say " - but you can do quantum computation"... and yes,
| it may work... and if you can get a quantum computer with
| a kilobit of qbits into space, I will be _very_
| impressed.
|
| ---
|
| One of the things that damages superconductors is
| radiation. On earth we've got a nice atmosphere blocking
| the worst of it. Chips in space tend to be radiation
| hardened. The JWST is using a BAE RAD750. The 750 should
| be something that rings a bell in the mind of people...
| its a PPC 750 - the type in a Macintosh G3... running
| between 110 and 200 Mhz (that is not a typo, it is not
| Ghz but Mhz).
|
| High temperature super conductors (we're not dealing with
| the 10 kelvin but rather about 80 kelvin (still colder
| than -250 degF) are very sensitive to damage to their
| lattice. As they accumulate damage they become less
| superconductive and that causes problems when you've got
| a resistor heating up in the cryogenic computer.
|
| ---
|
| Your descriptions of the technology for superconducting
| computers is in the lab, at best decades from being
| something resembling science fact (much less a fact that
| you can lift into space).
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > In space, only radiation works
|
| it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects
| that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in
| sunlight for the solar panels.
|
| This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C
| when it's night and +120C when it's day there.
|
| And the sun's radiation also flips bits.
|
| Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these.
| There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the
| solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware.
| It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of
| understanding about it.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how
| many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
|
| Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
|
| Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads
| to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
|
| Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and
| subscription counts?
| antonymoose wrote:
| To Steelman the topic, Musk's whole alleged mission is to make
| humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing
| event.
|
| To that end, a small data center space isn't about unit-
| economics, it's a bigger mission. So the question we should
| consider is what can we put into space the further that mission.
| Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for
| preservation? It sounds like "yes," even if we can't train
| ChatGPT models out there yet.
| redwood wrote:
| Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space
| mongol wrote:
| Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the
| data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here
| on earth
| awakeasleep wrote:
| When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school
| program for Catholics.
|
| The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to
| steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain
| power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
|
| After some years, I woke up and realized that's what I was
| doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn't make
| the source material rational.
|
| Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
| antonymoose wrote:
| > Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
|
| I do not politically align with Musk. I've always thought
| Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being
| a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain
| issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a
| power-grab.
|
| I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to
| shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of
| interest.
|
| If you think I'm a member of a religious cult, I respectfully
| suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| I completely failed to convey my point. It's not about any
| of your beliefs.
|
| The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent
| hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command
| to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It's like a
| mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point
| is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your
| head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out of
| the noise, it was still just noise.
|
| Where there is actual meaning in life, its kind of obvious,
| you dont have to rewrite so much to find it.
| handedness wrote:
| > ...you are using all the powers at your command to
| rearrange it into a coherent narrative...
|
| You're literally describing steelmanning, which GP
| explicitly set out to do.
|
| > It's like a mental game that some of us cannot help but
| play.
|
| Despite attempting to rephrase, you're still coming
| across as projecting your own internal issues onto GP's
| comment. Directly addressing the (worthwhile) points they
| made in their comments rather than attempting to analyze
| the meta of the basic nature of someone you've never met
| is the way to go.
| handedness wrote:
| Pseudo-psychoanalyzing someone for explicitly steelmanning a
| subject seems particularly degrading to discussion.
| mongol wrote:
| Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there
| is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it
| really matter that some humans survive, in light of the
| enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a
| very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while
| longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will
| will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
| antonymoose wrote:
| I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-
| wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no
| true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it's
| quite hard and far.
|
| I also see no reason to "lay down and die" as I feel is
| somewhat implied here. I think it's a truly noble cause, but
| maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and
| reality will stop changing.
|
| Everything dies. Deal with it.
|
| Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a
| way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will
| never know. You do that by improving things, not burning
| limited resources on a conman.
| icepush wrote:
| If this outcome is guaranteed, why hasn't it already
| happened ?
| ben_w wrote:
| Because we exist inside time, not outside it.
| olyjohn wrote:
| How do you know it hasn't?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Same reason you're not dead yet.
| icepush wrote:
| The whole point of the space stuff is _not_ accepting all
| life dying out on any timescale.
| Juliate wrote:
| Even rocks don't last. What do you expect?
| gf000 wrote:
| Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately
| people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver
| on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his
| next idiotic product.
|
| (Yes, I know what steel manning is)
| jsumrall wrote:
| Couldn't deliver on anything?
| grim_io wrote:
| A data center in space is probably toast after some years of
| space radiation.
|
| High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere.
| Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you
| don't need on earth.
|
| It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are
| trying to find any justification.
| antonymoose wrote:
| I'm not the right type of engineer to know and, hell,
| software largely isn't engineering anyway...
|
| Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a
| (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my
| criticism with TFA is its focus on "you can't do massive
| scale" rather than the premise entirely.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive.
| Shielding is _heavy_ and every kilogram of added payload
| results in a geometric increase in fuel load.
|
| The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge
| preservation/disaster redundancy are _entirely_ disjoint.
|
| Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-
| digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires
| relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis,
| there will be _extremely_ little chance of finding someone with
| the equipment, expertise, and _power_ to download bulk data.
| And don 't forget that you have less than a decade to access
| this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
|
| Meanwhile people who _actually care_ about preserving knowledge
| in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump
| of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far
| future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are
| buried under glaciers on earth.
|
| We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of
| knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually
| any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
|
| Datacenters in space don't solve _any_ of the problems posed
| because they simply will not last long enough.
| kklisura wrote:
| If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating
| with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?
| Juliate wrote:
| A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that
| specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or
| contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done
| continuously (radiowaves).
|
| Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species
| requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task
| requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission),
| at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at
| technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
|
| This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some
| people fall for it.
| redwood wrote:
| I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator
| necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they
| completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some
| esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds
| up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
| heisenbit wrote:
| Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi
| trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all
| physical limits to investment.
| gf000 wrote:
| You mean physical reality
| ortusdux wrote:
| Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One
| 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data
| center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
| thfuran wrote:
| Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a
| datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more
| compute.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| And 1 ML rack uses the power of like 10 regular racks
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Oh and even a non-ML server rack uses more power than a
| networking rack
| fwip wrote:
| So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the
| comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to
| receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul
| between satellites.
|
| Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it
| generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter,
| where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the
| rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
| retube wrote:
| It's lala land nonsense.
|
| - Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
|
| - Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty
| heatsinks you're going need
|
| - They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory
| corruption = even more mass
|
| - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will
| need replacing to stay competitive
|
| - Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels
| and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
|
| Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly
| against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre
| ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a
| fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into
| oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
| cyberax wrote:
| > - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and
| will need replacing to stay competitive
|
| Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I
| bet you can sell this service to the DoD!
|
| Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the
| highest bidder.
| geoffeg wrote:
| Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's
| spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior,
| thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up
| the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and
| you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
| sfink wrote:
| Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved
| the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work
| into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining
| crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent
| on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo
| sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and
| can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably
| added by distance.
|
| tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars
| end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep
| up with the Joneses.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of
| fiction such as like _Neuromancer_ , and percolating through the
| minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts.
| Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any
| earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas
| Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, _also_ hosted a powerful
| AI.)
|
| Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic
| engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for
| investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared
| to having a space-casino.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I've come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as
| "freestyle science fiction." They're just saying stuff off the
| top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas
| from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration
| of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it's
| usually pretty bad.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the
| SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run
| by confidence men running crypto scams.
|
| That's how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say "we need a
| Federal bailout", and then turn around and say "lol just
| joking".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| [checks today's bitcoin price]
|
| Oh.
|
| Is it below the level where mining and blockchain updates
| become uneconomic yet?
| DANmode wrote:
| Your dad can't tell the difference.
|
| If they get 3/10 things right, and 60 Minutes highlights
| those in the next interview, they're set!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'd say they're basically floating on the success of previous
| sci-fi ideas that they made a reality; reusable rockets at a
| fraction of the price of NASA or ESA launches for example, or
| self-driving electric cars (the electric part was a success,
| the self-driving, not so much).
| mbb70 wrote:
| That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash,
| which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a
| guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?
| ben_w wrote:
| Wow, now you say it, that finally makes sense. Especially
| given it looked stupid and all the other VR chat solutions
| could already do legs.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I always assumed they were copying the Wii Miis
| shermantanktop wrote:
| It also gave us Mechanical Turk and microdrones!
| fullshark wrote:
| This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI
| investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Yeah, if he gets more SpaceX shares in exchange for the xAI
| garbage shares then he wins, because the SpaceX shares will
| sell well.
| an0malous wrote:
| Also he can launder government funding for his AI company
| now
| ncruces wrote:
| He can also hide his garbage shares behind a too big to
| fail, essential for national security, business.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup, likewise Starlink - while space internet is an
| interesting and viable concept (whether it'll earn itself
| back is another question, I'm not convinced), the real
| motivation behind it was to create demand for many SpaceX
| launches. There have been 352 Starlink launches [0] so far,
| out of 596 total [1]. If it wasn't for Starlink, SpaceX would
| only have been operating at 1/3 to 1/2 of what it does today,
| cutting into their "economics of scale". And they'll need
| demand to make Starship viable, the possible moon missions
| aren't enough to fund or justify the whole project. Hence
| also the ideas of colonising Mars, which - if someone is
| willing to pay for it - would create a large and steady
| demand for launches / flights.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starsh
| iel...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon
| _He...
| dgxyz wrote:
| I wouldn't credit science fiction for much of this.
|
| It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
| lokar wrote:
| Can you smoke ketamine?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| In space, ketamine smokes you.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Can you smoke ketamine?_
|
| Apparently [1]. But "when ketamine is heated, its chemical
| structure degrades, reducing its potency."
|
| [1] https://innervoyagerecovery.com/can-you-smoke-ketamine/
|
| (Going to go ahead and VPN to my home connection from this
| airport Wi-fi.)
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This
| shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination
| and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
|
| So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean
| nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people
| who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not
| creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is
| money.
| scottyah wrote:
| Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots
| will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.
| fwip wrote:
| Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building
| the Torment Nexus.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "It's only Torment(tm) if you aren't a double-digit
| shareholder!"
| EFreethought wrote:
| From the classic sci-fi novel "Do Not Create The Torment
| Nexus".
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a
| datahaven for less-reputable banks!
| scottyah wrote:
| I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They
| see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work
| to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the
| fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
| ehnto wrote:
| We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with
| VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe
| technology. I think basically no one cares about space data
| centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the
| technosphere.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The harsh reality of economics and demand is hitting them.
| For years, Musk's ideas were funded by an overvalued Tesla
| stock and stupendous amounts of investor money, and
| currently it's being double down on with the amount of
| money being poured into AI and its necessary hardware.
|
| But the demand / economic viability just isn't there. VR is
| cool but it's not mainstream. "Metaverse" exists and some
| companies are making good money off of it (Roblox,
| Fortnite, MMOs, etc), but nobody wanted Facebook's multi-
| billion-dollar-invested version of it because they just
| don't get it. I really hope all this nonsense collapses
| sooner rather than later and we go back to realistic and
| viable spending.
|
| Large investments don't translate to results.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I have to say, this quip has been putting in a _lot_ of
| work over the last decade for me: "Markets can stay
| irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
| threecheese wrote:
| Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it's a good heuristic for
| people-I-don't-have-to-take-seriously.
| gowld wrote:
| More likely, stole grok from nerds who learned grok from
| Heinlein.
| rswail wrote:
| Heinlein's sci fi didn't age well, because it was written for
| juveniles and then later his social ideas overtook his sci fi
| ones.
|
| He had the same blind spots that Ayn Rand did, but perhaps
| better informed of the fascist-adjacent US culture.
|
| One of the _good_ sci fi /social ideas he had was about what
| it meant to "grok" something. groklaw.net of happy memory was
| exactly what that verb was supposed to mean, dive into
| something until you _understand_ it at a molecular level.
|
| The fact that Musk et al have stolen terms like "grok" and
| even "cyberspace" as if they own them is something I loathe.
| digiown wrote:
| > above any earthly government
|
| Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more
| vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the
| equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is,
| the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly
| government too.
| shagie wrote:
| He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're
| _really_ good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where
| machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
|
| https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...
|
| https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...
|
| https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...
|
| > Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his
| best "imagining" of this world. The science fiction novels
| depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually
| anything they want thanks to AI--making money obsolete and
| leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they
| love.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| If Musk was in the Culture universe, he'd be Veppers
| shagie wrote:
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008121639337320454
|
| > [I recommend] all of them, especially Surface Detail
| ehnto wrote:
| I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest.
| Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across
| the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and
| private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of
| time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare
| clients.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be
| honest. Or some kind of space resort.
|
| The ISS is the single most expensive thing built by humankind
| ($100b+). What makes you think that building a "space casino"
| or "space resort" is commercially viable?
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue
| eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that
| the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." --
| William Gibson, Count Zero
| aftbit wrote:
| Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too,
| where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant
| satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible
| because they were developed early on for communications, then
| obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a
| ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this
| fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never
| happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the
| real world.
|
| But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all
| the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.
| ozim wrote:
| *Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective
| relative to normal data centers*.
|
| Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space
| make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across
| the globe to communicate and get back lost information because
| ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
| proggy wrote:
| Has it occurred to _anyone_ that you can put computers
| underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing,
| how do you expect the ground based command and control
| infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on
| ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you
| put the command and control underground, might as well just
| skip the whole space based plan and just put the data
| underground.
| grim_io wrote:
| And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in
| the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused
| temporary amnesia.
| ozim wrote:
| To say so I am not a Musk fan - I am sci-fi fan and I make
| imaginary/silly stuff up on my own.
|
| I also like reading how people argue with not what I wrote
| but with what they imagined I wrote.
| grim_io wrote:
| It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.
|
| There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But
| if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as
| fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.
| ozim wrote:
| Why is it hard requirement?
|
| You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won't
| decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay
| faster.
|
| If you put stuff underground it is much harder to
| communicate.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort
| that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.
| Ekaros wrote:
| In that case wouldn't space also get wiped by EMP? Seems like
| disabling satellites would be good move if you have a few nukes
| to spare.
| wmf wrote:
| Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816
|
| (If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
| burkaman wrote:
| This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same
| topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.
| turtletontine wrote:
| That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of
| these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation
| degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can't upgrade data
| centers in orbit
| arjie wrote:
| It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of
| things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example,
| a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the
| techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on
| rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
|
| The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard.
| Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering
| problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because
| they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the
| California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them
| entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is
| combining it with mixed-use technology.
|
| The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated
| by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than
| trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route).
| Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train
| across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live
| in San Francisco.
|
| So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they
| anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where
| regulatory challenges are not.
| constantius wrote:
| Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they
| don't change your point.
|
| I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in
| 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them
| is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
| arjie wrote:
| That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the
| Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned
| to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I
| doubt it works as it stands.
|
| A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my
| life are:
|
| * https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Abolish_The_First_Lady -
| arguing that the FLOTUS role shouldn't exist
|
| * https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Upward_Mobility,_Downward_S
| o... - perhaps a less original idea that economic mobility
| leads to poorly performing lower-paying services.
|
| * https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis
| - an example of one way that factoids get upgraded to facts
| constantius wrote:
| Thanks, I'll read through those (and Citogenesis was one of
| the two that I stumbled upon!). I find a lot of value in
| observing out-of-the-box/second-order reasoning, your blog
| fits the bill!
| arjie wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words :)
| wrs wrote:
| Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for
| _underground_ datacenters, is now valued at $500B.
| m463 wrote:
| there was an article recently about a company wanting to put
| nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km
| deep).
|
| I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical,
| because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.
|
| not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl
| DaedalusII wrote:
| Interesting idea. 2km deep could work. I'm not sure how
| cooling or maintenance would work.
|
| Depth below surface | Typical temperature (degC) | Indicative
| cost to drill 1.2 m diameter hole
|
| 500 m | 15-25 | $5-10 million
|
| 1 km | 25-40 | $10-20 million
|
| 2 km | 50-70 | $25-45 million
|
| 3 km | 75-100 | $50-80 million
|
| 4 km | 100-130 | $90-140 million
|
| 5 km | 130-160 | $150-250 million
| m463 wrote:
| maybe not the article I read, but similar:
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/underground-nuclear-reactor-
| deep-f...
| kklisura wrote:
| Nah. They get contract for mining on Mars, valued north of $1T.
| sollewitt wrote:
| The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the
| extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it,
| manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it's done you
| incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and
| wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
|
| You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar
| panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2?
| Incinerate the lot!
|
| This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of
| waste should be a crime.
| timmmmmmay wrote:
| Aluminum is 8% of the earth's crust and silicon is 28%; I think
| we're good
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy
| by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about
| SpaceX's finances. How much did it _actually_ cost SpaceX to
| launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is
| NASA _actually_ donating them, per each year?
|
| I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space
| launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world
| battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk.
| Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use
| its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the
| planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing
| Starship yet, is it ready?
| Garlef wrote:
| I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they
| made up an interesting story to give it some context
| ww520 wrote:
| Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that's
| impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting
| computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions
| times faster than current CPU while using very little energy.
| When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature
| drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable
| superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the
| solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the
| ongoing operation.
| emkoemko wrote:
| i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun?
| and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being
| behind the earth for a moment?
| ww520 wrote:
| When did I say no insulation? If it took only one moment for
| the satellite to fly by behind the whole earth, its speed is
| so great that it would be flung out of the solar system.
| kevin061 wrote:
| A month and a half ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286645
| lelandfe wrote:
| Related, around the same time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Facts.
|
| Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk
| mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on
| the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels
| automatically. Literally free compute
| reactordev wrote:
| If you believe that, you're Musks target investor group.
| __loam wrote:
| I can't even tell what's sarcasm anymore lol.
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| The comment you are replying to is definitely sarcasm... I
| hope?
| triceratops wrote:
| I was skeptical until you mentioned this. Now I'm onboard
| dwroberts wrote:
| This is your brain on Factorio
| zelias wrote:
| I'm playing Space Exploration right now and all I can think
| is "damn what is he gonna do without productivity modules"
| guluarte wrote:
| Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?
| andrepd wrote:
| We can't keep our already perfect planet livable, but we're
| going to terraform a totally new one. Yeah right buddy.
| scottyah wrote:
| It'd probably be easier to terraform than convince everyone
| it's possible.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Earth keeps getting more livable!
|
| We have a record high population, healthier and richer than
| ever.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| You seem to be alive? So....
| gct wrote:
| Mars which is literally covered in poisonous perchlorate soil
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I would, it would be an adventure.
|
| You could have said the same thing about Europe or America.
| We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you
| did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was
| tough at the beginning.
| mediaman wrote:
| Africa, Europe, America, Mars. I wonder if there is
| something about one of these that makes them unlike the
| others.
|
| Actually, why not colonize Venus instead? Sure, it will be
| hard, at first, with all the sulphuric acid and intense
| heat and whatnot, but we colonized America, so why not
| Venus?
| alexandre_m wrote:
| I'd rather colonize antarctica than mars.
| madeforhnyo wrote:
| Would you say that slaughtering Native Americans and
| enslaving Africans "worked pretty well" for them, or do you
| only speak from the White adventurer perspective?
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >cities
|
| Not my downvote, I know what you mean.
|
| Much rather live way out in the boonies, as far away from
| civilization as possible.
|
| Oh wait . . .
| Keyframe wrote:
| Makes sense. I hope their plasma coolant supplies last long
| enough to get self sustained.
| scottyah wrote:
| They'll just mine up Hemium-3 for that.
| dgxyz wrote:
| They're going to have to deal with the moon nazis first. Oh no
| wait a minute.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money
| on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise
| makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible
| plan. The market speculates, but it's not being completely
| irrational. I'd actually be surprised if we didn't have factories
| or data centers in space one day.
| beloch wrote:
| I would _not_ assume cooling has been worked out.
|
| Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos
| great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else,
| a _fantastic_ thermos. A data center in space would necessarily
| rely _completely_ on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial
| data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You
| can 't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat
| exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only
| radiate heat into it.
|
| Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a
| satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going
| to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build
| data centers in the arctic.
|
| Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop
| (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It
| could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will
| _not_ be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes
| this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| A glaring lack of oceans to boil
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best
| option is to attach to Elon's moneybank (spacex) to get cash
| without dilution
| ben_w wrote:
| That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's
| maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's
| much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Remember how he argued for Tesla's Solarcity acquisition
| because solar roofs?
|
| Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.
| undersuit wrote:
| Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| In comparison to datacenters in space yes. Solar roofs
| are already a profitable business, just not likely to be
| high growth. Datacenters in space are unlikely to ever
| make financial sense, and even if they did, they are very
| unlikely to show high growth due to continuing ongoing
| high capital expenses inherent in the model.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think a better critique of space-based data centres is
| not that they _never_ become high growth, it 's just that
| _when_ they do it implies the economy is radically
| different from the one we live in to the degree that all
| our current ideas about wealth and nations and ownership
| and morality and crime & punishment seem quaint and out-
| dated.
|
| The "put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep
| space" for example, that's as far ahead of the entire
| planet Earth today as the entire planet Earth today is
| from specifically just Europe right after the fall of
| Rome. Multiplicatively, not additively.
|
| There's no reason to expect any current business (or
| nation, or any given asset) to survive that kind of
| transition intact.
| mayoff wrote:
| For an electrification company.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's obviously a pretty weird thing for a car company to
| do, and is probably just a silly idea in general (it has
| little obvious benefit over normal solar panels, and is
| vastly more expensive and messy to install), but in
| principle it could at least work, FSOV work. The space
| datacenter thing is a nonsensical fantasy.
| kuschku wrote:
| There's a synergy effect here - Tesla sells you a solar
| roof and car bundle, the roof comes without a battery
| (making it cheaper) and the car now gets a free recharge
| whenever you're home (making it cheaper in the long
| term).
|
| Of course that didn't work out with this specific
| acquisition, but overall it's at least a somewhat
| reasonable idea.
| Findecanor wrote:
| > win the AI race
|
| I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms
| race" or "AI surveillance race", what _does_ it mean?
|
| Those are the only explanations that I have found, and
| neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.
| strange_quark wrote:
| It's a framing device to justify the money, the idea being
| the first company (to what?) will own the market.
| totetsu wrote:
| It's a graft to keep people distracted and allow for
| positioning as we fall off the end of the fossil energy
| boom.
| ekidd wrote:
| A significant number of AI companies and investors are
| hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but
| I suppose it _might_ be possible. Which wouldn 't make it
| any more sane.
|
| But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the
| machine god first." Make of this what you will.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| On the edge of my seat waiting to see what hits us first,
| a massive economic collapse when the hype runs out, or
| the Torment Nexus.
| reverius42 wrote:
| It really seems like the market has locked in on one of
| those two things being a guaranteed outcome at this
| point.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Big tech businesses are convinced that there _must_ be some
| profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the
| fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the
| first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even
| though there 's no evidence yet that there is money to be
| made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
| Nystik wrote:
| It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens
| first, the discovery of such a model, or the bubble
| bursting.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| People keep saying this but it's simply untrue. AI
| inference is profitable. Openai and Anthropic have 40-60%
| gross margins. If they stopped training and building out
| future capacity they would already be raking in cash.
|
| They're losing money now because they're making massive
| bets on future capacity needs. If those bets are wrong,
| they're going to be in very big trouble when demand
| levels off lower than expected. But that's not the same
| as demand being zero.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| those gross profit margins aren't that useful since
| training at fixed capacity is continually getting
| cheaper, so there's a treadmill effect where staying in
| business requires training new models constantly to not
| fall behind. If the big companies stop training models,
| they only have a year before someone else catches up with
| way less debt and puts them out of business.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Only if training new models leads to better models. If
| the newly trained models are just a bit cheaper but not
| better most users wont switch. Then the entrenched labs
| can stop training so much and focus on profitable
| inference
| kuschku wrote:
| If they really have 40-60% gross margins, as training
| costs go down, the newly trained models could offer the
| same product at half the price.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Well thats why the labs are building these app level
| products like claude code/codex to lock their users in.
| Most of the money here is in business subscriptions I
| think, how much savings would be required for businesses
| to switch to products that arent better, just cheaper?
| kuschku wrote:
| I think the real lock-in is in "CLAUDE.md" and similar
| rulesets, which are heavily AI specific.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Openai and Anthropic have 40-60% gross margins.
|
| Stop this trope please. We (1) don't really know what
| their margins are and (2) because of the hard tie-in to
| GPU costs/maintenance we don't know (yet) what the useful
| life (and therefore associated OPEX) is of GPUs.
|
| > If they stopped training and building out future
| capacity they would already be raking in cash.
|
| That's like saying "if car companies stopped researching
| how to make their cars more efficient, safer, more
| reliable they'd be more profitable"
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| Typically in capitalism, if there is _any_ profit, the
| race is towards _zero_ profit. The alternative is a race
| to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to
| jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly (or
| duopoly, or some other stable arrangement). I assume the
| latter is the goal, but that means burning through like
| 50%+ of american gdp growth just to be undercut by china.
|
| Imo I would be extremely angry if I owned any spacex
| equity. At least nvidia might be selling to china in the
| short term... what's the upside for spacex?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors
| at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup
| the losses as a monopoly
|
| I don't know of an instance of this happening
| successfully.
| kuschku wrote:
| Walmart? It's certainly more successful in physical
| markets
| WalterBright wrote:
| See Amazon
| kuschku wrote:
| Are you saying that Amazon is a successful monopoly, or
| that Amazon is even with massive expenses still not a
| full monopoly?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Walmart competes with Amazon.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| Different markets entirely--I can't walk into amazon, and
| I don't order online from Walmart.
| jabron wrote:
| Amazon
| WalterBright wrote:
| See Walmart
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| taxi apps, delivery apps, social media apps--all of these
| require a market that's extremely expensive to build but
| is also extremely lucrative to exploit and difficult to
| unseat. You see this same model with big-box stores
| displacing local stores. The secret to making a lot of
| money under capitalism is to have a lot of money to begin
| with.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Taxis are a government created monopoly.
|
| None of the big-box stores have created a monopoly.
|
| Amazon unseated behemoth Walmart with a mere $300,000
| startup capital.
|
| Musk founded his empire with $28,000.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Being too far ahead for competitors to catch up, similar to
| how google won browsers, amazon won distribution, etc
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > xAI needs money to win the AI race
|
| Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously
| explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically
| winnable in any meaningful way.
|
| Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us
| from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art
| models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models
| are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone
| achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by
| everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes,
| is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices
| on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has
| already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and
| ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
| adventured wrote:
| If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb,
| eventually you orient it toward eating everything else
| instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build
| software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly
| likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed
| a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should
| MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software?
| The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT
| (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain
| internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they
| don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem,
| anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that
| touches it, it will.
|
| Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on.
| They'll move on anything that touches users (from
| productivity software to storage). You're not going to
| pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI
| will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto
| what you get to try to kill everyone else.
|
| Google of course has a huge lead on this move already
| with their various prominent apps.
| notahacker wrote:
| Dropbox is actually a great example of why this _isn 't_
| likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons
| of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload
| workflows (including directly into software with massive
| install base) exists, and showed an active interest in
| competing with them. Still doing OK
|
| Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already
| free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an
| obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the
| platform their financial models and all their clients
| rely on to a new upstart software suite
| fhd2 wrote:
| I _think_ the idea is that the first one to hit self
| improving AGI will, in a short period of time, pull _so_
| far ahead that competition will quickly die out, no longer
| having any chance to compete economically.
|
| At the same time, it'd give the country controlling it so
| much economic, political and military power that it becomes
| impossible to challenge.
|
| I find that all to be a bit of a stretch, but I think
| that's roughly what people talking about "the AI race" have
| in mind.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to
| seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is
| economically winnable in any meaningful way.
|
| Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI
| will most likely be the most valuable in the world. So it
| is worth all the effort to be the first.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Because the first company to have a full functioning
| AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world.
|
| This may be what they are going for, but there are two
| effectively religious beliefs with this line of thinking,
| IMO.
|
| The first is that LLMs lead to AGI.
|
| The second is that even if the first did turn out to be
| true that they wouldn't all stumble into AGI at the same
| time, which given how relatively lockstep all of the
| models have been for the past couple of years seems far
| more likely to me than any single company having a
| breakthrough the others don't immediately reproduce.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Like any other mega-scaler, theyre just playing Money
| Chicken.
|
| Everyone is spending crazy amounts of money in the hopes
| that the competition will tap out because they can't afford
| it anymore.
|
| Then they can cool down on their spending and increase
| prices to a sustainable level because they have an
| effective monopoly.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Money Chicken is the best term I've seen for this!
| danw1979 wrote:
| I'm not certain spacex is generating much cash right now ?
|
| Starship development is consuming billions. F9 & Starlink are
| probably profitable ?
|
| I'd say this is more shifting of the future burden of xAI to
| one of his companies he knows will be a hit stonk when it
| goes public, where enthusiasm is unlikely to be dampened by
| another massive cash drain on the books.
| xupybd wrote:
| I think he has rocket company that needs more work.
|
| Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company.
|
| The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems
| to get to Mars. His pet project.
|
| I really think it's that simple.
| croddin wrote:
| Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon
| 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity
| and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its
| goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders
| of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch
| capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all
| so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build
| up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
| ezst wrote:
| > colonize mars
|
| Oh, that crap again.
| belter wrote:
| Nobody colonizing Mars. Get real. The most likely outcome,
| is him landing on a cell when the full Epstein files come
| out.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| The most likely outcome is that no one will be punished
| for anything in the Epstein files.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Going to Mars is not a serious goal.
|
| We can tell because it's not being treated as a serious
| goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part
| that's really exciting to kids who get particularly excited
| by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus
| is on developing all the less glamorous but equally
| essential components of a successful Mars mission, like
| making sure the crew stays healthy.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Correct, and this is meant to attract the same investors
| and Bulls that already think Mars colonies is a solved
| problem, just need a few more years to run some tests. As
| with all, it is only about making himself richer.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| One man able to put a data center worth of mass in orbit is one
| man able to crash a datacenter worth of mass into Earth
| anywhere he wants.
| recursive wrote:
| Not a given. Re enter the atmosphere. Sure. Avoid
| vaporization? Much harder problem.
| debatem1 wrote:
| There is some evidence to suggest that spacex knows how to
| reenter an object without burning it up.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Sometimes without even meaning to:
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/spacex-cbc-
| debris-s...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The engineering overlap between between a small object
| designed for reentry and a flying (crashing...) warehouse
| is not a circle.
|
| Once upon a time there was a bonkers "rods from god" mass
| bomb idea, but that didn't work either.
| reppap wrote:
| I think it's actually the other way around, satellites need
| to be specifically designed to burn up fast in the
| atmosphere. See for example the warnings about space debris
| from Chinese satellites not designed with this in mind.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| 100 tons of steel will not vaporize before it hits the
| ground
| aunty_helen wrote:
| The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the
| temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its
| emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised
| phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
|
| Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we've got a
| lot of experience in the automotive sector.
|
| And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here
| with nanotechnology.
|
| Yes he's distracting, no it's not as impossible as many people
| think.
| sfink wrote:
| > And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good
| here with nanotechnology.
|
| So your hot thing is radiating directly onto the next hot
| thing over, the one that also needs to cool down?
| vel0city wrote:
| > Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we've
| got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
|
| My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does
| yours?
| MillionOClock wrote:
| Let's just hope the person you are responding to isn't Elon
| Musk!
| vel0city wrote:
| I wouldn't say that roadster isn't doing much _driving_
| but dang is it drifting!
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Engine bays have a lot of design go into where to keep heat
| and where to get rid of it. You can look up thermal
| coatings and ceramics etc.
| vel0city wrote:
| Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again?
| A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of
| cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing
| through it?
|
| Seems like quite a massive difference to ignore.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| This makes zero sense.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you
| double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the
| atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a
| factor of a thousand.
|
| It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done
| thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic
| sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest.
| Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous
| difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount
| Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he'd give it a
| shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get
| the job done.
|
| Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000
| years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
|
| As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as
| running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > some bloke on the fiver said he'd give it a shot
|
| Hillary (he features on the NZ Five Dollar note) was one
| of those guys who does things for no good reason. He also
| went to both poles. This only tells us that it is indeed
| possible, but not that it's desirable or will become
| routine.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If we define a data center as a place where computers run
| primarily to serve distant users, then we've had data
| centers in space for decades.
|
| Nobody should doubt that it's possible, since it's been
| done. It just doesn't make any sense to do it purely for
| the sake of having computers do things that could be done
| on the ground.
|
| There's nothing weird about using jet engines to make
| electricity. The design of a turbine designed to generate
| thrust isn't necessarily that different from a turbine
| designed to generate electricity. You can buy a new Avon
| gas turbine generator today, the same engine used in the
| Canberra, Comet, Draken, and many others. It makes about
| a million times more economic sense than putting GPUs in
| space to run LLMs.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > aka fancy air conditioning pumps
|
| Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things
| to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more
| radiators.
|
| Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier
| elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's
| not plainly not viable.
|
| > getting quite good here with nanotechnology
|
| Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| My dude, heat pipes were invented for satellites and
| there's people walking around with piezo pumps in their
| phones these days. We're getting close.
|
| Peltiers generate a lot of heat to get the job done so even
| though electricity is pretty much free, probably not a sure
| bet.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Peltiers and heat pipes don't remove heat, they just move
| it. You still need the radiator.
| stackghost wrote:
| Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
|
| - let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
|
| - let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
|
| - let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run
| at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for
| modern datacenter chips.
|
| Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring
| it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of
| launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area
| to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that
| chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127
| degrees C.
|
| No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and
| most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Hence the fancy air conditioning pumps
| stackghost wrote:
| ... on satellites?
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Yes, that's what we're talking about. Data centers in
| space.
|
| You put the cold side of the phase change on the internal
| cooling loop, step up the external cooling loop as high
| temp as you can and then circulate that through the
| radiators. You might even do this step up more than once.
|
| Imagine the data center like a box, you want it to be
| cold inside, and there's a compressor, you use to
| transfer heat from inside to outside, the outside gets
| hot, inside cold. You then put a radiator on the back of
| the box and radiate the heat to the darkness of space.
|
| This is all very dependent on the biggest and cheapest
| rockets in the world but it's a tradeoff of convenience
| and serviceability for unlimited free energy.
| abenga wrote:
| Why not use the unlimited free energy on terrestrial data
| centers then? You can use solar power as we speak, no?
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Because the sun hides at night. Scientists have yet to
| figure out where he goes. Until that happens it's not a
| great power source.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| What do the satellites do in earth's shadow?
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Polar orbit. We're already doing this.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| What do they do in earth's shadow in a polar orbit?
| abenga wrote:
| Overprovision solar and add batteries for the night,
| then. Whatever amount of money and effort is required to
| make space data centers feasible (launching, cooling,
| etc) cannot possibly be lower than just building solar
| powered terrestrial data centers + batteries or
| alternative power sources. It is just not as sexy a story
| to sell to investors as magic space computers.
| bagels wrote:
| You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out
| the back.
|
| Where will they go, nobody knows!
| strange_quark wrote:
| When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat
| into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! (are raining down
| on my house)
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Preferibly directly onto indian electronics salvagers
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Depending on where they land, you can double the service
| you offer. AI computations coupled with rods from God.
| eek2121 wrote:
| Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space =
| DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really
| claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws
| of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
|
| Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
|
| Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity
| when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space.
| If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there
| designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very
| interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is
| going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes
| anything socketed...
| tzs wrote:
| > Not going to read the article, because Data centers in
| space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article
| really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
|
| No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space
| talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk
| about _other_ problems that would remain even if the most
| commonly talked about problems were solved.
|
| It says:
|
| > But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency,
| and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues
| still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX
| understands them, a complete fantasy.
|
| and then talks about some of those other issues.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| It will be the communications, not the compute part.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come
| up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what
| does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by
| computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with
| a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS
| slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
| cluckindan wrote:
| Let me google that for you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro.
| ..
| vidarh wrote:
| The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are
| necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and
| should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might
| require...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Con
| tro...
| jamiek88 wrote:
| The ISS has MASSIVE radiators. Most of its volume is
| radiator. 900 cubic meters of space 2500 square meters of
| radiator.
| stouset wrote:
| The TL;DR is they radiate it into space via large, high
| surface area arms that stick out of the station.
| breput wrote:
| Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray
| panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as
| large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the
| scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat
| (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
|
| [0] https://images-
| assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I agree, all the good papers definitely talk about custom
| designed radiators being used on the dark sides of data
| center in space.
| gpt5 wrote:
| The ISS is designed to emit 126kW of heat radiation between
| the active cooking systems and the solar array cooling
| system.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Which is less than a single rack of GPUs.
| lancewiggs wrote:
| It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or
| worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.
|
| It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.
|
| It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money
| for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| Plus government backstop. The federal government (especially
| the current one) is not going to let SpaceX fail.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Maybe not, but they might force it to sell at fire sale
| prices to another aerospace company that doesn't have the
| baggage.
| gpt5 wrote:
| I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we
| actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
|
| A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It
| needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it)
| just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites
| already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation
| is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a
| rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
|
| Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy
| consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
|
| Why is starlink possible and other computations are not?
| Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also
| become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch
| vehicles?
| space_fountain wrote:
| It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in
| space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.
|
| 1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of
| energy to put it into orbit
|
| 2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of
| satellites is pretty low
|
| 3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
|
| 4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a
| relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio
| or laser links between satellites
|
| For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides
| something that can't really be provided any other way, but
| even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for
| data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your
| estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it
| account for the night cycle?)
| murderfs wrote:
| > The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime
| of satellites is pretty low
|
| Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant
| transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't
| have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
| sanex wrote:
| Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them
| after three yesrs?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Presumably they 're planning on doing in-orbit
| propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that
| they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean_
|
| Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to
| entropy every year. What if you could process those into
| reaction mass?
| falcor84 wrote:
| This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how
| our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors,
| then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data
| centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert
| this into a feature.
| lambdaone wrote:
| It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage
| collection.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately.
| Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with
| chunky sized components so that they are more resilient
| to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems
| unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of
| lead.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Or cooling water/oil?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Or cooling water /oil?_
|
| Oh. You surround it with propellant. In a propellant
| depot.
| notahacker wrote:
| Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life
| satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :)
|
| The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an
| inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the
| crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital
| disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst
| on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient
| than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all,
| it's also a nontrivial undertaking
| XorNot wrote:
| And just like that you've added another not never done
| before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix.
|
| These are all things which add weight, complexity and
| cost.
|
| Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even
| been done yet and that's completely vital to it's
| intended missions.
| zeofig wrote:
| "Planning" is a strong word..
| mlyle wrote:
| Another significant factor is that radiation makes things
| worse.
|
| Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of
| the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time.
|
| High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause
| latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware
| immediately, etc.
| Aerolfos wrote:
| If anything, considering this + limited satellite
| lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the
| current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the
| questions about overbuild with just the currently
| actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total
| that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or
| two).
|
| Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and
| will burn out within 5 years, _forcing_ a continuous
| replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and
| the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same
| scale, forever
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Everything about operating a datacenter in space is
| more difficult than it is to operate one on earth_
|
| Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know
| going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit
| budget on battlig state and local governments.
| deepGem wrote:
| This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom
| from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering
| and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land
| acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't
| want to deal with politicians. He learned from building
| out the Memphis DC.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| So freedom from law and regulation?
| blactuary wrote:
| He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people
|
| > an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow
| solve
|
| no he won't
| markhahn wrote:
| Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not
| designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a
| two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but
| not, directly, land.
|
| Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect:
| power and cooling in one place.
| deepGem wrote:
| Skepticism is valid. The environmentalists came after
| dams too.
| mbushey wrote:
| > Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
|
| Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is
| the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty
| floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a
| block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors
| of Data Centers.
| reverius42 wrote:
| I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near
| Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they
| have about half the total reported building square
| footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter:
| https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
|
| Every DC I've been in (probably around 20 in total) has
| been multi storey.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Multistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.
| dantillberg wrote:
| But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the
| planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you
| can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on
| a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer
| space.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the
| planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you
| can find some suitable location /government_
|
| More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation.
| There _are_ regimes where this balances. I don 't think
| we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it
| completely.
|
| > _Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more
| sensible than outer space_
|
| More corrosion. And still, interconnects.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| > More corrosion
|
| Surely given starlinks 5ish year deorbit plan, you could
| design a platform to hold up for that long... And instead
| of burning the whole thing up you could just refurbish it
| when you swap out the actual rack contents, considering
| that _those_ probably have an even shorter edge lifespan.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Starlinks are built to safely burn up on re-entry. A big
| reusable platform will have to work quite differently to
| never uncontrollably re-enter, or it might kill someone
| by high velocity debris on impact.
|
| This adds weight and complexity and likely also forces a
| much higher orbit.
| necovek wrote:
| Hopefully a sea platform does not end up flying into
| space all of its own, only to crash and burn back down.
|
| Maybe the AI workloads running on it achieve escape
| velocity? ;)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I can't wait for all the heavy metals that are put into
| GPUs and other electronics showering down on us
| constantly. Wonder why the billionaires have their
| bunkers.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Yeah, "burn up safely on reentry".
|
| 100 years later: "why does everything taste like
| cadmium?"
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| What counts towards a bullshit budget? Permitting is a
| drop in the bucket compared to construction costs.
| floatrock wrote:
| I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have
| things like international agreements to avoid, you know,
| catastrophic human development situations like kessler
| syndrome.
|
| All satellites launched into orbit these days are
| required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up"
| after EOL.
|
| I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning
| probably ain't as hard to ignore as international
| treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you have things like international agreements to
| avoid, you know, catastrophic human development_
|
| Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days
| for large ones. (In America.)
|
| Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor
| of in-space data centers.
| viraptor wrote:
| > is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig
| state and local governments
|
| Source? I can't immediately find anything like that.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey
| their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to
| 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be
| 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.
|
| 1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.
|
| 2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental
| assessments, and utility connection fees add extra
| expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process
| alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
| https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-
| costs
|
| 3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.
|
| 4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per
| gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per
| megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center.
| Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data
| center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world's
| largest data center market, it would cost between $420
| million and $770 million to construct the facility,
| including its powered shell and equipping the building
| with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC
| components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-
| to-build-a-data-...
| viraptor wrote:
| Yeah, I was trying to be nicer than "you're making it up"
| just in case someone has the actual numbers.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| He said bullshit budget, not budget. He's thinking about
| opportunity and attention costs, not saying that permits
| literally have a higher price tag than GPUs.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Maybe try meditation? It can help deal with negative
| emotions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Source? I can 't immediately find anything like that_
|
| I've financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent
| over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may
| be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told
| about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance
| and (b) not technical.
| KingMob wrote:
| Unless you're the single largest cost, your personal time
| says nothing about actual DC costs, does it?
|
| Just admit it was hyperbole.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that may have been the case before but it is not anymore.
| I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers
| and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree
| house. also see provisions in OBBB
| m4rtink wrote:
| If you think there is no papework necessary for launching
| satellites, you are very very wrong.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you think there is no papework necessary for
| launching satellites, you are very very wrong_
|
| I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about
| launching satellites than building anything. But it would
| take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the
| weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my
| kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not
| weeks.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's also infinitly easier to get 24/7 unadulterated
| sunlight for your solar panels.
| dantillberg wrote:
| Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon
| or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher
| latency to earth.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There are Sun-Synchronous Orbits, and those are what
| SpaceX plans to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-
| synchronous_orbit
| dantillberg wrote:
| Well, that's neat. TIL. Thanks for the link!
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you
| cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have
| fossil fuels.
|
| I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a
| chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing
| many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5
| years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Getting enough energy for your AI data centers is one of
| the most limiting factors for AI technology.
|
| Solar in space is about 5-10x as effective as solar on
| the ground.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| So what? Just build some nuclear power plants if AI data
| centers are so important. It can even work at night when
| it is infinitely as effective as solar on the ground!
|
| Also I'm astounded how important AI data centers are when
| we are running out of freshwater, to mention a thing we
| could easily solve with focusing our efforts on it
| instead of this. But yeah, surely the Space AI Data
| Centers (aka. "SkyNet") is the most important we must
| build...
|
| Also this is just about Elon jumping the shark...
| trhway wrote:
| >1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons
| of energy to put it into orbit
|
| putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit
| on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels,
| 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and
| $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be
| growing, while costs in space will be falling.
|
| Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare
| cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less
| than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and
| high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in
| space than on the ground.
|
| And for cooling that people so complain about without
| running it in calculator -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961
|
| >2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime
| of satellites is pretty low
|
| it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
| viraptor wrote:
| > will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer
|
| And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights
| and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
| trhway wrote:
| It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda,
| not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that
| they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which
| is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the
| datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to
| ground based and providing the demand for the huge
| Starship launch capacity.
|
| A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per
| square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus
| hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at
| $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the
| equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper
| than on the ground.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| 100 x 100 is 10,000.
| sarchertech wrote:
| It looks like you're comparing the cost of installing
| solar panels on the ground with the cost of just
| transporting them to orbit. You can't just toss raw solar
| panels out of a cargo bay.
| trhway wrote:
| >You can't just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
|
| That is exactly what you do - just like with Starlink -
| toss out the panels with attached GPUs, laser transmitter
| and small ion drive.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Best estimates based on the publicly available data I can
| find are that solar panels make up 5-10% of the
| manufacturing cost of a starlink satellite.
|
| There's so much overhead you're hand waving away to make
| your numbers work.
| gf000 wrote:
| > it is SpaceX/Elon
|
| The known scammer guy? Like these ideas wouldn't pass the
| questions at the end of a primary school presentation.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| Current cost to LEO is $1500 per kg
|
| That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to
| put into space.
|
| Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100
| per kg that's still $4000
|
| There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is
| going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
| trhway wrote:
| >That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to
| put into space.
|
| with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the
| capex.
|
| >Even being generous and assuming you could get it to
| $100 per kg that's still $4000
|
| noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.
|
| >There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is
| going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
|
| Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs -
| may as well happen to be secondary to other
| considerations - power/cooling capacity stable
| availability, jurisdiction, etc.
| blackoil wrote:
| Any idea, what is the estimated cost of a Google TPU. It
| may not make sense for Nvidia retail price but at cost
| price of Google.
| trhway wrote:
| Can only speculate out of thin air - B200 and Ryzen 9950x
| made on the same process and have 11x difference in die
| size. 11 Ryzens would cost $6K, and with 200Gb RAM - $8K.
| Googling brings that the B200 cost or production is
| $6400. That matches the numbers from the Ryzen based
| estimate above (Ryzen numbers is retail, yet it has
| higher yield, so balance). So, i'd guess that given
| Google scale a TPU similar to B200 should be $6K-$10K.
| estomagordo wrote:
| > with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the
| capex.
|
| Yes, only doubling the capex. With the benefits of, hmm,
| no maintenance access and awful networking?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Don't forget the major problem with cooling
| iso1631 wrote:
| > jurisdiction
|
| This is the big thing, but Elon's child porn generator in
| orbit will be subject to US jurisdiction, just as much as
| if they were in Alaska. I guess he can avoid state law.
|
| If jurisdiction is key, you can float a DC in
| international waters on a barge flying the flag of Panama
| or similar flag of convenience which you can pretty much
| buy at this scale. Pick a tin-pot country, fling a few
| million to the dictator, and you're set - with far less
| jurisdiction problems than a US, Russia, France launched
| satellite.
| ericd wrote:
| I think the disconnect is that with starship they're
| targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so
| the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the
| production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one
| on the ground, doesn't suffer seasonality/weather, and
| doesn't require battery storage for smoothing/time
| shifting, so you'd need to deploy many times the number
| of panels on earth. Our home array in North America over
| the course of the year generates something like 1/7th of
| its theoretical capacity, overproduces in the summer, and
| underproduces in the winter.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into
| orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar
| panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between
| $400 and $4K.
|
| What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising
| for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered
| only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
| trhway wrote:
| it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these
| discussions have no sense otherwise.
|
| > or the real one that has thus far delivered only one
| banana worth of payload into orbit?
|
| once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for
| discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to
| book your payload slot.
| gspr wrote:
| You are presented with a factual, verifiable, statement
| that starship has been promised for years and that all
| that's been delivered is something capable of sending a
| banana to LEO. Wayyyy overdue too.
|
| You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing
| and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!
|
| What a cult.
| ENGNR wrote:
| They also launched dummy satellites from the "pez
| dispenser", directly simulating the actual mission
| payload, about 4 months ago.
| ben_w wrote:
| I have no idea if SpaceX will ever make the upper stage
| fully reusable. The space shuttle having existed isn't an
| existence proof, given the cost of repairs needed between
| missions.
|
| However, with Starship SpaceX has both done more and less
| than putting a banana in orbit. Less, because it's never
| once been a true orbit; more, because these are learn-by-
| doing tests, all the reporting seems to be in agreement
| that it could already deliver useful mass to orbit if
| they wanted it to.
|
| But without actually solving full reusability for the
| upper stage, this doesn't really have legs. Starship is
| cheap enough to build they can waste loads of them for
| this kind of testing, but not cheap enough for plans such
| as these to make sense if they're disposable.
| reverius42 wrote:
| The bean counters at NVidia recently upped the expected
| lifecycle from 5 years to 6. On paper, you are expected
| now to get 6 years out of a GPU for datacenter use, not
| 3-5.
| blackoil wrote:
| To add space solar cell will weigh only 4-12kg as
| protection requirements are different.
| estomagordo wrote:
| source?
| blackoil wrote:
| :| Did rough calculations with help of ChatGPT. In space
| it need not be hardened for rain, hail, wind and dust but
| for radiation and micro meteors.
| shagie wrote:
| Compare the cost of a RAD750 (the processor on the JWST)
| to its non rad hardened variant. Additionally, consider
| the processing power of that system to modern AI demands.
| blackoil wrote:
| I just calculated the potential weight of solar cells in
| space. Can't say about cost. Idea is mot of the weight of
| panel is because of glass/plastic protection on top and
| frame, these are there to protect from rain, hail, wind
| and dust. In space the elements it will need protection
| from will be different. I could be completely off but
| have no claims on cost and feasibility of this.
| shagie wrote:
| A solar panel deployed to space isn't deployed in its
| open / unframed configuration. Rather, it's sent in a way
| that is folded up into a compact volume and then unfolds
| into the full size.
|
| https://youtu.be/wkume9d4Ogw
|
| You'll note that there is still a frame that it gets
| unfolded with and that you've got the additional
| mechanical apparatus to do the unfurling (and the human
| there to fix it if there are problems.
|
| https://youtu.be/UX4cCKKFVrs
|
| Again, you'll note that there is frame material there.
|
| You don't have a sheet of glass on it, but space doesn't
| give you the mass savings you think it does.
|
| https://youtu.be/6vjK9vGEw5Q
|
| Those are cutting edge tech (designed to work at
| Jupiter's distance) and that's about 40 m^2 of space (ten
| times more than you're describing) and they mass 176 kg (
| https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-025-01190-6 ). If we
| assume that scales down linearly, the cutting edge
| technology for solar panels is 20kg for 4m^2 which is
| more than your estimates. ... And they have problems and
| can fail to deploy. https://spacenews.com/cygnus-solar-
| array-fails-to-deploy/ https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1
| 105/25telstar14r/index.htm...
| https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-
| skylab-2-astronaut... https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations
| /20210020397/downloads/Al...
|
| You'll note that the Cygnus used the same design as Lucy,
| though smaller.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_(spacecraft)
|
| > Starting with the Enhanced variant, the solar panels
| were also upgraded to the UltraFlex, an accordion fanfold
| array, and the fuel load was increased to 1,218 kilograms
| (2,685 lb).
|
| Digging more into Ultra Flex, https://www.eng.auburn.edu/
| ~dbeale/ESMDCourse/Site%20Documen...
|
| > Specific performance with 27% TJ cells: >150 W/kg BOL &
| > 40 kW/m3 BOL
|
| So there's your number. 150 W/kg of solar panel array. 1
| kW is about 7 kg.
|
| They're not cheap.
|
| https://spacenews.com/36576ousted-from-first-orion-
| flight-ci...
|
| > In 2011, Orbital replaced Dutch Space on the project
| and gave ATK's space components division, which was
| already supplying the substrates for Dutch Space's Orion
| solar panels, a $20 million deal to provide UltraFlex
| arrays for later Cygnus flights.
| bildung wrote:
| 1 KW of solar panels is 150EUR _retail_ right now. You
| are probably at 80EUR or less if you buy a few MW.
|
| (I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually
| creating the satellites is ignored here, too)
| tpm wrote:
| installation of large solar plants is largely automated
| already
| iso1631 wrote:
| My car costs far more per mile than the bare cost of the
| fuel. Why would starship not have similar costs?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels
| more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight
| (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for
| the items you listed, but it may not be true that
| everything is more difficult in space.
| edoceo wrote:
| I'm stretched to think of one thing that is easier in
| space. Anything I could imagine still requires getting
| there (in one piece)
| blipvert wrote:
| Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?
| esquivalience wrote:
| Death, and some science. That's it?
| ljsprague wrote:
| Horseshoes.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Noise insulation.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the
| ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency
| gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't
| replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of
| your satellite its power production drops.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Solar panels in space are more efficient...
|
| ... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting
| them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison
| between the amount of energy required to get a solar
| panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces
| during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it
| were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a
| tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a
| rocket is not an efficient process.
| obidee2 wrote:
| My sketchy napkin math gives an order of magnitude of a
| few months of panel output to get it in space.
|
| 5kg, 500W panel (don't exactly know what the ratio is for
| a panel plus protection and frame for space, might be a
| few times better than this)
|
| Say it produces about 350kWh per month before losses.
|
| Mass to LEO is something like 10x the weight in fuel
| alone, so that's going to be maybe 500kWh. Plus
| cryogenics etc.
|
| So not actually that bad
| serallak wrote:
| If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their
| useful life before reentry is low anyway.
|
| A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a
| starlink satellite.
|
| If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites
| every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop
| using worn out or broken ones.
| kibwen wrote:
| Terrestrial data centers save money and recoup costs by
| salvaging and recycling components, so what you're saying
| here is that space-based datacenters are even less
| competitive than we previously estimated.
| ericd wrote:
| No idea how quickly they wear out in space with 24x7
| irradiance and space temps, but on the earth, they're at
| something like 80% capacity after 25 years. So seems like
| you could control how long they have via overpanelling?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Let's say with no atmosphere and no night cycle, a space
| solar panel is 5x better. Deploying 5x as many solar
| panels on the ground is still going to come in way under
| the budget of the space equivalent.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| That's with current launch costs, right? Nobody is
| claiming it's economic without another huge fall in
| launch costs, but that's what SpaceX is doing.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It wouldn't make sense if launch was free and it will
| never be
| cmenge wrote:
| And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the
| ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at
| night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather
| and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks
| or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while
| still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your
| battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside
| what you designed for occurs.
| Certhas wrote:
| Or you put the data centers at different points on earth?
|
| Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating the
| earth?
|
| Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting
| above the clouds?
|
| If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems,
| why not for a million other more sensible options?
| cmenge wrote:
| > Or you put the data centers at different points on
| earth? > Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating
| the earth?
|
| What that does have to do with anything? If you want to
| solar-power them, you still are subject to terrestrial
| effects. You can't just shut off a data center at night.
|
| > Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting
| above the clouds?
|
| They'd have to fly at 50,000+ ft to be clear of clouds, I
| doubt you can lift heavy payloads this high using
| bouyancy given the low air density. High risk to people
| on the ground in case of failure because no re-entry.
|
| > If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space
| problems, why not for a million other more sensible
| options?
|
| How is this a fantasy? With Starlink operational, this
| hardly seems a mere 'fantasy'.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > You can't just shut off a data center at night.
|
| Why not?
|
| A capacity problem can be solved by having another data
| center the other side of the earth.
|
| If it's that the power cycling causes equipment to fail
| earlier, then that can be addressed far more easily than
| radiation hardening all equipment so that it can function
| in space.
| ericd wrote:
| Because GPUs are expensive, much more expensive than
| launch costs if they get starship to the low end of the
| range they're aiming for, and you want your expensive
| equipment running as much as possible to amortize the
| cost down?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| just take cost of getting kg in space and compare it to
| how much solar panel will generate
|
| Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels.
| Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000. So we're at
| $13.3(3)/Watt. We need to double it because same amount
| need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
|
| One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you
| need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then
| you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is
| 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping
| cmenge wrote:
| Over 10 years ago, the best satellites had 500W/kg [2].
| Modern solar panels that are designed to be light are at
| 200g per sqm [1]. That's 5sqm per kg. One sqm generates
| ca. 500W. So we're at 2.5kW per kg. Some people claim
| 4.3kW/kg possible.
|
| Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at
| $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.
|
| 120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe
| per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs
| aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more
| stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which
| is still good.
|
| [1] - https://www.polytechnique-
| insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr... [2] -
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-
| pos...
| mkesper wrote:
| What if you treat that launch costs goal as just a
| marketing promise. Invest in reality, not in
| billionaire's fantasies.
| cmenge wrote:
| > What if you treat that launch costs goal as just a
| marketing promise.
|
| Then it's roughly 10x-15x and still works.
|
| > Invest in reality, not in billionaire's fantasies.
|
| SpaceX has dramatically reduced payload cost already. How
| is that a fantasy?
| smileeeee wrote:
| The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech
| isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI
| folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and
| uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing
| more money at it gets you more satellites.
|
| At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It
| ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back
| into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To
| get them to spend money this is as good a way as any
| other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little
| spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's just tax payer money, who cares right? :)
| tw04 wrote:
| Amazon's new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW
| when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that's ignoring the
| fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for
| compute.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy
| consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
|
| xAI's first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and
| their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned
| buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.
|
| So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of
| magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.
|
| Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
| hirsin wrote:
| Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud
| size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
|
| A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a
| single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
|
| When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units
| of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't
| scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
|
| And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even
| trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right
| order of magnitude.
| tensor wrote:
| How much of that power is radiated as the radio waves it
| sends?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| the majority is likely in radio waves and the inter
| satellite laser communication
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Inter sat comms cancels out - every kw sent by one sat is
| received by another.
| mlyle wrote:
| It doesn't, because the beams are not so tight that they
| all fall on the target satellite, and not all of that is
| absorbed :P
| hirsin wrote:
| Good point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping"
| some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious
| about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but
| I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy
| dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the
| form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind
| that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a
| wash).
| adrian_b wrote:
| I am willing to bet that more than 10% of the electrical
| energy consumed by the satellite is converted into
| transmitted microwaves.
|
| There must be many power consumers in the satellite, e.g.
| radio receivers, lasers, computers and motors, where the
| consumed energy eventually is converted into heat, but
| the radio transmitter of a communication satellite must
| take a big fraction of the average consumed power.
|
| The radio transmitter itself has a great efficiency, much
| greater than 50%, possibly greater than 90%, so only a
| small fraction of the electrical power consumed by the
| transmitter is converted into heat and most is radiated
| in the microwave signal that goes to Earth's surface.
| tullianus wrote:
| Unfortunately this is not the case. The amplifiers on the
| transmit-side phased arrays are about 10% efficient
| (perhaps 12% on a good day), but the amps represent only
| ~half the power consumption of the transmit phased
| arrays. The beamformers and processors are 0% efficient.
| The receive-side phased arrays are of course 0% efficient
| as well.
| klaff wrote:
| I'm curious. I think the whole thing (space-based
| compute) is infeasible and stupid for a bunch of reasons,
| but even a class-A amplifier has a theoretical limit of
| 50% efficiency, and I thought we used class-C amplifiers
| (with practical efficiencies above 50%) in FM/FSK/etc.
| applications in which amplitude distortion can be
| filtered away. What makes these systems be down at 10%?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, a 10% efficiency is very weird if true.
|
| Nowadays such microwave power amplifiers should be made
| with gallium nitride transistors, which should allow
| better efficiencies than the ancient amplifiers using
| LDMOS or travelling-wave tubes, and even those had
| efficiencies over 50%.
|
| For beamformers, there have been research papers in
| recent years claiming a great reduction in losses, but
| presumably the Starlink satellites are still using some
| mature technology, with greater losses.
| mlyle wrote:
| I doubt half the power is to the transmitter, and radio
| efficiency is poor -- 20% might be a good starting point.
| synctext wrote:
| Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real?
| Can experts check this out?
|
| "SmartIR's graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX
| Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on
| heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts
| say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be
| the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with
| avoiding complex self-assembly in space through
| decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid
| comms).
|
| [1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-
| based-radia...
| ajnin wrote:
| This coating looks like it can selectively make parts of
| the satellite radiators or insulators, as to regulate
| temperature. But I don't think it can change the
| fundamental physics of radiating unwanted heat and that
| you can't do better than black body radiation.
| synctext wrote:
| Indeed, graphene seems capable of .99 of black body
| radiation limit.
|
| Quote: "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of
| wavelengths". Article title "Perfect blackbody radiation
| from a graphene nanostructure" [1]. So several rolls of
| 10 x 50 meters graphene-coated aluminium foil could have
| significant cooling capability. No science-fiction needed
| anymore (see the 4km x 4km NVIDIA fantasy)
|
| [1]
| https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-21-25-30964
| habinero wrote:
| It's not as exciting as you think it is. "emissivity
| higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths" is
| basically code for "it's, like, super black"
|
| The limiting factor isn't the emissivity, it's that
| you're having to rely on radiation as your only cooling
| mechanism. It's super slow and inefficient and it limits
| how much heat you can dissipate.
|
| Like the other person said, you can't do any better than
| blackbody radiation (emissivity=1).
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, graphene appears to offer a negligible improvement
| over other kinds of paints based on black carbon, e.g.
| Vantablack.
|
| The research article linked above does not claim a better
| emissivity than Vantablack, but a resistance to higher
| temperatures, which is useful for high temperature
| sensors (used with pyrometers), but irrelevant for a
| satellite that will never be hotter than 100 Celsius
| degrees, in order to not damage the electronic equipment.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Lets assume an electrical consumption of 1 MW which
| turned into heat and a concommitant 3 MW which was a
| byproduct of acquiring 1 MW of electrical energy.
|
| So the total heat load if 4 MW (of which 1 MW was
| temporarily electrical energy before it was used by the
| datacenter or whatever).
|
| Let's assume a single planar radiator, with emissivity ~1
| over the thermal infrared range.
|
| Let's assume the target temperature of the radiator is
| 300 K (~27 deg C).
|
| What size radiator did you need?
|
| 4 MW / (5.67 * 10 ^ -8 W / ( m ^2 K ^4 ) * 300 K ^4) =
| 8710 m ^2 = (94 m) ^2
|
| so basically 100m x 100m. Thats not insanely large.
|
| The solar panels would have to be about 3000 m ^2 = 55m x
| 55m
|
| The radiator could be aluminum foil, and something
| amounting to a remote controlled toy car could drive
| around with a small roll of aluminum wire and locally
| weld shut small holes due to micrometeorites. the wheels
| are rubberized but have a magnetic rim, on the outside
| theres complementary steel spheres so the radiator foil
| is sandwiched between wheel and steel sphere. Then the
| wheels have traction. The radiator could easily weigh
| less than the solar panels, and expand to much larger
| areas. Better divide the entire radiator up into a few
| inflatable surfaces, so that you can activate a spare
| while a sever leak is being solved.
|
| It may be more elegant to have rovers on both inside and
| outside of the radiator: the inner one can drop a heat
| resistant silicone rubber disc / sheet over the hole,
| while the outside rover could do the welding of the hole
| without obstruction of the hole by a stopgap measure.
| mlyle wrote:
| > The radiator could be aluminum foil,
|
| As I've pointed it out to you elsewhere -- how do you
| couple the 4MW of heat to the aluminum foil? You need to
| spread the power somewhat evenly over this massive
| surface area.
|
| Low pressure gas doesn't convect heat well and heat
| doesn't conduct down the foil well.
|
| It's just like how on Earth we can't cool datacenters by
| hoping that free convection will transfer heat to the
| outer walls.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the heat
| transport, then you correct me, but I never see you
| correct people who believe the thermal radiation step is
| the issue. It's a very selective form of correcting.
|
| Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the heat
| transport to the radiator, how is it solved on earth?
| mlyle wrote:
| > Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the
| heat transport, then you correct me, but I never see you
| correct people who believe the thermal radiation step is
| the issue
|
| It's both. You have to spread a lot of heat very evenly
| over a very large surface area. This makes a big, high-
| mass structure.
|
| > how is it solved on earth?
|
| We pump fluids (including air) around to move large
| amounts of heat both on Earth and in space. The problem
| is, in space, you need to pump them much further and
| cover larger areas, because they only way the heat leaves
| the system is radiation. As a result, you end up
| proposing a system that is larger than the cooling tower
| for many nuclear power plants on Earth to move 1/5th of
| the energy.
|
| The problem is, pumping fluids in space around has 3 ways
| it sucks compared to Earth:
|
| 1. Managing fluids in space is a pain.
|
| 2. We have to pump fluids much longer distances to cover
| the large area of radiators. So the systems tend to get
| orders of magnitude physically larger.
|
| 3. The mass of fluids and all their hardware matters more
| in space. Even if launch gets cheaper, this will still be
| true compared to Earth.
|
| I explained this all to you 15 hours ago:
|
| > If this wasn't a concern, you could fly a big inflated-
| and-then-rigidized structure and getting lots of area
| wouldn't be scary. But since you need to think about
| circulating fluids and actively conducting heat this is
| much less pleasant.
|
| You may notice that the areas, etc, we come up with here
| to reject 70kW are similar to those of the ISS's EATCS,
| which rejects 70kW using white-colored radiators and
| ammonia loops. Despite the use of a lot of exotic and
| expensive techniques to reduce mass, the radiators mass
| about 10 tonnes-- and this doesn't count all the hardware
| to drive heat to them on the other end.
|
| So, to reject 105W on Earth, I spend about 500g of mass;
| if I'm as efficient as EATCS, it would be about 15000g of
| mass.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Aluminum foil of great surface will not work very well,
| because the limited conductivity of a thin foil will
| create a great temperature gradient through it.
|
| Thus the extremities of the foil, which are far from the
| satellite body, will be much cooler than the body, so
| they will have negligible contribution to the radiated
| power.
|
| The ideal heatsink has fins that are thick close to the
| body and they become thinner towards extremities, but a
| heatsink made for radiation instead of convection needs a
| different shape, to avoid a part of it shadowing other
| parts.
|
| I do not believe that you can make an efficient radiation
| heatsink with metallic foil. You can increase the
| radiating surface by not having a flat surface, but one
| covered with long fins or cones or pyramids, but the more
| the surface is increased, the greater the thermal
| resistance between base and tip becomes, and also the
| tips limit the solid angle through which the bases
| radiate, so there must be some optimum shape that has
| only a limited surface increasing factor over the
| radiation of a flat body.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I do not believe that you can make an efficient
| radiation heatsink with metallic foil.
|
| What radiators look like is foil or sheet covering fluid
| loops to spread the heat, control the color, and add
| surface area.
|
| In general, radiators are _white_ because there 's no
| reason for them to absorb visible light, and they're not
| hot enough to radiate visible light. You want them to be
| reflective in the visible spectrum (and strongly
| absorptive/emissive in the infrared).
|
| A white surface pointing at the sun can be _quite_ cool
| in LEO, < -40C.
| mlyle wrote:
| What radiators look like is foil or sheet covering fluid
| loops to spread the heat, control the color, and add
| surface area.
|
| They are usually white, because things in a spacecraft
| are not hot enough to glow in visible light and you'd
| rather they not get super hot if the sun shines on them.
|
| The practical emittance of both black paint and white
| paint are very close to the same at any reasonable
| temperature-- and both are quite good, >90% of this
| magical material that you cite ;)
|
| Better materials -- with less visible absorption and more
| infrared emittance -- can make a difference, but you
| still need to convect or conduct the heat to them, and
| heat doesn't move very well in thin materials as my
| sibling comment says.
|
| The graphene radiator you cite is more about _active
| thermal control_ than being super black. Cheap ways to
| change how much heat you are dumping are very useful for
| space missions that use variable amounts of power or have
| very long eclipse periods, or what move from geospace to
| deep space, etc. Usually you solve it on bigger
| satellites with louvers that change what color they 're
| exposing to the outside, but those are mechanical parts
| and annoying.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Entirely depends on band, at 10GHz more like 40%, at
| lower frequencies more, for example FM band can even go
| to 70%
| nosianu wrote:
| The radio receiver and transmitter are _additional_
| hardware and energy consumption. They add to the heat,
| not subtract from it.
| jeltz wrote:
| I think you missed the point. If you have a 100 MW
| communicstion satellite and a 100 MW compute satellite
| those are very different beasts. The first might send 50%
| of the energy away as radio communication making it
| effectively a 50 MW satellitefor cooling purposes.
| habinero wrote:
| No, they didn't. You can't "send away" thermal energy via
| radio waves. At the temperatures we're talking about,
| thermal energy is in the infrared. That's blackbody
| radiation.
| mortehu wrote:
| Your answer makes it seem like you too missed the point.
| If a Starlink sends a 1000W signal to Earth, that is
| 1000W of power that does not heat the satellite.
| adrian_b wrote:
| You missed the point.
|
| Nobody describes a satellite by specifying the amount of
| heat that it produces, but by the amount of electrical
| energy that it consumes.
|
| In a communication satellite, a large fraction of the
| consumed electrical energy goes into the radio
| transmitter. Radio transmitters are very efficient and
| most of the consumed power is emitted as radio waves and
| only a very small part is converted into heat, which must
| be handled by the cooling system.
|
| So in any communication satellite, a significant fraction
| of the consumed energy does not become heat.
| lloeki wrote:
| For another reference, the Nvidia-OpenAI deal is
| reportedly 10GW worth of DC.
| pera wrote:
| New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe
| the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around
| ~150kW, can someone confirm?
|
| The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously
| can't imagine something similar being deployed in
| orbit...
| synctext wrote:
| Could this be about bypassing government regulation and
| taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.
|
| The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you
| launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and
| the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal
| entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is
| Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and
| creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space
| sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.
| habinero wrote:
| No. There is no "one weird trick" when it comes to
| regulation. The company is based in the US, therefore you
| just go after that.
|
| Anyway, promising some fantasy and never delivering is
| definitely a typical Elon endeavor.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You misspelled 'hate speech'.
| 9dev wrote:
| Untrue. Responsible for any spacefaring vessel is in all
| cases the state the entity operating the vessel is
| registered in. If it's not SpaceX directly but a shell
| company in Ecuador carrying out the launch, Ecuador will
| be completely responsible for anything happening with and
| around the vessel, period. There are no loopholes in this
| system.
| Someone wrote:
| For the sake of an argument, let's assume "The Outer
| Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from
| international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the
| equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal
| entity there is significant legal ambiguity" is 100%
| true.
|
| To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX
| would have to be "not owned by a US-company". Do you
| think the US government would allow that to happen?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You cannot escape _national_ regulations like that, at
| least until a maritime-like situation develops, where
| rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars
| and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are
| doing.
|
| It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from
| that. As of now, big countries watch their space
| corporations very closely and won't let them do this.
|
| Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape _state_ and
| _regional_ authorities this way. IIRC The Californian
| Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX
| activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which
| is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to
| comply with.
|
| If you launch from international waters, these lower
| authority tiers do not apply.
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-14/cal
| ifornia...
| zbentley wrote:
| In addition to all the sibling comments explaining why
| this wouldn't work, the money's not there.
|
| A grift the size of Dogecoin, or the size of "free
| speech" enthusiast computing, or even the size of the
| criminal enterprises that run on the dark web, is tiny in
| comparison to the footer cost and upkeep of a datacenter
| in space. It'd also need to be funded by investments
| (since criminal funds and crypto assets are quite
| famously not available in up-front volumes for a huge
| enterprise), which implies a market presence in some
| country's economy, which implies regulators and risk
| management, and so on.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| This could simply be done by hosting in the Tor hidden
| service cloud. Accessing illegal material hosted on a
| satellite is still exactly as risky for the user (if the
| user is on earth) as accessing that same illegal material
| through the Tor network, but hosting it through the Tor
| network can be done for 1/1000th the cost compared to an
| orbital solution.
|
| So there's no regulatory or tax benefit to hosting in
| space.
| stonogo wrote:
| Most of the OEMs are past 300kW racks, planning on 600kW
| racks within a year or two, with realistic plans to hit a
| megawatt
| mike_hearn wrote:
| But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters
| comes from the practicalities of ground based
| construction. There are huge overheads involved with
| obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land,
| pouring concrete foundations, building roads and
| increasingly often now, building a power plant on site.
| So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building
| massive facilities, which is why they get so big.
|
| That _doesn 't_ mean you need a gigawatt of power before
| achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not
| for inference which scales horizontally.
|
| With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time,
| and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those,
| but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying
| them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you
| can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and
| just keep launching them on a cadence.
|
| I also strongly suspect, given some background reading,
| that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff
| we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling
| needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space
| radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of
| low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
| cogman10 wrote:
| > I also strongly suspect, given some background reading,
| that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff
| we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling
| needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space
| radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of
| low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
|
| You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized
| radiator tech because of things like the international
| space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment
| due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added
| cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper
| optimization.
|
| Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem
| easier.
|
| Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to
| help address this very problem.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The ISS is a government project that's heading towards
| EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything
| because the people who built it don't get rich by doing
| so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.
| jeltz wrote:
| By the same token SpaceX has no reason to optimize
| Starship. That is also largely a government project.
| b112 wrote:
| It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has
| reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point.
|
| Starship isn't largely a government project. It was
| planned a decade before the government was ever involved,
| they came along later and said "Hey, this even more
| incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can
| hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?"
|
| Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any
| government.
| habinero wrote:
| Haha no. SpaceX survives entirely on money from the US
| government. It's always been that way.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| A puzzling statement, could you explain? Most of their
| revenue now comes Starlink which is mostly private
| clients. Also it's trivial to look at their launch
| history and see they have plenty of private clients. For
| sure the USG is their most important client but
| "entirely" is flat out wrong.
| s-y wrote:
| Where are you getting this from?
| lightedman wrote:
| Entirely? lol not even close.
|
| Source: I am out of LEDs and LASERs and now handle
| aerospace solar for a private company. Guess who almost
| everyone in the private sector flies on?
| oivey wrote:
| Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and all the others
| are private companies, too. NASA and others generally go
| through contractors to build things. SpaceX is on the
| dole just like them.
| pineaux wrote:
| that is true. They would have failed after their first
| failed launch. The US government saved them.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because
| the people who built it don't get rich by doing so.
|
| Optimization is literally how contractors working for the
| government got rich. Every hour they spent on research
| was directly billed to the government. Weight reduction
| being one of the most important and consistent points of
| research.
|
| Heck, R&D is how some of the biggest government
| contractors make all their dough.
|
| SpaceX is built on the billions in research NASA has
| invested over the decades. It looks like it's more
| innovative simply because the USG decided to nearly
| completely defund public spending in favor of spending
| money on private contractors like SpaceX. That's been
| happening since the 90s.
| zero_bias wrote:
| ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many
| radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will
| demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling
| cogman10 wrote:
| ISS cost $150B and a large factor driving that cost was
| the payload weight.
|
| Minimizing payload at any point was easily worth a
| billion dollars. And given how heavy and nessisary the
| radiators are (look them up), you can bet a decent bit of
| research was invested in making them lightweight.
|
| Heck, one bit of research that lasted the entire lifetime
| of the shuttle was improving the radiative heat system
| [1]. Multiple contractors and agencies invested a huge
| amount of money to make that system better.
|
| Removing heat is one of the most researched problems of
| all space programs. They all have to do it, and every
| gram of reduction means big savings. Simply saying "well
| a DC will need more of it, therefore there must be low
| hanging fruit" is naive.
|
| [1] https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116
| leoedin wrote:
| But why would you?
|
| Space has some huge downsides:
|
| * Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things
| need to be radiation hardened or shielded.
|
| * Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of
| energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO.
| I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket
| and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at
| least.
|
| * Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in
| the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is
| incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has
| to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into
| space.
|
| * Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some
| sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of
| coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals
|
| * You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means
| writing off the entire system.
|
| * Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No
| electrolytic capacitors for you!
|
| So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit
| I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you
| don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the
| thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact
| you have to blast it all into space? Why not just
| overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?
| Findeton wrote:
| Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult,
| but perhaps not as difficult?
| thephyber wrote:
| Almost none of the parent's bullet points are solved by
| building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit.
|
| The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are
| IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit.
|
| Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth
| is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable
| location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs
| by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing
| improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction
| that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers
| in.
|
| This whole things screams a solution in search of a
| problem. We have to solve the traditional data center
| issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience,
| etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground
| or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical
| space data centers, but they are all already solved for
| terrestrial data centers.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?
| notahacker wrote:
| That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving
| that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture
| a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to
| transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon.
| That probably works out more expensive than launching the
| whole thing to LEO
| mcny wrote:
| But none of those are usable, right? It will take decades
| of work at least to get a commercial grade mining
| operation going and even then the iron, titanium,
| aluminum would need to be fashioned...
|
| Ah, I see the idea now. It is to get people to talk about
| robotics and how robots will be able to do all this on
| the moon or wherever.
|
| Instantly pumps Tesla stock here now on earth!
| ahoka wrote:
| It has all these problems, plus more.
| kakacik wrote:
| Yeah, carrying stuff 380k km and still deploying in
| vacuum (and super dusty ground) doesn't solve anything
| but adds cost and overhead. One day maybe, but not these
| next decades nor probably this century.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you
| also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also
| have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There's no wind of
| course, but surely material will be stirred up and
| resettle based on all the landing activity.
|
| And it's still a vacuum with many of the same cooling
| issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon
| itself as a heat sink (maybe).
| microtherion wrote:
| > Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more
| fuel to land on it
|
| And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to
| be used.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The 2.5s round trip communication latency isn't going to
| be great for chat. (Alongside all the other reasons.)
| zbentley wrote:
| And 2.5s is _best case_. Signal strength issues, antenna
| alignment issues, and all sorts of unknown unknowns
| conspire to make high-integrity /high-throughput digital
| signal transmissions from a moon-based compute system
| have a latency much worse than that on average.
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| Still a vacuum so the same heat dissipation issues,
| adding to it that the lunar dust makes solar panels less
| usable, and the lunar surface on the solar side gets
| really hot.
| wombatpm wrote:
| It would make more sense to develop power beaming
| technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink
| constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto
| the rooftops of data centers
| habinero wrote:
| Why? We have solar panels and fossil fuels at home.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Everybody wants a death ray.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Hello SimCity 2000 Microwave Power Plant.
| iFred wrote:
| Looking forward to an CNN breaking chyron titled "Oops!"
| wookmaster wrote:
| Why does that make sense at all
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _Why does that make sense at all_
|
| Parent said it would make _more_ sense.
|
| I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on
| display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge
| reflectors in space than it is to try to build space
| datacenters, where the electricity can only power
| specific pieces of equipment that are virtually
| impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within
| a few years).
| fpoling wrote:
| If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one
| month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things
| works for a year or more energy cost to put them into
| orbit becomes irrelevant.
|
| To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and
| require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus
| on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet
| that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them
| could work.
|
| Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if
| one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then
| calling would be much less problematic.
|
| But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that
| would require entirely different architecture/design.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "But why would you?"
|
| Because the permitting process is much easier and there
| are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut
| you down.
|
| I think this is the entire difference. Space is very,
| very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to
| labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be
| able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a
| lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all
| but a few authorities that would hold power over you down
| on Earth.
|
| No one will be able to complain that your data center is
| taking their water or making their electricity more
| expensive, for example.
| oivey wrote:
| The satellite is built on Earth, so I'm not sure how it
| dodges any of those regulations practically. Why not just
| build a fully autonomous, solar powered datacenter on
| Earth? I guess in space Elon might think that no one can
| ban Grok for distributing CSAM?
|
| There's some truly magical thinking behind the idea that
| government regulations have somehow made it cheaper to
| launch a rocket than build a building. Rockets are
| fantastically expensive even with the major leaps SpaceX
| made and will be even with Starship. Everything about a
| space launch is expensive, dangerous, and highly
| regulated. Your datacenter on Earth can't go boom.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "fantastically expensive"
|
| From individual POV yes, but already Falcons are not
| _that_ expensive. In the sense that it is feasible for a
| relatively unimportant entity to buy their launch
| services.
|
| "The satellite is built on Earth, so I'm not sure how it
| dodges any of those regulations practically."
|
| It is easier to shop for jurisdiction when it comes to
| manufacturing, especially if your design is simple enough
| - which it has to be in order to run unattended for
| years. If you outsource the manufacturing to N chosen
| factories in different locations, you can always respond
| to local pressure by moving out of that particular
| country. In effect, you just rent time and services of a
| factory that can produce tons of other products.
|
| A data center is much more expensive to build and move
| around. Once you build it in some location, you are
| committed quite seriously to staying there.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Truly magical thinking, you say? OK, let's rewind the
| clock to 2008. In that year two things happened:
|
| - SpaceX launched its first rocket successfully.
|
| - California voted to build high speed rail.
|
| Eighteen years later:
|
| - SpaceX has taken over the space industry with reusable
| rockets and a global satcom network, which by itself
| contains more than half of all satellites in orbit.
|
| - Californian HSR has spent over thirteen billion dollars
| and laid zero miles of track. That's more than 2x the
| cost of the Starship programme so far.
|
| Building stuff on Earth can be difficult. People live
| there, they have opinions and power. Their governments
| can be dysfunctional. Trains are 19th century technology,
| it should be easier to build a railway than a global
| satellite network. It may seem truly magical but putting
| things into orbit can, apparently, be easier.
| msie wrote:
| _it should be easier to build a railway_
|
| No, because of the costs of acquiring land that the
| railway goes through.
| ericd wrote:
| Now how about procuring half a gigawatt when nearby
| residents are annoyed about their heating bills doubling,
| and are highly motivated to block you? This is already
| happening in some areas.
| plorg wrote:
| So it's a Zone in search of a use case?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Libertarian Paradise!
|
| Too bad the fire trucks can't get to you when you catch
| on fire from that hot GPU.
| ericd wrote:
| Good thing the lack of oxygen does a pretty good job of
| taking care of that for you ;-)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And publicly maintained roads.
| elihu wrote:
| The main reason is that generating energy in space is
| very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective
| solar panels are.
|
| Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article
| that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new
| one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes
| advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to
| cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it
| matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put
| a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous
| sunlight.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
|
| Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a
| bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If
| electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter
| costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm
| willing to at least concede that it might be plausible.
|
| If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would
| want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying
| more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap
| power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my
| money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great
| idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more
| importantly, the people who work for him) have actually
| got this figured out.
| leoedin wrote:
| Let's assume your space solar panel is always in sun - so
| 8760 kWh per year from 1kWp.
|
| In Spain, 1kWp of solar can expect to generate about 1800
| kWh per year. There's a complication because seasonal
| difference is quite large - if we assume worst case
| generation (ie what happens in December), we get more
| like 65% of that, or 1170 kWh per year.
|
| That means we need to overbuild our solar generation by
| about 7.5x to get the same amount of generation per year.
| Or 7.5kWp.
|
| We then need some storage, because that generation shuts
| off at night. In December in Madrid the shortest day is
| about 9 hours, so we need 15 hours of storage. Assuming a
| 1kW load, that means 15kWh.
|
| European wholesale solar panels are about EUR0.1/W -
| EUR100/kW. So our 7.5kWp is EUR750. A conservative
| estimate for batteries is EUR100/kWh. So our 15kWh is
| EUR1500. There's obviously other costs - inverters etc.
| But perhaps the total hardware cost is EUR3k for 1kW of
| off-grid solar.
|
| A communications satellite like the Eurostar Neo
| satellite has a payload power of 22 kW and a launch mass
| of 4,500 kg. Assuming that's a reasonable assumption,
| that means about 204kg per kW. Current SpaceX launch
| costs are circa $1500 per kg - but they're targeting
| $100/kg or lower. That would give a launch cost of
| between $300k and $20k per kW of satellite power. That
| doesn't include the actual cost of the satellite itself -
| just the launch.
|
| I just don't see how it will make sense for a long time.
| Even if SpaceX manage to drastically lower launch costs.
| Battery and solar costs have also been plummeting.
|
| https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-
| air...
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-
| roadma...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting calculations.
|
| Is it reasonable to use Neo as a baseline? Modern
| Starlink satellites can weigh 800kg, or less than 20% of
| Neo. I see discussions suggesting they generate ~73kw for
| that mass. I guess because they aren't trying to blanket
| an entire continent in signal? Or, why are they so much
| more efficient than Neo?
|
| Interestingly the idea of doing compute in space isn't a
| new one, it came up a few years ago pre-ChatGPT amongst
| people discussing the v2 satellite:
|
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=58374.m
| sg2...
|
| Still, you make good points. Even if you assume much
| lighter satellites, the GPUs alone are very heavy. 700kg
| or so for a rack. Just the payload would be as heavy as
| the entire Starlink satellite.
| blastro wrote:
| Kind of a scary thought - a DC in space can't be stopped
| by protests or regulation
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > So I guess the question is - why bother?
|
| This is a Musk escapade, so my guess would be
| extraterritoriality and absence of jurisdiction.
| UltraSane wrote:
| No. With Musk it is always about inflating his share
| prices.
| thephyber wrote:
| There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of
| magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more
| satellites that have to navigate around each other.
|
| We still don't have any plan I've heard of for avoiding a
| cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn
| into lots of fast moving shrapnel. Yes, space is big, but
| low Earth orbit is a very tiny subset of all space.
|
| The amount of propulsion satellites have before they
| become unable to maneuver is relatively small and the
| more satellite traffic there is, the faster each
| satellite will exhaust their propulsion gasses.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| >There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of
| magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more
| satellites that have to navigate around each other.
|
| This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed
| up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of
| commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do
| 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications.
| Elon probably said "they could just run the machines
| faster! I'm brilliant".
| krisoft wrote:
| > We still don't have any plan I've heard of for avoiding
| a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and
| turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel.
|
| What do you mean we don't have any plans to avoid that?
| It is a super well studied topic of satelite management.
| Full books have been written on the topic.
|
| Here is just one: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/202
| 30002470/downloads/CA...
|
| Did you think satelites are kept apart by good luck and
| providence?
| thephyber wrote:
| I am very aware that the US Air Force / Space Force
| monitor's trajectories and calls satellite owners when
| there is an anticipated collision but that method doesn't
| scale, especially with orders of magnitude more
| satellites in the same LEO shells.
|
| And it still doesn't solve the problem of a cascade
| causing shrapnel density to increase in an orbit shell
| which then causes satellites to use some of their scarce
| maneuver budget to avoid collision. But as soon as a
| satellite exhausts that budget, it becomes fodder for the
| shrapnel cascade.
| skywhopper wrote:
| All of those "huge overheads" you cite are nothing
| compared to the huge overhead of building and fueling
| rockets to launch the vibration- and radiation-hardened
| versions of the solar panels and GPUs and cooling
| equipment that you could use much cheaper versions of on
| Earth. How many permitted, regulated launches would it
| take to get around the one-time permitting and
| predictable regulation of a ground-based datacenter?
|
| Are Earth-based datacenters actually bound by some
| bottleneck that space-based datacenters would not be?
| Grid connections or on-site power plants take time to
| build, yes. How long does it take to build the rocket
| fleet required to launch a space "datacenter" in a
| reasonable time window?
|
| This is not a problem that needs to be solved. Certainly
| not worth investing billions in, and definitely not when
| run by the biggest scam artist of the 21st century.
| markhahn wrote:
| 50MW is on the small side for an AI cluster - probably less
| than 50k gpus.
|
| if the current satellite model dissipates 5kW, you can't
| just add a GPU (+1kW). maybe removing most of the downlink
| stuff lets you put in 2 GPUs? so if you had 10k of these,
| you'd have a pretty high-latency cluster of 20k GPUs.
|
| I'm not saying I'd turn down free access to it, but it's
| also very cracked. you know, sort of Howard Hughesy.
| hackernudes wrote:
| High latency to earth but low latency (potentially) to
| other satellites.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| Starlink provides a service that couldn't exist without the
| satellite infrastructure.
|
| Datacenters already exist. Putting datacenters in space
| does not offer any new capabilities.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| This is the main point I think. I am very much convinced
| that SpaceX is capbable to put a datacenter into space. I
| am not convinced they can do it cheaper than building a
| datacenter on earth.
| notahacker wrote:
| I would be a lot more convinced they had found a way to
| solve the unit economics if it was being used to secure
| billion dollar deposits from other companies rather than
| as the narrative for rolling a couple of Elon's loss
| making companies into SpaceX and IPOing...
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| > A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power.
| It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power
| on it) just to operate.
|
| This isn't quite true. It's very possible that the majority
| of that power is going into the antennas/lasers which
| technically means that the energy is being dissipated, but
| it never became heat in the first place. Also, 5KW solar
| power likely only means ~3kw of actual electrical
| consumption (you will over-provision a bit both for when
| you're behind the earth and also just for safety margin).
| gclawes wrote:
| Starlink satellites also radiate a non-trivial amount of
| the energy they consume from their phased arrays
| antonvs wrote:
| > Why is starlink possible and other computations are not?
|
| Aside from the point others have made that 50 MW is small
| in the context of hyperscalers, if you want to do things
| like SOTA LLM training, you can't feasibly do it with large
| numbers of small devices.
|
| Density is key because of latency - you need the nodes to
| be in close physical proximity to communicate with each
| other at very high speeds.
|
| For training an LLM, you're ideally going to want
| _individual_ satellites with power delivery on the order of
| at least about 20 MW, and that 's just for training
| previous-generation SOTA models. That's nearly 5,000 times
| more power than a single current Starlink satellite, and
| nearly 300 times that of the ISS.
|
| You'd need radiator areas in the range of tens of thousands
| of square meters to handle that. Is it theoretically
| technically possible? Sure. But it's a long-term project,
| the kind of thing that Musk will say takes "5 years" that
| will actually take many decades. And making it economically
| viable is another story - the OP article points out other
| issues with that, such as handling hardware upgrades.
| Starlink's current model relies on many cheap satellites -
| the equation changes when each one is going to be very,
| very expensive, large, and difficult to deploy.
| kristjansson wrote:
| 50MW might be one aisle of a really dense DC. A single rack
| might draw 120kW.
| pdpi wrote:
| 5kW means you can't even handle a single one of these[0],
| compared to a handful per rack on an earthbound data
| centre.
|
| 0. https://www.arccompute.io/solutions/hardware/gpu-
| servers/sup...
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| I ran the math the last time this topic camps up
|
| The short answer is that ~100m2 of steel plate at 1400C
| (just below its melting point) will shed 50MW of power in
| black body radiation.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616#46093316
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Which GPU runs at 1400C?
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| One made of steel presumably.
|
| I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of
| heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously
| that's going to impact efficiency.
|
| Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is
| a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre.
| It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea
| is.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The idea of using heat pumps to increase the temperature
| of the radiator is unlikely to allow an increase of the
| fraction of the original amount of heat that is radiated
| per heatsink surface, i.e. the added heat may be higher
| than the additionally radiated heat, though I am too lazy
| to compute now whether this is possible.
|
| Moreover, a heat pump would add an equipment with moving
| parts that can fail, requiring maintenance.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The temperature of space datacenters will be limited to
| 100 Celsius degrees, because otherwise the electronic
| equipment will be destroyed.
|
| So your huge metal plate would radiate (1673/374)^4 = 400
| times less heat, i.e. only 125 kW.
|
| In reality, it would radiate much less than that, even if
| made of copper or silver covered with Vantablack, because
| the limited thermal conductivity will reduce the
| temperature for the parts distant from the body.
| phs318u wrote:
| Because 10K satellites have a FAR greater combined surface
| area than a single space-borne DC would. Stefan-Boltzman
| law: ability to radiate heat increase to the 4th power of
| surface area.
| thebolt00 wrote:
| It's linear to surface area, but 4th power to
| temperature.
| dguest wrote:
| Also worth noting that if computing power scales with
| volume then surface area (and thus radiation) scales like
| p^2/3. In other words, for a fixed geometry, the required
| heat dissipation per unit area goes like p^1/3. This is
| why smaller things can just dissipate heat from their
| surface, whereas larger things require active cooling.
|
| I'm not a space engineer but I'd imagine that smaller
| satellites can make due with a lot of passive cooling on
| the exterior of the housing, whereas a shopping-mall
| sized computer in space would will require a lot of extra
| plumbing.
| phs318u wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. Last time I looked at it was
| in 2nd year Thermodynamics in 1985.
| padjo wrote:
| Are starlink satellites in sun synchronous orbits? Doesn't
| constant solar heating change the energy balance quite a
| bit?
| cjfd wrote:
| Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of
| Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application
| is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are
| going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at
| somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source...
| What do you mean by "open source"? Can we contribute
| changes to it?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| A Starlink satellite is mainly just receiving and sending
| data, the bare minimum of a data center-satellite's
| abilities; everything else comes on top and would be the
| real power drain.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Square-cube law.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why would anyone think the unit cost would be competitive
| with cheap power / land on earth? If that doesn't make
| sense how could anything else?
| chairmansteve wrote:
| A typical desktop/tower PC will consume 400 watts. So 12
| PC's equals 1 starlink satellite.
|
| A single server in a data center will consume 5-10 kW.
| kimixa wrote:
| Output from radiating heat scales with area it can
| dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a _much_
| higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k
| separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10
| objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power
| output is the same.
|
| Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a
| _very_ hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at
| useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are
| doing today. And that 's with direct cables - using
| wireless communication means even less bandwidth between
| nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and
| significantly higher power use and complexity for the
| communication in the first place.
|
| Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is
| still much better in pretty much every metric than in
| space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency,
| ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even
| things like communication network connectivity would be
| easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh
| would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an
| entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new
| trunk connections to every major hub.
|
| There are advantages to being in space - normally around
| increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great
| distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But
| that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use
| case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those
| benefits is nonsense.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run
| better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in
| antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the
| ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for
| those activities that can only be done from space. For
| general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the
| globe are full.
|
| This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will
| line up to give it to him.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run
| better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in
| antarctica than it will in space
|
| That is clearly not true. How do you power the data
| center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the
| shadow of earth for half a year.
| adrianN wrote:
| A tanker full of LNG and a turbine would probably work.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Kinda like the ones they are already burning in Starship
| to put these in space in the first place.
|
| Anywhere on earth is better than space for this
| application.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Space is so expensive that you can power it pretty much
| any way you want and it will be cheaper. Nuclear reactor,
| LNG, batteries (truck them in and out if you have to).
| Hell, space based solar and beam it down. Why would there
| ever be an advantage to putting the compute in space?
| cmsj wrote:
| Get those penguins doing something productive for once,
| put them on treadmills!
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Or burn them in a furnace. Pretty much any way you can
| think of to accomplish something on earth, is vastly
| cheaper, easier, and faster than doing it in space.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Then you put another in the high north. Two, or six, is
| still cheaper than one in orbit.
| triceratops wrote:
| > How do you power the data center on antarctica?
|
| Nuclear power plant?
| kimixa wrote:
| Yup - my example of the Sahara wasn't really a specific
| suggestion, so much as an example of "The Most
| Inconvenient Inhospitable part of the earth's surface is
| still _much_ better than space for these use cases ".
| This isn't star trek, the world doesn't match sci-fi.
|
| It's like his "Mars Colony" junk - and people lap it up,
| keeping him in the news (in a not explicitly negative
| light - unlike some recent stories....)
| abalone wrote:
| _> using wireless communication means even less bandwidth
| between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows,
| and significantly higher power use_
|
| Space changes this. Laser based optical links offer
| bandwidth of 100 - 1000 Gbps with much lower power
| consumption than radio based links. They are more
| feasible in orbit due to the lack of interference and
| fogging.
|
| _> Building data centres in the middle of the sahara
| desert is still much better in pretty much every metric_
|
| This is not true for the power generation aspect (which
| is the main motivation for orbital TPUs). Desert solar is
| a hard problem due to the need for a water supply to keep
| the panels clear of dust. Also the cooling problem is
| greatly exacerbated.
| Retric wrote:
| You don't need to do anything to keep panels with a
| significant angle clear of dust in deserts. The Sahara is
| near the equator but you can stow panels at night and let
| the wind do its thing.
|
| The lack of launch costs more than offset the need for
| extra panels and batteries.
| abalone wrote:
| What's your source for that claim? Soiling is a massive
| problem for desert solar, causing as high as 50%
| efficiency loss in the Middle East.[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-
| stu...
| Retric wrote:
| A relevant quote from that article.
|
| "The reason I concentrate my research on these urban
| environments is because the composition of soiling is
| completely different," said Toth, a Ph.D. candidate in
| environmental engineering at the University of Colorado
| who has worked at NREL since 2017. "We have more fine
| particles that are these stickier particles that could
| contribute to much different surface chemistry on the
| module and different soiling. _In the desert, you don't
| have as much of the surface chemistry come into play."_
| cmsj wrote:
| Space doesn't really change it though because the
| _effective_ bandwidth between nodes is reduced by the
| overall size of the network and how much data they need
| to relay between each other.
| kimixa wrote:
| Yup. We don't use fibre optics on earth rather than
| lasers because of some specific limitation of the earth's
| surface being in orbit would avoid.
|
| We use them because they're _many_ orders of magnitude
| cheaper and simpler for anywhere near the same bandwidth
| for the distances required.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Why would they bother to build space data center in such
| monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables
| between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2
| satellite. That satellite size is large enough to
| encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much
| physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be
| "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither
| does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart
| from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen
| wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid
| incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-
| server communication with correlated work loads than we
| already have on earth for most needs.
|
| Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it
| does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've
| solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good
| reason to actually _do_ this unless there 's a use for
| all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is
| happening with immense growth and demand expected for
| increased pharmaceutical research and various
| manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one
| hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be
| able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of
| the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred
| thousand watts of heat into space.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power
|
| Is that 5kW of electrical power input at the terminals, or
| 5kW irradiation onto the panels?
|
| Because that sounds like kind of a lot, for something the
| size of a fridge.
| rootnod3 wrote:
| Forget heat. Replacing disks alone is a deal breaker on
| that one.
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| > A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power.
| It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power
| on it) just to operate.
|
| The "+ solar power" part is the majority of the energy.
| Solar panel efficiency is only about 25-30% at beginning-
| of-life whereas typical albedos are effectively 100%. So
| your estimate is off by at least a factor of three.
|
| Also, I'm not sure where you got 5 kw from. The area of the
| satellite is ~100 m2, which means they are intercepting
| over 100 kw of bolometric solar power.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Not related to heat, but a com satellite is built from
| extremely durable HW/SW that's been battle-tested to run
| flawlessly over years with massive MTBF numbers.
|
| A data center is nowhere near that and requires constant
| physical interventions. How do they suggest to address
| this?
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| > 10th (or worse) best AI company
|
| You might only care about coding models, but text is
| dominating the market share right now and Grok is the #2
| model for that in arena rankings.
| adventured wrote:
| Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user /
| subscriber side of things.
|
| They have no path to paying for their existence unless they
| drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very
| many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are
| really really big.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies
| can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and
| have to transition to profitability or at least revenue
| neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing
| prices.
|
| Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on
| their product that they grit their teeth and keep on
| paying?
| adventured wrote:
| It'll be a combination of advertising and subscription
| fees, and there will only be a few big winners.
|
| Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model
| already primed, their financial resources, their traffic
| to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D
| capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to
| training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the
| ultimate goof to mess up here.
|
| Microsoft is toast, short of a miracle. I'd bet against
| Office and Windows here. As Office goes down, it's going
| to take Windows down with it. The great Office moat is
| about to end. The company struggles, the stock struggles,
| Azure gets spun off (unlock value, institutional
| pressure), Office + Windows get spun off - the company
| splits into pieces. The LLMs are an inflection point for
| Office and Microsoft is super at risk, backwards
| regarding AI and they're slow. The OpenAI pursuit as it
| was done, was a gigantic mistake for Microsoft - one of
| the dumbest strategies in the history of tech, it left
| them with their pants down. Altman may have killed a king
| by getting him to be complacent.
|
| Grok is very unlikely to make it (as is). The merger with
| SpaceX guarantees its death as a competitor to
| GPT/Gemini/Claude, it's over. Maybe they'll turn Grok
| into something useful to SpaceX. More likely they'll slip
| behind and it'll die rapidly like Llama. The merger is
| because they see the writing on the wall, this is a
| bailout to the investors (not named Elon) of xAI, as the
| forced Twitter rollup was a bailout for the investors of
| Twitter.
|
| Claude is in a weird spot. What they have is not worth
| $300-$500 billion. Can they figure out how to build a lot
| more value out of what they have today (and get their
| finances sustainable), before the clock runs out? Or do
| they get purchased by Meta, Microsoft, etc.
|
| OpenAI has to rapidly roll out the advertising model and
| get the burn rate down to meaningless levels, so they're
| no longer dependent on capital markets for financing
| (that party is going to end suddenly).
|
| Meta is permanently on the outside looking in. They will
| never field an in-house competitor to GPT or Gemini that
| can persistently keep up. Meta doesn't know what it is or
| why it should be trying to compete with
| GPT/Gemini/Claude. Their failure (at this) is already
| guaranteed. They should just acquire GPT 4o and let their
| aging userbase on FB endlessly talk itself into the grave
| for the next 30 years while clicking ads.
|
| If Amazon knew what they were doing (they don't right
| now), they would: immediately split retail + ads and AWS.
| The ad business ensures that the retail business will
| continue to thrive and would be highly lucrative. Then
| have AWS purchase Anthropic when valuations drop, bolt it
| on to AWS everything. Far less of an anti-trust issue
| than if what is presently known as Amazon attempted it
| here and now. Anthropic needs to build a lot on to itself
| to sustain itself and justify its valuation, AWS already
| has the answer to that.
|
| If valuations plunge, and OpenAI is not yet sustainable,
| Microsoft should split itself into pieces and have the
| Windows-Office division purchase OpenAI as their AI
| option. It'd be their only path to avoiding anti-trust
| blocking that acquisition. As is Microsoft would not be
| allowed to buy OpenAI. Alternatively Microsoft can take a
| shot at acquiring Anthropic at some point - this seems
| likely given the internal usage going on at Redmond, the
| primary question is anti-trust (but in this case,
| Anthropic is viewed as the #3, so Microsoft would argue
| it bolsters competition with GPT & Gemini).
| o333 wrote:
| "Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model
| already primed, their financial resources, their traffic
| to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D
| capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to
| training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the
| ultimate goof to mess up here"
|
| Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is
| seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make
| products for the sake of it, else the technology is not
| accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core
| a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core
| thing, along side superior marketing.
|
| One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel
| phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects
| with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has
| a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user
| tremendously for switching.
|
| Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out
| where they can take advantage of the investments others
| have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.
| postexitus wrote:
| Why do you say Amazon doesn't know what they are doing? I
| think among those mentioned, they are the best positioned
| alongside Apple in the grander schema of things.
|
| Also you say meta will never field a competitor to GPT -
| but they did llama; not as a commercial product, but
| probably an attempt at it (and failed). Otherwise agreed.
| arppacket wrote:
| *Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be
| complacent.*
|
| I still think a lot about the failed OpenAI coup, and how
| different things would be now if Microsoft hadn't backed
| Altman. Would this hype cycle and bubble grown so
| ridiculous if there were more conscientious people in
| charge at the front-runner? We will unfortunately never
| know. I really wish that board had planned out their coup
| better.
| o333 wrote:
| The answer to this is very very simple.
|
| Think about the stock return over a period - its composed
| of capital gains and dividends.
|
| Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps
| turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher.
|
| What does this mean? Less retained earnings / cashflows
| that can be re-invested.
|
| Apple is the only one that will come out of this OK. The
| others will be destroyed for if they dont return cash,
| the cash balance will be discounted leading to a further
| reduction in the value of equity. The same thing that
| happened to Zuckerberg and Meta with the Metaverse
| fiasco.
|
| Firms in the private sphere will go bust/acquired.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps
| turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher_
|
| This is not how corporate finance works. Capital gains
| and losses apply to assets. And only the most disciplined
| companies boost dividends in the face of decline--most
| double down and try to spend their way back to greatness.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| Merging with SpaceX means they don't have to pay for
| their existence. Anyway they're probably positioned
| better than any other AI player except maybe Gemini.
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't follow why merging with SpaceX means they don't
| have to pay for their existence. Someone does. Presumably
| now that is SpaceX. What is SpaceX's revenue?
| reverius42 wrote:
| Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively
| unlimited money through the US Government, either via
| ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if
| needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would
| bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.
| arppacket wrote:
| Bingo! Elon's main life mission now is to roll back
| social progress via the anti-woke combination of xAI and
| Twitter. That's why he's tying them to the now rather-
| essential SpaceX, despite possibly hurting its IPO. He
| can now keep pumping money into them without a worry.
| mbesto wrote:
| Arena rankings, lol.
|
| Openrouter is a decent proxy for real world use and Grok is
| currently 8% of the market: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
| (and is less than 7% of TypeScript programming)
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| 5th place company or better in every chart on that page
| except 'fastest models' suggests that parent is still
| right to criticize the 10th place characterization.
| mbesto wrote:
| They sure are right to criticize but not by this specific
| evidence: "text is dominating the market share right now
| and Grok is the #2 model for that in arena rankings"
| stogot wrote:
| xAI includes twitter? I thought twitter was just X?
| 7bees wrote:
| xAI acquired twitter in 2025 as part of Musk's financial
| shell game (probably the same game he is playing with
| SpaceX/xAI now).
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Elon's always looking for another Brooklyn Bridge to sell to
| the rubes...
| Vaslo wrote:
| Sounds like Elon hurt someone's feelings
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated
| than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells
| instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output
| they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess
| that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway
| so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same
| solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
|
| Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space
| solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and
| that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get
| terrestrially.
| s0a wrote:
| quantum computers on the sun!
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I would not assume cooling has been worked out._
|
| There should be some temperature where incoming radiation
| (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as
| you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance
| from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making
| sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| My guess is it's just another example of his habit of trying to
| use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of
| his companies' products.
|
| Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply
| isn't any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift
| capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor
| is there anyone who isn't currently launching heavy payloads to
| LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need
| weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of
| heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that's an all-or-
| nothing thing for them.
|
| So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per
| year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in
| orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same
| way he fixed Cybertruck's demand problem by selling heaps of
| them to SpaceX.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| There might be a lot of induced demand from starship. I'm
| sure defense is a big one.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| No, but really, where will it come from?
|
| If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a
| _specific_ source of latent demand that is large enough to
| soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply
| of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver,
| then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually
| have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a
| business plan that's been thought through as clearly as a
| $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.
|
| "Defense" is not nearly specific enough to count as an
| answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do
| you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this
| kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense.
|
| Starship can replace Falcon 9 and probably be cheaper, if
| fully reusable, so more profitable. So at least some economic
| sense is there already.
| kibwen wrote:
| No, that's not how any of this works. Try to think for a
| moment why we still overwhelmingly use non-jumbo jets for
| aviation in a world where jumbo jets exist.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Not to mention that making the upper stage and payload
| fairing much bigger and heavier juat so you can recover
| them is not an automatic win. You can recover it, but
| you've also made it much more expensive in the first
| place. And the booster needs to be bigger, heavier and
| more expensive, too.
|
| It's not an automatic deal breaker, of course. Falcon 9
| is obviously a promising success. But Starship is also
| working with some new challenges that Falcon 9 didn't
| have to worry about.
|
| Many of these stem from design compromises that were
| forced by Starship's secondary goal of being capable of a
| trip to Mars. In that respect, it very much resembles
| another major project to produce a heavy launch vehicle
| with a reusable combination payload fairing and upper
| stage that is also capable of carrying a human crew: the
| Space Shuttle.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I have noticed that there are two radically different
| approaches to assessing Starship.
|
| One is based on boring old analysis, hard numbers, and,
| worst of all, continually updating the analysis as more
| information (e.g., Raptor's severe expectations vs reality
| shortfall) becomes available. People who use this approach
| don't seem to have an opinion of Starship that is trending
| upward.
|
| The other approach seems to be based on vibes, and trusting
| that Starship will meet its original design goals despite
| the fact that no rocket project has ever come close to such
| an achievement. If there's ever any introspection about why
| Starship should be the exceptional project that actually
| does meet its performance goals, the conclusion tends to be
| something about how Starship is special because it's being
| developed by a private company. And I've noticed that, if
| the conversation does get to this point, you can send it in
| all sorts of unpredictable and fascinating directions by
| saying words like "OTRAG" and "Conestoga."
| simoncion wrote:
| > I would _not_ assume cooling has been worked out.
|
| That's wise.
|
| However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other
| difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most
| definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make
| orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As
| mentioned: But even if we stipulate that
| radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved,
| other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at
| least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in
| particular come to mind:
| a-dub wrote:
| apocalyptic space twitter with satellites shaped like whales
| that drop from the sky would have been cooler.
| pokot0 wrote:
| Can't you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part
| of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and
| dissipates.
|
| This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Good intuition, that is generally how radiators work in
| space.
| prpl wrote:
| yeah if you want a heat thruster
| thinkingkong wrote:
| You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough
| for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques
| to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away,
| the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep
| pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the
| same amount back out again.
| pas wrote:
| Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an
| efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative
| cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it
| has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to
| "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that
| "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree
| hotter.
|
| All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more
| energy than the compute parts.
| parl_match wrote:
| yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually
| exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
|
| requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of
| materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires
| a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces
| the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
|
| so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!)
| but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator
| solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service
| environment space) then your entire investment is toast
|
| now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the
| cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math
| suggests he's full of it
| godelski wrote:
| Be careful with the math there. While a 4th power is
| awesome you got the Stefan-Boltzman constant to consider
| and that's on the order of 10^-8
|
| Radiative power is really efficient for hot things but not
| so great when you're trying to keep things down to normal
| levels. Efficient for shedding heat from a sun but not so
| much for keeping a cpu from overheating...
| FabHK wrote:
| Pet peeve:
|
| T^4 is not exponential in T, it's polynomial. For
| exponential, T must be in the exponent, e.g. 2^T or so.
|
| Still, pretty effective.
|
| Having said that, agree that Elon is full of it.
| parl_match wrote:
| yes sorry, it's a fourth order exponent but not
| exponential
| rcruzeiro wrote:
| You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not
| easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate
| the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not
| collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least
| 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier
| model).
| kamaal wrote:
| >>This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with
| this.
|
| On the similar lines, why can't one run a refrigerator in
| space?
| jdranczewski wrote:
| You can, but the heat needs to go _somewhere_ , and now
| you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all
| this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger
| on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get
| rid of both of the heat your compute generates _and_ the
| energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people
| often give is that a fridge with an open door actually
| heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around
| pointlessly.
| afiori wrote:
| Sure but if it was a good idea we could do it on earth too
| and datacenters could stop gurgling a city worth of water
| mlindner wrote:
| I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good
| at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's
| also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and
| reflect thermal radiation.
|
| That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's
| nothing stopping thermal radiation.
|
| Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or
| convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away
| energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of
| rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid
| melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
|
| By Stefan-Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with
| temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets
| your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently.
| This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the
| danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause
| significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our
| corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
|
| Even without making them super hot, there's already significant
| energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW
| of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
|
| And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a
| "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking
| about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally
| talked him into releasing that hastily put together white
| paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any
| investment from him.
| runarberg wrote:
| It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop
| was because he didn't want them to build a high speed rail
| for some reason:
|
| > Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop
| was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for
| high-speed rail in California--even though he had no plans to
| build it.
|
| https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-
| visions...
| kuschku wrote:
| > a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not
| only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of
| metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal
| radiation.
|
| Not necessarily. There are many modern thermos "cups" that
| are just a regular cup, except with two layers of glass and a
| vacuum. Even the top is open all the time. (e.g.
| https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/passerad-double-wall-
| glass-8054... )
|
| It's still good enough to keep your coffee hot for an entire
| day.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it
| will not be is a useful source of computing power_
|
| It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal
| opinion.)
|
| Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely-someday-be
| a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it
| today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let
| you build a space station.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
| bdangubic wrote:
| musk is always up to something but remarkably people still eat
| this stuff up - remarkable to watch!
| matt-p wrote:
| (DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade
| heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got
| excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is
| fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current
| standard practice.
|
| It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city
| centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very
| little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need
| the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
|
| Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big
| nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone
| care.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to
| generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something
| useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the
| winter). But it's not all upsides.
|
| Heat pumps are _magic_. They 're something like 300%
| efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| I share your enthusiasm about heat pumps, but I wonder what
| the efficiency of using waste heat is. Couldn't it be
| competitive with heat pumps? As it's a waste product, isn't
| it reasonable to also expect it to be more than 100%
| efficient?
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Much more than 100% since the only energy you need to put
| in is for pumping the hot water around.
| matt-p wrote:
| As a rule of thumb (obviously it varies) you spend about
| 1% pumping water round a heat network. So your CoP is
| around 99 if you consider heat truly free. It's actually
| higher as pump energy largely is converted to
| friction/heat.
| Nevermark wrote:
| You can't extract energy from heat by itself. Only from a
| heat delta.
|
| Think of heat like flowing water or charge. Only an
| altitude or voltage delta creates the flow needed to
| harvest energy.
|
| You get no useful energy from heat you are already trying
| to shed because you have no delta to work with. (The
| entire problem exists because there is no surrounding
| environment with high heat capacity and lower heat.)
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| What is waste heat depends on your usecase. Using waste
| heat from industrial processes for district heating is
| done in some places.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Yes, because there is a heat delta. A heat difference.
|
| Using higher heat to raise lower heat is just the most
| simple case.
|
| But purpose isn't relevant to this constraint, it is a
| physics constraint. Regardless of purpose, you can't
| extract useful energy from heat without a heat difference
| to work with. (And without a heat difference, even
| "heating" with heat doesn't do anything.)
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Its not inefficient if you were creating the heat anyway,
| its a completely free byproduct.
| matt-p wrote:
| Yeah. This. Obviously if the objective is just to
| generate heat only buy a heat pump and not a B200!
| elil17 wrote:
| Well a few considerations:
|
| - You have to size your cooling towers for your hottest hour.
| Doing this saves you no capital costs.
|
| - You barely have to run the fans on your cooling towers in
| the winter because the air is so cold. So often this also
| won't save you much operating costs.
|
| - Already there is an essentially unlimited amount of so
| called "waste heat" from power plants and factories. Building
| district heating systems is extremely capital intensive,
| which is why this isn't done more.
|
| - As a municipality it's just a horrible idea to make the
| heating system of your whole city rely on a random company
| continuing to operate (even worse if said company is in a
| potential bubble). This is why most district heating systems
| work with power plants - they already have the government
| involved in ensuring their continuing operations.
| matt-p wrote:
| I don't think I ever said it reduced capital cost. I agree
| (though you might be willing to take more risk on reducing
| redundancy e.g instead of 2+1 cooling towers you may be
| more willing to just buy 2).
|
| You cannot put a power station in the middle of a city
| centre, you can put a datacentre there. The main reason
| this isn't done more is that it's expensive to build heat
| network between the 'far out of town industrial area' where
| they put the heat sources and the city centre where the
| heat consumers are.
|
| I don't know why a municipality is involved, but regardless
| you can simply install a backup heat source and/or add a
| mix of heat suppliers to the network. Backup gas boiler or
| similar is not that problematic or expensive to add
| particularly because you don't need to add redundancy as
| it's just there for a backup scenario.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| > It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
|
| Please, no!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to
| space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C
| on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side.
| The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means
| you're always radiating.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens
| and underestimating how much surface area that rock has.
| Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the
| radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C
| between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of
| radiation happening.
|
| In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq
| meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at
| 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a
| small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of
| surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel
| that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both
| sides).
|
| Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun,
| and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length.
| That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a
| heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat.
| That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to
| radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW,
| giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600
| meters.
|
| All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses
| from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a
| 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on
| a relatively small compute cluster.
|
| This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's
| huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before.
| The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide
| for comparison.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want
| to keep it at 40C
|
| What is this figure based on?
| ralfd wrote:
| > it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to
| space before
|
| That is the goal of Starship though. The ISS has a mass of
| 400 ton, the goal is to need only two cheap launches of
| Starship v4 for that.
| FabHK wrote:
| First, thanks for your knowledgeable input.
|
| Second, are you saying that we basically need to have a
| radiator as big (approximately) as the solar panels?
|
| That is a lot, but it does sound manageable, in the sense
| that it approximately doubles what we require anyway for
| power.
|
| So, not saying that it's easy or feasible, but saying that
| cooling then seems "just" as difficult as power, not
| insurmountably more difficult. (Note that the article lists
| cooling, radiation, latency, and launch costs as known hard
| problems, but not power.)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > So, not saying that it's easy or feasible, but saying
| that cooling then seems "just" as difficult as power, not
| insurmountably more difficult
|
| This is with an ideal radiator and perfect pointing so it
| receives no incident light, so in practice you need a
| bigger one than this.
|
| However, if you think launching a solar panel that is the
| size of 10 NYC city blocks is "manageable," then why not
| throw in a radiator that is about 15 city blocks in size?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| What do you think about droplet radiators? E.g. using a
| ferrofluid with magnetic containment for capture and enough
| spare on board to last five years of loss due to occasional
| splashes?
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I think it's possibly more informative to look at what happened
| with SolarCity and Tesla and contemplate if there's not a
| similar dynamic here.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| It's funny how quickly the general public forgot about the
| "vacuum thermos". (Perhaps more popular before StarBucks
| overran society).
|
| Those flasks don't have any space age insulating material -
| mainly just a vacuum...
|
| Technology from 1892...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| They are more popular than ever, actually. Pretty much all
| those fancy cups and bottles (like Stanley, other brands
| available) sold to keep your coffee hot/drink cold on the go
| are vaccum ones. It's just updated and more robust design
| compared to the older thermos flasks.
| bartread wrote:
| All of this and more.
|
| For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel
| is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind
| of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely
| worthwhile.
|
| I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting
| useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or
| anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all
| this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.
|
| Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no
| sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their
| stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.
|
| Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental
| impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel
| for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be
| appalling.
| energy123 wrote:
| Does that emit more than Elon's terrestrial data centers
| powered by natural gas, per unit of compute?
| ianburrell wrote:
| Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid
| oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which
| is a problem with lots of flights.
| afiori wrote:
| IIRC the methane is produced at launch site with
| considerable pollution
| sam wrote:
| This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold
| (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature
| difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is
| much lower and it's the temperature difference which determines
| the rate of cooling.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "Radiate" is exactly what you have to do, and that is
| extremely slow. You need a huge area to dissipate the amount
| of power you are talking about.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Basically you concentrate the heat into a high emissivity
| high temperature material that's facing deep space and is
| shaded. Radiators get dramatically smaller as temperature
| goes up because radiation scales as T4 (Stefan-Boltzmann).
| There are many cases in space where you need to radiate
| heat - see Kerbal Space Program
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "High emissivity, high temperature" sounds good on paper,
| but to create that temperature gradient within your
| spacecraft the way you want costs a lot of energy. What
| you actually do is add a shit load of surface area to
| your spacecraft, give that whole thing a coating that
| improves its emissivity, and try your hardest to minimize
| the thermal gradient from the heat source (the hot part)
| throughout the radiator. Emissivity isn't going past 1 in
| that equation, and you're going to have a very hard time
| getting your radiator to be hotter than your heat source.
|
| Note that KSP is a game that fictionalizes a lot of
| things, and sizes of solar panels and radiators are one
| of those things.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have a vacuum thermos. I've been unimpressed with its
| ability to keep coffee hot.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth
| where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible,
| then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads
| to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman
| line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat.
| Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation
| can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also,
| given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling
| systems might be feasible.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...
|
| But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is
| investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is
| trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern
| is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.
|
| Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is
| that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or
| transfers entropy.
| ericmay wrote:
| > At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that
| heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will
| be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
|
| Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real
| time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these
| things will operate in space and communicate with each other
| and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient
| history
| reverius42 wrote:
| I feel like this is an incredibly fantastic goal-post-
| moving from the original announcement.
|
| SpaceX: "we're going to put datacenters in space"
|
| HN comments: "obviously we'll need to move human
| civilization into space first for this to make sense.
| checks out."
| ericmay wrote:
| I wasn't responding to the original announcement, I was
| responding to someone who presumed that these data
| centers need to send data back to earth.
|
| I was making a snide comment that certain ultra wealthy
| people don't need these data centers to send data to
| earth, because they don't plan on being here.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Ah. Apologies, that went right over my head!
| ericmay wrote:
| All good haha I didn't do a good enough job with it :)
| stogot wrote:
| > You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate
| heat into it.
|
| I don't remember the difference from my science classes, isn't
| This the same thing essentially?
| FabHK wrote:
| The other two methods of heat transfer apart from radiation
| are conduction (through "touch", adjacent molecules, eg from
| the outside of a chicken on the BBQ to the inside) and
| convection (through movement, eg cold air or water flowing
| past).
| m463 wrote:
| I used to really enjoy musk's talks when he was spooling up
| tesla. He was an engineer and obviously the world is missing
| what engineers see clearly.
|
| But now looking back and accounting for the claims he made
| there's a pattern.
|
| I saw this article:
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-...
|
| that said... he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up
| satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to
| all of us.
| dsl wrote:
| > he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites
| every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.
|
| Talk to any former SpaceX or Tesla employee. They will clue
| you in that both were successful in spite of Elon, not
| because of him.
|
| The Cybertruck was really the first product he saw to
| completion from his own design. And well...
| dboreham wrote:
| I think you under appreciate him a bit here. No he's not a
| super genius. He's probably not even a good engineer. But
| he is a) a total a.hole and b) a tremendous bullshitter.
| There are circumstances in which you need such a person to
| succeed (see also Steve Jobs). He yelled at people for 10
| years straight and he was crucial in facilitating capital
| to build these very capital intensive products. A regular
| smart person would absolutely not have succeeded, for these
| reasons.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > bullshitter
|
| why is lying at the edge of committing fraud so
| respected?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It makes the stock go up and people earn crazy amounts of
| money.
| notrustincloud wrote:
| iff "earn" == "receive"
| randallsquared wrote:
| In the absence of force or fraud, those are the same,
| more or less.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > he did jumpstart the EV industry.
|
| This is widely believed (especially in the US, where, other
| than the Leaf, most early electric cars never launched), but
| honestly pretty dubious. The first real electric cars, with
| significant production:
|
| 2010 - Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan Leaf
|
| 2011 - Smart electric, Volvo C30 electric, Ford Focus
| electric, BYD e6.
|
| 2012 - Renault Zoe (Renault launched a couple of other
| vehicles on the same platform ~2010, but they never saw
| significant production), Tesla Model S (Tesla had a prior
| car, the Roadster, but it never saw significant production).
|
| 2013 - VW eUP, eGolf (VW occasionally put out an electric
| Golf historically, going back to 1992, but again those were
| never produced in large quantities).
|
| The big change ~2010 was around the economics of lithium ion
| batteries; they finally got cheap enough that everyone
| started pulling their concept designs and small-scale
| demonstration models into full production.
| test6554 wrote:
| AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower
| power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more
| efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But
| you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.
|
| Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-
| moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.
| energy123 wrote:
| What in particular is wrong/misleading in the Starcloud
| whitepaper, then?
|
| https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| Probably this bit on page 4, which parent comment addresses:
| "More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of
| higher DT in space."
| mmoustafa wrote:
| They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done,
| they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due
| to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about
| dT not delta T
| beloch wrote:
| In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre
| is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a
| value of $0 with the claim:
|
| "More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of
| higher DT in space"
|
| My bold claim: The cost of cooling will _not_ be $0. The cost
| of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The
| cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling _in
| space_ will not be $0.
|
| They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in
| the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost
| at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude
| that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it
| in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
| WithinReason wrote:
| That row specifically says "chiller energy cost" which is 0
| trymas wrote:
| Previous discussions on HN: -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390781
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667458
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188
|
| I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those
| threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:
|
| - radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;
|
| - lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of
| magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole
| world now;
|
| - maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no
| feasable way to maintain;
|
| - compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to
| have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters
| sound ridiculous;
|
| NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many
| things that are possible if we would invest effort (and
| money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon"
| talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to
| Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand -
| napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need
| efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo
| mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per
| day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally
| incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
| red75prime wrote:
| A giant space datacenter with square kilometers of solar
| panels doesn't make sense. A cluster of Starlink-sized
| satellites, which orbit near each other(1) and which are
| connected using laser-links might make sense.
|
| (1) There are orbital arrangements that allow satellites to
| stay close together with minimal orbital corrections. Scott
| Manley mentioned this in one of his videos.
| trymas wrote:
| Sounds like we would want to elevate from water wasting
| on Earth to pollution in space.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-
| low-cost space launches.
|
| His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a
| fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the
| moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
|
| Raises some big questions about whether there are actually
| sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But,
| whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the
| people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making
| is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying
| "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the
| moon", and we are in the age of lying.
| bendews wrote:
| If any single country tried to create a whole production
| chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer
| equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any
| result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this
| century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the
| economics would ever work out.
| Findeton wrote:
| Do you acknowledge how much change was there in the XX
| century? How can you probably make such predictions with
| such confidence?
| uoaei wrote:
| The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-
| value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have
| another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
|
| Unfortunately no. The arctic region is too cold and humid. You
| need way more energy to manage the cooling of a datacenter
| there than somewhere hotter.
| ospray wrote:
| The only way I see this actually working given the resource
| requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction
| using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of
| the solar panels at L1 or something.
|
| https://share.google/uXWQyAp7a8nE03qoi
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators
| and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of
| sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even
| more expensive that some of the estimates flying around
|
| While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just
| wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is
| "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect
| place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to
| train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation
| stealing copyright content is not okay any more
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Maybe you can't copyright infringe in space, but it's still
| infringement when the result gets back to earth.
| randyrand wrote:
| Keep the result in space, and use large telescopes to look
| at it!
| RugnirViking wrote:
| the result is the result. If you look at it and use it
| for something, you have moved the result. Its not a
| physical object that exists in a place, its an idea.
| Hence IP. Intellectual property.
| estearum wrote:
| Really depends on how good your lawyers are
| whycome wrote:
| These major AI tools have already been trained on
| infringing works.
| pointlessone wrote:
| DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80
| H200. Doesn't sound like a big data center. More like a
| server room.
|
| ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So
| you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also
| filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive
| system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons.
|
| You also need to collect that power so you need about the
| same amount of power coming from solar panels. ISS solar
| array wings are 35x12 m and can generate about 31 kW of
| power. So we'll need at least 3 of them. BTW each weighs a
| ton, a literal metric ton.
|
| It hardly seems feasible. Huge infrastructure costs for small
| AI server rooms in space.
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| if I may add, you can't really launch a station three times
| the size of ISS with a single rocket so there will be
| multiple launches. Just the launch costs alone could likely
| finance multiple similarly sized server rooms on land.
| abalone wrote:
| > It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
|
| What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has
| excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would
| the energy come from?
|
| A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately
| 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in
| the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance
| for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major
| concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal
| locations).
|
| There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial
| generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital
| panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical
| engineering discussion.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have
| approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial
| solar panel in the arctic.
|
| Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be
| cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that
| there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just
| building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from
| warmer regions would be cheaper.
| IsTom wrote:
| Sunlight is unevenly distributed in the arctic during the
| year to say the least.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would
| still be cheaper than travelling to space.
|
| Well first you have to make solar panels works in the polar
| nights, in winter they have a few minutes of sun in the day
| at most.
| abalone wrote:
| _> Even just building a long powerline around the globe to
| fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper._
|
| Deserts have good sun exposure and land availability but
| extremely poor water resources, which is necessary for
| washing the sand off the panels. There are many challenges
| with scaling both terrestrial and orbital solar.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| I wasn't thinking of going THAT far. Northern
| Canada/Alaska is in the arctic region, so build the line
| some thousand miles down to the sunny parts of Canada/USA
| and call it done. Not like this is particularly hard,
| probably not even that expensive, compared to a million
| satellites/future space-debris. Greenland would probably
| be also a good location.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal
| networking, its power management (what happens when its in
| darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration
| (https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-
| vibration...)
|
| What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened"
| microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies
| with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal
| 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.
|
| Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you
| need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend
| >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have
| a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is
| space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also
| cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is
| not going to make them happy)
|
| Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are
| we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole
| "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you
| if you're going to try that.
|
| Its just complete and total bollocks.
|
| utter utter bollocks.
| PinkiesBrain wrote:
| You don't put it in a standard orbit, you put it in a polar
| orbit with near 100% suntime ... obviously.
|
| Obviously you use the backside of the massive area of PV you
| need, for an equally massive area for HOPG radiator films
| with condensor coils (because obviously you use heatpumps for
| cooling, not pure liquid).
|
| Consider the obvious ways you'd actually do it, not the most
| naive ways.
|
| The GPU pods obviously won't weigh the same as a terrestrial
| rack. Space based solar arrays obviously don't weigh the same
| as your hail and storm resistant panels on your roof (see
| ROSA, but there might be another 10x weight reduction if
| using flexible solar in tension from rotation). Noone cares
| about a couple 100 ms extra for first token.
|
| Solar wind and drag are in my opinion the biggest issue.
| Problem : it's a giant surface catching drag and solar wind.
| Solution : it's a giant solar sail. Controlling the angle of
| PV for useful thrust, that's never really been done for a
| satellite.
| owaislone wrote:
| or perhaps as simple as saving xAI for himself as he prepares
| to offload rest of Twitter?
| andix wrote:
| I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his
| companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is
| mostly based on hope.
|
| They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's
| not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over
| night.
|
| I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the
| companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the
| merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really
| do it.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos."_
|
| A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is
| carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively
| narrow band around _room temperature_.[1] during all
| operational phases.
|
| This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and
| parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits
| around room temperature.
|
| [1] _" Room temperature"_ is actually a technical term meaning
| 20degC (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the
| rule).
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > 1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning
| 20degC (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the
| rule).
|
| Yes 20 and 25degC I believe are the two most popular choices.
| In many cases it makes little difference with units in Kelvin
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| latexr wrote:
| > Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop
| (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It
| could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab.
|
| It could also just be ignorance and talking out of his ass to
| look smart. Like when he took over Twitter and began publicly
| spewing wrong technical details as if he knew what he was
| talking about and being corrected by the people actually
| working on the product.
| killerstorm wrote:
| People did the calculation: radiative cooling requires smaller
| surface area than solar panels. So, basically, a solar panel
| itself can radiate heat.
|
| Have you done a calculation yourself?
| Numerlor wrote:
| How can the solar panel itself radiate heat when it's being
| heated up generating supplying power? Looking at pictures of
| the ISS there's radiators that look like they're there
| specifically to cool the solar panels.
|
| And even if viable, why would you just not cool using air
| down on earth? Water is used for cooling because it increases
| effectiveness significantly, but even a closed loop system
| with simple dry air heat exchangers is quite a lot more
| effective than radiative cooling
| Symmetry wrote:
| You take the amount of energy absorbed by the solar panels
| and subtract the amount they radiate. Most things in
| physics are linear systems that work like this.
| drtz wrote:
| The same radiative (radiant) cooling on Earth works almost
| just as well, but without the cost of a rocket launch.
| coliveira wrote:
| Jeffrey Epstein's friend Elon Musk is trying to stop a
| financial disaster in xAi that would expose how irresponsible
| he is. He's gonna put all that in a company that has real money
| coming from government and soon will get retail investors
| money.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| _You can 't exchange heat with vacuum_
|
| If you put a pipe with hot gas inside, in space, it will get
| colder by convection.
|
| Blow air through the pipe.
| valec wrote:
| ok. your pipe is full. now what
| wendgeabos wrote:
| I have reached the same conclusion -- this is perhaps not a
| distraction but an attempt to gather funds to pursue the One
| True Goal...
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| I have no idea how it compares to the heat being generated, but
| one advantage of space would be totally efficient radiative
| cooling, I believe. Assuming you can pump the heat, and can
| deploy a large enough surface area (the key question I assume),
| then you have that at least.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us that radiative power scales
| to the fourth power of temperature (T^4). While terrestrial
| cooling is largely linear and dependent on ambient air/water
| temperature (the "wet-bulb" limit), a radiator in space is
| dumping heat into a 3-Kelvin sink. That thermal gradient is
| massive.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Stefan-Boltzmann is about absolute, not relative temperature.
|
| When one does the math on the operating temperatures of
| regular computing equipment that we use on Earth, how much
| heat it generates per watt, and how fast it would need to
| sink that heat to allow for continuous operation, one gets
| surface areas that are not impossible, but are pretty on the
| high end of anything we've ever built in space.
|
| And then you have to deflect the incoming light from the Sun
| which will be adding to your temperature (numbers published
| by private space companies regarding the tolerances of
| payloads those companies are willing to carry note that those
| payloads have to be tolerant of temperatures exceeding 100deg
| C, from solar radiation alone). That is doable, you could
| sunshield the sensitive equipment and possibly decrease some
| of your thermal input load by putting your craft out near L2
| which hangs out in the penumbra of Earth. Still a daunting
| technical challenge when the alternative is just build it on
| the planet with the technology and methods we already have.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| You're correct that Stefan-Boltzmann uses absolute
| temperature (K), but that only reinforces the advantage of
| moving the "hot side" of the gradient up. If you increase
| your radiator temp from 300K (standard Earth ambient) to
| 360K (hot silicon), your radiative efficiency doesn't just
| go up by 20%--it nearly doubles.
|
| The Solar Load is Directional: Unlike a terrestrial
| atmosphere where heat is omnidirectional, space allows for
| "shadow engineering." A simple multi-layer insulation (MLI)
| sunshield can reduce solar flux by orders of magnitude. We
| do this for the James Webb Space Telescope to keep
| instruments at 7K while the sun-facing side is at 380K. For
| a data center, you don't need 7K; you just need to keep the
| "dark side" radiators in the shade.
| papercrane wrote:
| The thermal gradient in space is meaningless because there is
| hardly any matter to dump the energy into. This means you are
| entirely reliant on thermal radiation. If you look at the
| numbers given by Stefan-Boltzmann law you'd see that means to
| radiate a significant amount of energy you need a combination
| of a lot of surface area and high temperatures.
|
| This means you need some sort of heat pump. For a practical
| example you can look at the ISS, which has what they call the
| "External Active Thermal Control System" (EATCS), it's a
| complicated system and it provides 70kW of heat rejection. A
| datacenter in space would need to massively scale up such a
| system in order to cool itself.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| The ISS comparison is a bit of a category mismatch. The
| EATCS is complex because it's a life-support system that
| must keep humans at exactly 22C (295K) while managing
| ammonia loops in a manned environment.
|
| Computers aren't humans. High-performance silicon can
| comfortably operate at a junction temperature of 80C to 90C
| (approx. 360K). Because of that T^4 relationship, a
| radiator at 85C rejects nearly double the heat per square
| meter than a radiator at 20C, unless I miss something.
|
| So this makes it a bit more nuanced.
| Dasistmeinname wrote:
| This is misleading: - A radiator only "sees" 3 K if it's
| perfectly shielded from the Sun, Earth albedo, and Earth IR.
| In Earth orbit you can easily get hundreds of W/m^2 incident;
| without sunshields the net rejectable heat is greatly
| reduced. - You have a "massive" advantage only if the
| radiator is allowed to run very hot: At 300-310 K with
| \epsilon \approx 0.9: about 400-500 W/m^2. Effective
| "radiative heat transfer coefficient" at 300 K: h_rad \approx
| 4\epsilon\sigma T^3 \approx 5-6 W/m^2K. That's orders of
| magnitude lower than forced convection in air (\approx 50-500
| W/m^2K) or the water side of a heat exchanger (>=1000
| W/m^2K).
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Yeah I took the best case scenario in space, I did not
| account for anything else. I imagine the space DC be like
| two sides, one is pointing towards the sun and being a
| solar panel the other is a cold radiator radiating heat
| into the void. I am not sure how feasible this is.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's not just Musk, Google is working on it too... very soon to
| actually launch tests. I have a feeling it's a regulatory dodge
| of some kind.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic
|
| This. Like it would make far more sense to colonize the poles
| than Mars.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop
| (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It
| could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will
| not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes
| this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
|
| That.
|
| Also, am I the only one to remember when SpaceX was supposed to
| pivot to transporting people from cities to cities, given how
| cheap and reusable and sure BFF/Starship was going to be ?
|
| Or how we were all going to earn money by pooling our full self
| driving cars in a network of robo taxis ?
|
| In all seriousness, what is the number of "unrealized sci-fi
| pipe dreams" that is acceptable from the owner a company ? Or,
| to be fair, what is the acceptable ratio of "pipe dreams" /
| "actually impressive stuff actually delivered (reusable
| rockets, starlink, decent EVs, etc...)" ?
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Yeah the Space Data Center companies completely gloss over this
| fact by saying "oh yeah and we'll need radiators 10x the size
| of our solar panels. NBD."
| Symmetry wrote:
| Space is a vacuum and yet here we are on a rock floating in
| space warmed by the sun and the temperate is actually pretty
| comfortable. Indeed, without the greenhouse effect it would be
| positively chilly. An important part of a thermos is that you
| have to use high albedo materials in the vacuum chamber or else
| it would lose heat too quickly to radiation.
|
| A satellite as a whole will come to thermal equilibrium with
| space at a fairly reasonable temperature, the problematic part
| is that the properties of electricity make it easy to
| concentrate a good part of the incoming energy in a small area
| where the GPU is. Heat is harder to move than electricity and
| getting that heat back out to the solar panels or radiators
| requires either heavy heat pipes or complex coolant pumps.
| its-summertime wrote:
| a data center in space doesn't have a gigantic rock taking up
| most of its area, a data center in space is 100% data center
| 0% rock.
|
| If it had the same data center to rock ratio as earth, it
| would just end up being earth in the end, and earth doesn't
| seem to be wanting to stick to its equilibrium either right
| now
| xavortm wrote:
| Well, they do have silicon, with some more additives they
| can make rocks in space! And throw them at earth, that will
| show em
| Symmetry wrote:
| The rock in this case acts as extra thermal mass that makes
| it take longer to reach thermal equilibrium, but doesn't
| change what the ultimate thermal equilibrium is. Only the
| configuration of the parts of the surface that can absorb
| or radiate electromagnetic radiation do that. And because
| rock is a fairly good insulator we only really benefit from
| the top layer and if the sun went out we would all freeze
| in a week or so.
| its-summertime wrote:
| it changes the amount of exposed area to release heat
| back into the universe. if you have a non-negligible
| amount of compute compared to earth, you are going to be
| approaching a non-negligible amount of space required to
| radiate that away, along with all the other costs and
| maintainability issues
| Symmetry wrote:
| The formula for the equilibrium temperature for a sphere
| in sunlight is 2 * pi * r^2 * L / (4 *
| pi * d) * (1 -a) = 4 * pi * r^2 * sigma * T^4
|
| As you can see there are pi*r^2 on both sides of the
| equation, the surface area to cross section ratio of a
| sphere doesn't change as it gets bigger and so the
| equilibrium temperature doesn't change no matter how big
| the sphere is. (d is the distance to the Sun, nothing to
| do with the sphere itself).
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I don't believe you've considered the possibility of a data
| center on Pluto...
|
| But in all seriousness, if there is a possibility of building
| industrial centers outside of the Earth's atmosphere, it is
| surely not here yet. Lots of areas would need improvement.
| goalieca wrote:
| > Musk is up to something here.
|
| This is Musk, yet again, pulling themes from sci-fi books. He
| has that vision of ushering in the "future" which is good for
| dragging us forward but also he fails a lot. His open letter
| cited the Kardashev scale and his vision for getting us forward
| like in the novel accelerando.
| rootnod3 wrote:
| "Musk is on to something here"? Really? Any high school student
| with a basic grasp of physics could explain that. But sure, the
| idiot billionaire nazi "is on to something". That's giving him
| too much credit.
|
| Of course it doesn't fucking make sense to put data centers
| into space. Even if heating were solved somehow magically,
| server disks are veeery prone to fail and need replacement.
| Shoot a rocket up every week to replace failed drives or
| absolutely burned through GPUs? Yeah, that doesn't even
| remotely sound feasible.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Unless you want cash-rich AI companies to pay a certain
| company for weekly / daily lifts during the build-out phase.
| Eventual crash be damned, make hay while the sun shines
| rootnod3 wrote:
| And burn even more energy and fuel than DCs on the ground,
| great idea :D
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Nobody said it was a good idea except his accountant, who
| doesn't pay the energy bills.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I suspect Musk has a workable plan of some sort, realistically.
| Clearly, the one thing that is available in space is an
| abundance of square meters. There is no need whatsoever to
| conserve space at sufficient orbit. It is a little counter
| intuitive as we are so used to needing to conserve all the
| things.
|
| Power input and heat radiation both scale with area so maybe
| there is some way to achieve this at scale. For instance, maybe
| it will not look like a traditional data center or even
| traditional chips.
| torginus wrote:
| The rumor I heard is that Musk's big issue with SpaceX was
| that he was only able to employ US citizens with a security
| clearance, as per the limitations of a rocket company, which
| he has rallied against multiple times.
|
| One of the motivations behind this whole thing could be that
| he could make a way for foreign talent to work on space
| projects without the necessary government signoff.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Would that really be that much of an unlock?
| torginus wrote:
| Yes. I don't have an estimate right off the bat, but if
| you considered all the people employed at top tech
| companies, what percentage do you think are US nationals
| eligible for a security clearance?
|
| I'd say less than a third.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I had a look at SpaceX career page. There are 128
| software related roles available. Perhaps half of those
| could be filled by big tech type companies, the others
| are more specialized (like antenna software engineer). I
| don't think that 64 open positions would move the needle
| really. And, if it were that easy to get around the
| security clearance by having another company, he could
| have created a new / separate company years ago.
|
| Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that SpaceX is making a
| lot of money while xAI is losing a lot. If funds have to
| flow through Elon personally it is likely complicated and
| costly. Also, if the "space data center" idea is actually
| workable (I have no idea if it is) then it does make some
| logical sense as well. Of course, Twitter just seems like
| kind of a write off to me at this point.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| He's got a trillion dollar compensation package on the line.
| You can absolutely guarantee he's doing something shady.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| The 4-5nm gpu will break from high energy protons from the sun.
|
| Lag for roundtrip: 35ms. But when satelite needs to pass
| through other satellites as has no ground coverage you add more
| lag and reduce bandwidth of the whole network.
|
| The best part is jurisdiction safety. Very hard to get raided
| by govs.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| It links his middling AI company and his failing social media
| company with the only company that can send the United States
| to space.
|
| X failing and can't pay its debts? Welp, better give him a
| government bailout otherwise no more rockets for you!
| the_real_cher wrote:
| This exactly. His other companies are failing. He links the
| shitty companies with the only one working.
| catoc wrote:
| Exactly - satellites need to be _cooled_ to prevent overheating
| that wouldn't happen on earth.
|
| (Space doesn't help in cooling GPUs in a satellite - space
| makes cooling worse)
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at
| keeping your drink hot_
|
| e.g. the lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping
| your drink _cold_ too
| catoc wrote:
| Yes but in this case the lack-of-a-thing keeps GPUs _hot_
| fsckboy wrote:
| people who do understand thermodynamics will already
| understand the problem, but innocent people who don't
| understand thermodynamics should not be misled by poorly
| chosen examples presented as proof.
| fwipsy wrote:
| At risk of stating the obvious - computers produce heat.
| "Keeping them cool" really means dissipating that heat.
| Insulating them will cause them to get hotter.
| EGreg wrote:
| The ideal would be to park the data centers at the lagrange
| point behind the Earth in its umbra, so they don't need to
| dissipate direct solar heat.
| jmalicki wrote:
| "But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and
| launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still
| make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them,
| a complete fantasy. "
|
| I'm pretty his point is that while cooling is an impossibility,
| it is not the only one!
| dfabulich wrote:
| In 2024, Starcloud posted their plans to "solve" the cooling
| problem. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
|
| > _As conduction and convection to the environment are not
| available in space, this means the data center will require
| radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of
| thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a
| lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area -
| by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating
| primarily towards deep space..._
|
| They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate,
| they're looking at square _kilometers_ of radiators to
| dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps _hectares_ of
| radiators.
|
| They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat
| dissipation with heat pumps.
|
| So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few
| hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that
| can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at
| all over a lifetime of decades.
|
| This seems like the sort of "not technically _impossible_ "
| problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs
| buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Yes, on the face of it, the plan is workable. Heat radiation
| scales linearly with area and exponentially (IIRC) with
| temperature.
|
| It really is as simple as _just_ adding kilometers of
| radiatiors. That is, if you ignore the _incredible_ cost of
| transporting all that mass to orbit _and_ assembly in space.
| Because there is quite simply no way to fold up kilometer-
| scale thermal arrays and launch in a single vehicle. There
| will be assembly required in space.
|
| All in all, if you ignore all practical reality, yes, you can
| put a datacenter in space!
|
| Once you engage a single brain cell, it becomes obvious that
| it is actually so impractical as to be literally impossible.
| slashdev wrote:
| As an engineer of the software variety, logically heat
| dissipation would seem like a difficult problem.
|
| But SpaceX has lots of real engineers who are very smart. I'm
| certain they ran the math on it. Which is more than you or I
| have done.
|
| If they say it can be done, I'm inclined to believe them.
| therein wrote:
| Wow. Definitely not a textbook fallacy.
|
| I mean why think about anything, you know. Critical thinking
| is for losers, am I right?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I think it's more an appeal to (expert) authority
| foobiekr wrote:
| Musk lies with ease and routinely. This and Optimus are both
| just more examples of that.
| tim333 wrote:
| >I would not assume cooling has been worked out
|
| On the other hand Starlink has several thousand satellites up
| there using solar power to run processors and cooling them with
| radiators so it's not totally new technology.
|
| Here's a Musk tweet linking some analysis
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2013676764099199156
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| > Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a
| thermos great at keeping your drink hot.
|
| 1) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier conducting
| heat standing still.
|
| 2) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier in motion.
|
| 3) The heat can be transported by thermal radiation.
|
| The first 2 require massive particles, the latter are
| spontaneous photons.
|
| A thermos bottle does not simply work by eliminating the motile
| mass particles.
|
| Lets consider room temperature as the outer thermos temperature
| and boiling hot water as the inner temperature, that is roughly
| 300 K and 400 K.
|
| Thermal radiation is proportional to the fourth power of
| temperature and proportional to emissivity (which is between 0
| and 1).
|
| Lets pretend you are correct and thus thermally blackened glass
| (emissivity 1) inside the vacuum flask would be fine according
| to you. That would mean that the radiation from your tea to the
| room temperature side would be proportional to 400^4 while the
| thermal radiation from room temperature to the tea would be
| proportional to 300^4. Since (400/300) ^ 4 = 3.16 that means
| the heat transport from hot tea to room temperature is about 3
| times higher.
|
| If on the other hand the glass was aluminized before being
| pulled vacuum the heat transports are proportional to 0 * 400 K
| ^ 4 and 0 * 300 K ^ 4 . So the heat transport in either
| direction would be 0 and no net heat transport remains.
|
| If you believe the shiny inside of your thermos flask is an
| aesthetic gimmick, think again.
|
| You are making a non-comparison.
|
| Imagine comparing a diesel engine car to an electric car, but
| first removing the electric motor. Does that make a fair
| comparison???
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Nobody made any of the claims you're "refuting".
|
| You've imagined an argument so you can dunk on it to appear
| superior.
|
| In addition, thermoses aren't made of glass. It is far more
| common to make them out of steel or aluminum.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out
| into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend
| a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will
| never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering
| scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
| anywhichway wrote:
| Musk said in his autobiography he announced the hyperloop plan
| without any intention of doing it to distract from the
| California high speed rail plans.
| fd-codier wrote:
| We were supposed to be on Mars right now, but I guess data
| centers in space are nice too. Kinda disappointed they aren't on
| the moon.
| wanderinghogan wrote:
| If we won't stop what he is doing with grok and ai-generated
| CSAM, he will be completely free from oversight up there.
| Findecanor wrote:
| As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
|
| If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government
| are covered by a law that would make its offices (on _Earth_ ,
| duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending
| make that protection also encompass the data centres that
| contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to
| protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
|
| That does not have to sound reasonable to _us_ ... only to
| Musk.
| undsoft wrote:
| Dealing with rogue AI also seems easier when you can walk up to
| its data center and unplug it.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Admiral Grace Hopper is famous for using a length of wire to
| explain to others what a nanosecond was.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-embraces-musks-g...
|
| Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close
| to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you
| rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states?
| Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a
| battlefield?
|
| Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to
| provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is
| one of those projects where he can run up the budget and
| operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive
| military applications.
| timmmmmmay wrote:
| you know you're looking at some hard analysis when they use the
| number "gazillion". can I get that one in scientific notation?
| nvader wrote:
| What data centers in space enable is protection for the compute
| of near-superintelligent AIs from the interference of humans.
|
| As an alleged human, I'd like to preserve my option to interfere.
| e12e wrote:
| No, no, no - Villa Starlight was the prison the Tessier-Ashpool
| AI needed help to escape from!
| krater23 wrote:
| How else would you secure skynet against Sarah Connor?
| kibwen wrote:
| No no, let Musk cook. This _definitely_ won 't be SpaceX's
| Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-
| mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the
| egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
| bs7280 wrote:
| As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on
| trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet,
| would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
|
| The moon has:
|
| - Some water
|
| - Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things
| (like heat sinks?)
|
| - a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
|
| - a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the
| radiation problem
|
| - close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated
| robots work
|
| I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to
| commit to a hyper-scale effort.
| vel0city wrote:
| What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even
| more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even
| advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from
| radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch
| costs?
|
| Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a
| point for putting it on earth.
| bs7280 wrote:
| I think there's something to be said about imagining a future
| where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial
| processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big
| part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of
| manufactoring in space.
|
| I have long theorized there will be some game changing
| manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero
| gravity environment. EX:
|
| - 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ
| donor problem
|
| - stronger materials
|
| - 3d computer chips
|
| I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are
| just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we
| can make things in space without any launches once that
| industry is bootstrapped.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Human organs manage to grow pretty well in 1G. In fact,
| they're almost certainly going to be terrible at it in zero
| g.
| vel0city wrote:
| We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I
| don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made
| just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we _need_ zero g to
| do either of these things.
|
| Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is
| about launching AI compute into space. To do important
| stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of
| government intervention.
| bs7280 wrote:
| The first two kidneys are free its the third one that
| gets tricky
| vidarh wrote:
| Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling
| point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To
| be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that
| specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon
| would be an even harder sell.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to
| position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
|
| I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.
| snewman wrote:
| Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it
| wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a
| very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day,
| freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month
| there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems
| worse than low-earth orbit.
| munchler wrote:
| > every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power
|
| So it's dark 50% of the time on the moon... just like here on
| Earth.
| foxglacier wrote:
| ... and completely not like a sun-synchronous Earth orbit
| which is dark 0% of the time.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar
| regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and
| will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a
| big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer,
| sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as
| required.
|
| i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits
| though. when europeans first started exploring australia they
| found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the
| bronze age.
|
| the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something
| like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using
| 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail
| network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated.
| it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100
| tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
| rswail wrote:
| And Fortescue and others are working on BEV vehicles for
| those giant Tonka trucks that move the raw ore to the
| processing areas at the top of the opencut.
|
| They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would
| run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its
| batteries that would then take the empty train back to the
| mine.
|
| Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean
| it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries
| come online.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| have to take this stuff with a grain of salt. a lot of
| australian mining companies do this so their stock
| qualifies as ESG and pension funds can buy it.
|
| turns out pit mining is good for the environment after all
|
| https://www.fortescue.com/en/real-zero/green-metals
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon
| then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Moon also has 14 day long nights, while space has permanent
| sunlight for your solar panels.
|
| I suspect this is really the fundamental idea behind this whole
| plan.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into
| data centres: 1. Inference 2. Training
|
| Inference _just might_ be doable in space because it is
| "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of
| thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single
| compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text,
| which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be
| uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is
| required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging,
| and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just
| with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling.
| Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-
| optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs,
| LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...
|
| Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure,
| but only through _heroic efforts_ involving fantastically
| expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth.
| It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of
| data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred
| thousand or more GPUs into _close proximity_ and connect them
| with a terabit or more _per GPU_ to exchange data. This cannot be
| put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a
| giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling
| panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space
| debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
|
| The problem with putting inference-only into space is that
| training still needs to go _somewhere_ , and current AI data
| centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training
| and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is
| that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible
| clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) _in one place_ , and
| _that_ is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the
| ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the
| problem here is that training workloads _can 't_ be spread out.
|
| Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to
| thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just
| hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
|
| It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are
| the problem.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Like I've always said love him or hate him Elon Musk is a SPACE
| OIL SALESMAN!
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Comments full of EDS. Everyone is a rocket scientist in here
| also.
| pokstad wrote:
| > Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost
| effective relative to normal data centers.
|
| Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space,
| you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity.
| Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
| tgbugs wrote:
| One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and
| also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate
| entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of
| superconducting circuitry.
|
| I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside
| hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically
| cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now
| due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating
| waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't
| generate in the first place.
|
| The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components
| and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic
| temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data
| center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
|
| That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated
| circuits you could colocate your data centers and your
| propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep
| space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal
|
| take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to
| operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel
|
| at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator
| can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space
|
| seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space
|
| perhaps I'm missing something?
| variaga wrote:
| Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally
| superconducting material are you going to make your cube out
| of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the
| core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the
| h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more
| radiator area do you need then?
|
| Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats
| things too.
|
| How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is
| generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
|
| How do you move data between the ground and your satellite?
| How much power does that take?
|
| If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100
| survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question
| and add an order of magnitude.
|
| I could go on, but honestly those details - while
| individually solvable - don't matter because _there is no
| world where you would not be better off taking the exact same
| h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead_
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| h100 can operate at 80-90C continuously, so 70C seems
| conservative
|
| I'm not advocating for space GPUs as a logical next step.
| so many unsolved problems remain
|
| point is that launch costs per kg are a more realistic
| blocker than cooling
| cdf wrote:
| The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I
| didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square
| meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size
| comparable to the ISS.
|
| How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something
| that big?
|
| Do you see how unrealistic this is?
|
| Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and
| still have change left.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| my point is that cooling is not the problem, launch cost
| per kg is
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| Don't let common sense stop you from a good time.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks
| terrestrially.
|
| Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
|
| Launch costs are dropping, and we're still using inefficient
| rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop
| this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using
| rockets, maybe we'll never get to elevators & trains the costs
| will drop so low!
|
| Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and
| phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi
| Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming,
| no doubt with nuclear power.
|
| Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it
| does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction
| wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to
| replace.
|
| Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first
| laser comms missions NASDA's ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA's Artemis ,
| and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF
| is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just
| demonstrated by ESA.
|
| Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs,
| heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to
| mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
|
| Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with
| superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space
| based computation.
|
| Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I'm
| not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
| sfink wrote:
| > Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch
| costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not
| to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
|
| You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the
| sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the
| time formerly known as night?
|
| I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd
| thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100degC with a
| 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small
| house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot
| of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough,
| which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
|
| Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and
| radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the
| power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar
| panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
|
| (All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are
| unchecked.)
| nickorlow wrote:
| I don't get the point at all of these. You:
|
| - have very non-deterministic latency
|
| - are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China
| could disrupt your space data center)
|
| - have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware
| frotaur wrote:
| and : kessler syndrome
| jonshariat wrote:
| And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers
| don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to
| physically interact with them.
| cousinbryce wrote:
| You're also located outside of any country that could regulate
| nickorlow wrote:
| A country will definitely still be able to regulate you. Also
| under what regulations they'd be afraid of other than local
| building laws
| j45 wrote:
| I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to
| everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
|
| Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support
| something with Mars?
|
| As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to
| counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing
| SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays
| at the R&D stage for so long.
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the
| launch of other satellites.
|
| Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans
| with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability
| for those robots Tesla is building.
| phire wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable
| because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard
| terrestrial data centres.
|
| And nobody ever calls them out on it.
|
| Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy,
| density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of
| advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in
| space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for
| absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to
| supply, except for the compute.
|
| If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as
| cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the
| middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the
| internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and
| radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct
| sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
|
| The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same
| satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours
| of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to
| repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be
| extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day
| outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground
| satellites".
|
| And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more
| cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements.
| You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get
| rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air
| cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't
| have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind
| turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours.
| Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind
| power instead.
|
| An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the
| same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper
| costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that
| space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter
| which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
|
| -------------------
|
| Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution
| looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but
| they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency
| sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a
| massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem
| for their favourite solution to solve.
|
| But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are
| completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better
| fit.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| You don't even need the desert. Just put it in India and use
| coal power or whatever. AI training doesn't care about latency
| to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it
| is cheap.
| phire wrote:
| I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
|
| But there should be plenty of options once you start actually
| optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many
| places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore,
| which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you
| could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
| butvacuum wrote:
| After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I
| realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to
| do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must
| be factoring in something else-
|
| Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR
| controlled countries and/or sanctioned
| countries/individuals.
|
| Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can _REALLY_ verify
| system behavior once its up there. So NSA /CIA etc sure are
| chomping at the bit to allow it.
|
| I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less
| outlandish/tinfoily as well.
| variaga wrote:
| This is the correct analysis.
|
| Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is
| spending so much time wondering if we _could_ build a space
| data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn
| sense whatsoever to do so.
| rhplus wrote:
| By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the
| gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it's financially
| viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on
| reentry.
| rybosworld wrote:
| It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah
| sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
|
| And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
|
| But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that
| breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if
| unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
|
| The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches
| zero.
| NegativeK wrote:
| With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it
| takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
|
| I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the
| amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack.
| Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
|
| So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time
| attempting to discredit bullshit.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Well said.
| bamboozled wrote:
| But it's absolutely amazing hype and memevestors love it.
| gowld wrote:
| What is this website?
|
| The website insists that you let it record your voice in order to
| show you the dangers of AI. Is it trolling the visitor?
| https://civai.org/talk
| random_duck wrote:
| It seems quite telling we are even discussing this.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency)
| equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats
| outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of
| taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from
| any/all government.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best
| people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as
| well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting
| that would be.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Everyone else is announcing initiatives to _investigate the
| feasibility of this_ because earthlings currently hate the data
| center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how
| much electricity /water they're using. They're selling a story.
| rolph wrote:
| where do you put things, so that no one will be able to warrant
| thier way into access?
|
| entirely out of jurisdiction, where it is prohibitively expensive
| to travel, and impractical for any physical seizure.
|
| you dont need to compute, just store it and P2P amongst
| satellites.
|
| essentially an orbital NAS.
| typ wrote:
| Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and
| thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how
| hot can the object be?
|
| Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the
| temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With
| the right shape and "color", the equilibrium temperature can be
| cooler than most people thought.
|
| I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no
| different than this iron ball in principle.
| eldenring wrote:
| The ideal shape would be a shaded, flat panel perpendicular to
| the sun right?
| typ wrote:
| That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there
| could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.
|
| Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface
| roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it
| can have dramatically different emissivity.
| adastra22 wrote:
| About 120 degC.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of
| getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had
| good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the
| place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data
| center there?
|
| Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much
| better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an
| awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would
| be a nightmare.
|
| And yet it's way better than _space_. It 's much easier to get
| to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation
| environment is much more forgiving.
|
| This whole concept is baffling to me.
|
| (Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when
| talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south
| pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so
| take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply
| them.)
| xrd wrote:
| Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no
| longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also
| using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would
| focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an
| entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that
| now.
| kabdib wrote:
| Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad
| time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.
|
| And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not
| going to be fast.
| taf2 wrote:
| Isn't Starlink already basically a distributed datacenter in
| space? they have like ~9k+ satellites up there already at least
| according to: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html.
|
| what am I missing here?
| ladberg wrote:
| I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount
| of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to
| provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as
| many watts on Earth as they can source.
| cornonthecobra wrote:
| Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in
| building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space
| seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling
| our access to space_
|
| I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with
| a grain of salt after seeig this.
|
| Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes.
| They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they
| "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels.
| To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material
| fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
| alansammarone wrote:
| Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but
| this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by
| doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-
| level analysis.
|
| The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are
| many others. Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns
| a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research.
| Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies
| from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit
| (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no
| more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL.
| That's just the obvious stuff.
|
| Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like
| Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those
| already.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Particularly at high altitudes.
|
| Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.
|
| The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a
| quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less
| time it will last.
|
| There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is
| small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way
| lower than things like GEO.
| adastra22 wrote:
| SpaceX made a request of the FCC to authorize a constellation
| of 1 million satellites. And these are going to be much larger,
| "data center" satellites. This many satellites, all in the
| _same_ orbit (sun-synchronous is a specific orbit), vastly
| changes the math on Kessler syndrome.
| quantum_state wrote:
| A pie in the sky
| mrandish wrote:
| > Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective
| for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
|
| I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit
| on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area
| based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way
| to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
|
| However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to
| improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive
| pressure on space-based solutions.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Requirements for power still don't come close to total or
| practical surface area. If we get to that point, space
| collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
| innis226 wrote:
| People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and
| completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus
| AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in
| realtiy shave off 20-25% because of clouds and night time. In a
| sun-synchronous orbit, you're pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and
| that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage
| per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much
| surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-
| force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into
| active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively
| paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance
| of space power.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You do not solve a problem that is many orders of magnitude
| more difficult with a mere 5x to 6x efficiency gain.
| dathinab wrote:
| The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic
| (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
|
| 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you
| don't have at ground level
|
| 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a
| vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation
| rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a
| satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight
| alone not including running any higher heat producing component
| (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a
| reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in
| color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a
| point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
|
| 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot
| of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs
| on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have
| some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs
| less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
|
| 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even
| if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your
| operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes
| worse.
|
| 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every
| satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in
| the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like
| Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting
| datacenters into space.
|
| 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a
| whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things
| into space which don't need to go there.
|
| Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
|
| There is zero benefit, non nada.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > sure space is cold
|
| Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It
| only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is
| pretty useless in the shade.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the
| shade.
| adastra22 wrote:
| In close proximity, and connected to metal structures
| radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have
| to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the
| spacecraft core.
| Tepix wrote:
| I think stopping the heat conductivity is a solved
| problem - space telescopes manage to do this. But all in
| all, cooling in space remains a very big challenge.
| adastra22 wrote:
| No, it isn't solved. The James Webb telescope was shipped
| with cryogenic coolant, and put in an orbit in the shadow
| of the moon far from the radiating earth. Once it runs
| out in a few years, it's done.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| The energy collected from the solar panels must be
| converted into heat in the AI chips. It's really like
| putting the AI chips directly into the sun, just with extra
| steps. Sunlight gets transformed into electricity which
| gets transformed into heat in the chips.
| tgtweak wrote:
| They actually need the entirety of the backside of the
| panels to cool them - if not they would literally burn out
| from the accumulated heat from being exposed to the sun.
| joelthelion wrote:
| > The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then
| basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
|
| And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating
| Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are
| merging to bring data centers to space").
| graemep wrote:
| That sounds like what journalists usually do. They are
| reporters, and rarely have any real knowledge of what they
| report.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion,
| journalism should be comparatively rigorous. _" Musk says"_
| is not _" plans/hopes"_
| joelthelion wrote:
| I'd argue this is not opinion but fact. Also, articles very
| often didn't say "Musk says" but just took his word for
| fact, not even quoting him. And in the era of Trump/Musk,
| their practices should evolve.
| titzer wrote:
| I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says
| Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing
| out the fact that _the moon is not made of blue cheese_ a
| kind of "rigorous" reporting?
|
| Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the
| press extra constitutional protections for.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| So, don't take this the wrong way, but basically:
| https://newsliteracy.wsj.com/news-opinion
|
| I was poorly trying to raise this trite distinction,
| asserting _skepticism_ falls closer to _Opinion_ than
| _Journalism_. The line gets more fine every day. I know.
| Take it up with them /their peers.
|
| 'Rigorous' would be _" Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'"_,
| not _" Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'... and here's how
| we feel/think about it"_.
| oblio wrote:
| For people new to HN (Paul Graham - PG - is HN's founder):
|
| https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
|
| > Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are
| back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most
| surprising things I discovered during my brief business
| career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a
| huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you
| read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes,
| or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
|
| Musk is running out of runway on his way to infinity dollars
| and since Tesla is slowly crumbling compared to its
| valuation, the ideas need to become crazier and crazier:
| humanoid robots tomorrow, self driving taxis tomorrow,
| reusable rockets going to Mars tomorrow, data centers in
| space tomorrow.
|
| It would be fun to watch if Musk wouldn't funnel a lot of
| money that could be used for good, instead. Imagine how many
| diseases we could cure with all that money. Or feed and
| educate the poor. Or how much walkable and bikeable and
| ultimately liveable infrastructure we could build world wide.
| Or how fewer plastics we could use, ingest and discard if we
| could promote healthy and natural alternatives.
|
| And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and
| sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
| titzer wrote:
| There is no accountability anymore. Literal crypto pump and
| dump schemes mint millionaires and funnel money to
| billionaires and not a single investigation, indictment,
| court case, sentence, or even fine!
|
| It's a casino and the mirage of billionaire competency
| would vanish instantly if the media were even slightly
| skeptical.
|
| The media is owned, it's a sham. It's a play.
|
| > And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line
| and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek
| fantasies.
|
| Not all techies, but enough of them to keep the raft
| afloat.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The same thing happened with Hyperloop. Many journalists are
| simple stenographers of the utterances of others and there's
| no verification applied to any of the claims.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but
| I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too
| expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers
| to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number
| of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately,
| without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this,
| because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems
| you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely
| impossible for anyone to ever solve.
|
| > 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue
| you don't have at ground level
|
| This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap
| enough to offset this.
|
| > 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a
| vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation
| rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a
| satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight
| alone not including running any higher heat producing component
| (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is
| a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold
| in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a
| point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
|
| I would assume the people designing this are "very careful"
| with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the
| cooling is only very hard and requires careful material
| engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it
| done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a
| physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved
| analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling
| power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious
| ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a
| maximum amount of heat.
|
| > 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a
| lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea
| GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that
| 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but
| "performs less good then it should/compared to other units"
| kind of broken.
|
| I suppose they could make something like the International
| Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth
| exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
|
| > 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck
| even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your
| operations scale is large enough. In space things are
| magnitudes worse.
|
| Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic";
| everything about putting data centers in space is. The question
| is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can
| engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a
| one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the
| running costs of the facility.
|
| > 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does
| every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that
| relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for
| keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it
| worse by putting datacenters into space.
|
| > 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity
| as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting
| things into space which don't need to go there.
|
| These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and
| will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who
| wants to send more satellites into space.
| greggoB wrote:
| > This is a one time cost
|
| > which would get regular traffic back-and-forth
|
| I hope it's not a mystery why this commemt has been downvoted
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > This is a one time cost.
|
| Sure, until you need to replace or upgrade it. How long does
| a server on earth last for, how often does it need
| maintenance / replacing? And how long is the expected or
| desired lifetime for a server in space? Then calculate weight
| and cost etc.
|
| > Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
|
| "Maybe" is hope, you can't build a business on hope / wishful
| thinking. And the running costs for data centers on earth can
| be reduced too if you build them the same way as a sattelite
| - solar panels + battery + radiative cooling gives you enough
| data to compare. But servers / data centers aren't built that
| way because of cost vs benefit.
|
| > If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires
| careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and
| they will get it done.
|
| See, it's _possible_ for sure - we HAVE computers in space,
| powered, cooled, running 24 /7. The questions are whether it
| makes economic sense, both launch costs and running /
| maintenance costs. That's straight math, and the math isn't
| mathing.
|
| > I suppose they could make something like the International
| Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth
| exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
|
| Sure, but the ISS itself cost ~100 billion to build and
| operate - probably more, this is based on a ten second search
| query. While I'm sure launches are cheaper than ever and will
| be even cheaper in the future, it's still tens of billions to
| build a data center in space, plus you'd need astronauts,
| supplies, hardware, etc - all a LOT more expensive than the
| equivalent processing power on earth.
|
| > These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and
| will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who
| wants to send more satellites into space.
|
| True, so we as humanity should offer resistance to plans to
| launch thousands of objects into space unless they have a
| clear and definite benefit. I'm not worried about Starlink,
| it's a benefit to all the areas that don't have (open) access
| to the internet and they're in low-earth orbit so they'll
| fall back within 5 years. But I just don't see the benefit in
| putting datacenters in space, not when it's so much cheaper
| and more viable to put them on earth.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Yes, this is the nature of Brandolini's Law.
|
| > I would assume the people designing this are "very careful"
| with everything they put in the data center
|
| Which is very nice for Musk, who can spend 30 seconds running
| his mouth, and people jump to assuming that a) it's being
| designed, b) by skilled people, c) the math and finances
| works out already, d) that 'completely obvious' problems must
| simply be your lying eyes, and contort themselves to put all
| the effort into defending it.
|
| Even though Musk has a history of lying announcements and not
| being able to deliver and the 'completely obvious' problems
| were actually problems that nobody solved. Where is the 2017
| full self driving car? Where is the Vision-over-LIDAR
| success? Where is the Hyperloop that "would be able to whisk
| passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in just 35 minutes"?
| Where are the 2025 orbital refuelling test flights for the
| Moon and Mars schedule, and the plans for how to keep
| cryogenic liquid Hydrogen cold in Space? Where was the
| "funding secured" Musk lied about for taking Tesla stock
| private in 2018 when judges found there wasn't any funding
| and fined him $20M? Where's the person Musk said in 2011 he
| could "put on Mars in a decade"? Where's the uncrewed Mars
| ship in 2022 he announced in 2017? The human voyage in 2024?
|
| > " _I 'm a physicist myself_"
|
| And if someone tells you they have found a quantum zero-point
| free energy room temperature superconducting over-unity
| perpetual motion machine, do you jump to their defense
| because you assume the speaker must be very careful and
| smarter than everyone else? Or do you say "sounds unlikely;
| extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
|
| > " _I suppose they could make something like the
| International Space Station, which would get regular traffic
| back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed._
| "
|
| The ISS cost 100-150 billion, is "larger than a 6 bedroom
| house", and its solar panels can generate 250 kW. NVidia says
| their AI datacenter costs $50-60 billion, needs 1GW of
| electricity, and look at the size of it:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nvidia-
| worth-5-trillion-...
|
| You're looking at that multiple-warehouses-structure which
| could sink the output of an entire nuclear power station, and
| going with "it would be cheaper if we launched that into
| space"?
| claaams wrote:
| The benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets.
| It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15
| years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit
| from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still
| waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make
| himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of
| a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything
| is more money and power.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| I just purchased a sandwich I made from myself in a deal that
| values me a $1tn. I plan to make toasties in space.
| slackerIII wrote:
| Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the
| machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as
| disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it
| will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's
| stored on earth than one in space.
|
| Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center
| thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power,
| etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of
| the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
|
| (yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream
| pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
| int0x29 wrote:
| The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can
| just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm
| to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure
| is fragile.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| What if you just took some ketamine and tried again? Does it make
| sense?
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| Like there isn't enough stuff floating up there already.
| cdf wrote:
| I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on
| and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be
| moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it
| will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he
| sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
|
| Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I
| have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt
| have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
|
| There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what
| they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the
| shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
|
| And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we
| replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is
| afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently
| wrong.
| IFC_LLC wrote:
| Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a
| good'ol horsie was in 1910.
|
| Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It
| does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on
| figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to
| happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to
| have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of
| research needed.
|
| Ain't my money being spent.
|
| As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US
| payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
| danny_codes wrote:
| It is your money being spent. ~40B so far. Though half of that
| is for services.
|
| But more abstractly, it's our resources that are being
| allocated. The planet as a unit is deciding where to put it's
| effort. Apparently we're not very good at this
| metabagel wrote:
| I can't take any of it seriously.
| kittikitti wrote:
| A more reasonable project would be repurposing portions of the
| ISS for a data center and using that as a POC for larger scale
| stations.
| 7e wrote:
| Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x
| more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and
| be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of
| darkness.
| MBCook wrote:
| How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY
| harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and
| seize or block?
|
| They make no sense otherwise.
|
| The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a
| scheme to get investment and they're never going to actually go
| through with it.
|
| At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.
| zemaj wrote:
| I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all
| just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory
| objections to combining the companies.
| elamje wrote:
| I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of
| a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and
| this whole premise makes no sense to me.
|
| 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
|
| 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is
| bandwidth cheaper in space?
|
| 3. Chips must be "Rad-hard" - that is do more error correcting
| from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA
| dedicated to special hardware for this.
|
| 4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy
| cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to
| and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat
| generated away from source.
|
| 5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass
| manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space
| energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are
| lost.
|
| Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes
| total sense, because it's really hard to see for me!
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Chips must be "Rad-hard" - that is do more error correcting
| from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA
| dedicated to special hardware for this.
|
| They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just
| accept error and use redundant CPUs.
| elamje wrote:
| Where did you hear this?
| adastra22 wrote:
| You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-
| hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an
| option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
|
| Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable
| circuits, not mere bitflips.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > You are confidently incorrect.
|
| No, he's not. Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs.
| And it's rated to carry humans to space.
|
| > AWST: So, NASA does not require SpaceX to use radiation-
| hardened computer systems on the Dragon?
|
| John Muratore: No, as a matter of fact NASA doesn't require
| it on their own systems, either. I spent 30 years at NASA
| and in the Air Force doing this kind of work. My last job
| was chief engineer of the shuttle program at NASA, and
| before that as shuttle flight director. I managed flight
| programs and built the mission control center that we use
| there today.
|
| On the space station, some areas are using rad-hardened
| parts and other parts use COTS parts. Most of the control
| of the space station occurs through laptop computers which
| are not radiation hardened.
|
| > Q: So, these flight computers on Dragon - there are three
| on board, and that's for redundancy?
|
| A: There are actually six computers. They operate in pairs,
| so there are three computer units, each of which have two
| computers checking on each other. The reason we have three
| is when operating in proximity of ISS, we have to always
| have two computer strings voting on something on critical
| actions. We have three so we can tolerate a failure and
| still have two voting on each other. And that has nothing
| to do with radiation, that has to do with ensuring that
| we're safe when we're flying our vehicle in the proximity
| of the space station.
|
| I went into the lab earlier today, and we have 18 different
| processing units with computers in them. We have three main
| computers, but 18 units that have a computer of some kind,
| and all of them are triple computers - everything is three
| processors. So we have like 54 processors on the
| spacecraft. It's a highly distributed design and very
| fault-tolerant and very robust.
|
| [1] - https://aviationweek.com/dragons-radiation-tolerant-
| design
| adastra22 wrote:
| > Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's
| rated to carry humans to space.
|
| Those are not independent facts. They put the hardware
| inside, behind the radiation shielding they use to keep
| the astronauts safe. It's why regular old IBM laptops
| work on the Space Station too. That kind of shielding is
| going to blow your mass budget if you use it on these
| satellites.
|
| SpaceX, which prefers COTS components when it can use
| them, still went with AMD Versal chips for Starlink.
| Because that kind of high performance, small process node
| hardware doesn't last long in space otherwise (phone SoC-
| based cubesats in LEO never lasted more than a year, and
| often only a month or so).
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > They put the hardware inside,
|
| Which is exactly how you'd do a hypothetical dc in space.
| Come on, you're arguing for the sake of arguing. CotS
| works. This is not an issue.
|
| > That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass
| budget
|
| SpX is already leading in upmass by a large margin.
| Starship improves mass to orbit. Again, this is a
| "solved" issue.
|
| There are other problems in building space DCs. Rad
| hardening is not one of them. AI training is so fault
| tolerant already that this was never an issue.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| > AI training is so fault tolerant already that this was
| never an issue.
|
| Such nonsense.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Between fp nondeterminism, fp arithmetic, async gradient
| updates, cuda nondeterminism, random network issues,
| random nodes failing and so on, bitflip is the _last_ of
| your concerns. SGD is very robust on noise. That 's why
| it works with such noisy data, pipelines, compute and so
| on. Come on! This thread is having people find the most
| weird hills to die on, while being completely off base.
| adastra22 wrote:
| None of the discussed designs include radiation shielding
| like that. Nobody is considering doing it that way,
| because the math really really doesn't work out (instead
| of unshielded, where it just doesn't work out).
|
| A cosmic ray striking a chip doesn't cause a bitflip - it
| blows out the whole compute unit and permanently disables
| it. It is more like a hand grenade going off.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Carrying humans to space is not the same use case as
| spending long periods of time in orbit.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Dragon spends 6mo+ in orbit regularly. I have no idea
| what's happening in this thread, but it seems everyone is
| going insane. People don't even know what they're talking
| about, but they keep on bringing bad arguments. I'm out.
| numpad0 wrote:
| There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this
| is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about
| substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant
| regular x86 years ago, that's true.
|
| I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and
| power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden
| variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up,
| and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill
| Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
| kortilla wrote:
| >Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is
| bandwidth cheaper in space?
|
| Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground.
| If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between
| sats, this isn't a real issue.
| TheDong wrote:
| > Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually
| makes total sense, because it's really hard to see for me!
|
| Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises
| (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi
| earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
|
| The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to
| enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has
| made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the
| stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a
| financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good
| light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's
| performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon
| musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes
| check).
|
| The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar,
| and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money
| by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as
| a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to
| make him richer.
|
| People will support it too since it pattern matches with the
| thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will
| want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla
| holdings go to the moon.
|
| Make sense now?
| adastra22 wrote:
| The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this
| year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter
| and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak
| of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap
| worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity.
| Simple as that.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion
| is spending most of his time maximizing his money.
| z3t4 wrote:
| He probably have 700 billion in loans and need to pay
| rent
| kadoban wrote:
| Welcome to billionares. If they weren't obsessed with
| "number go up" over any other consideration, they
| wouldn't be billionares.
| nosianu wrote:
| Billionaire money is not like money for the normal
| person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you
| have on the economy - and even the state.
|
| It is not just a number, as it is for people who just
| save a few dollars, for whom it really _is_ just a number
| until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire 's
| money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and
| the abstraction of turning this into a number does a
| terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many.
| Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-
| control-giving paper assets is different and not what
| being a top capitalist is about, only used as an
| additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully
| control (the small investor does not even have any
| control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public
| company).
|
| They don't just play with money, they play with real
| things! And they want to play with ever bigger real
| things. They don't just want to improve some minor
| product. They want to control the fate of civilization.
|
| OT:
|
| I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too
| many people discussing wealth inequality issues get
| wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile.
| Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly,
| hiding what is actually going on for too many observers
| who then go on to discuss "numbers".
|
| That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money
| of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual
| real complex organizations. And you can't just make
| everything into a public company, and also, even when
| they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like
| managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the
| GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just
| does not work the same.
|
| We will have to look at what those super-rich _are
| actually doing_ , case by individual case of ownership,
| not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes
| concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good
| thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection
| of "who would control that?", because right now they
| control themselves so it's never nobody.
| the_other wrote:
| I think you have read the "redistrubute the money" people
| wrong. They definitely, absolutely want to reduce the
| power the tiny minority hold over the many. That's the
| whole point. The money is a tool to get the work done.
| tyg13 wrote:
| Doesn't it just make sense though? How else would he have
| gotten 800 billion dollars?
| sixQuarks wrote:
| What's silly is a bunch of so-called intelligent
| entrepreneurs and tech insiders twisting themselves into
| a pretzel coming up with reasons why this or that won't
| work, by the guy who keeps doing the impossible
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > by the guy who keeps doing the impossible
|
| What exactly has Elon done that's "impossible"? Like the
| Boring Company where he promised 1,000x faster boring? It
| turned into a mile or two of a poorly routed hole with
| some Teslas tossed down into it. He and his shills hand
| waved away the problem, confident their brilliance would
| allow them to dig 1,000x faster than modern commercial
| boring. It never happened.
|
| The only impossible thing Elon has done is make fantasy
| claims and real people fall for it.
| stevage wrote:
| I will definitely credit Elon with building a company
| that made reusable self-landing rockets seem routine and
| boring. That was definitely "impossible".
|
| Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.
| kergonath wrote:
| > That was definitely "impossible".
|
| It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it
| before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate
| basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.
|
| Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a
| rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don't have to keep
| spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets.
| It's not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.
|
| It's like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it
| was still something people could plan and prepare for.
| But you're not going to climb all the way to the moon,
| even with oxygen bottles. It's a completely different
| problem to solve.
|
| The most difficult point to argue against for people who
| want to defend Musk's delusions is simple economics: at
| the end of the day, when you've solved
|
| - the energy source problem (difficult but probably
| doable);
|
| - the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do
| it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near
| as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);
|
| - the head dissipation problem (physically implausible,
| to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that
| a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would
| just be very difficult);
|
| - the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because
| you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite,
| so you'd _need_ communication to be more useful than a
| couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that's
| additional moving parts, it's probably doable but still a
| bit of work);
|
| - the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all
| I can say, that's a fair number of orders of magnitude
| larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy
| to do it);
|
| - and all the other tiny details, such as materials and
| logistics just to build the thing.
|
| Then, you still end up with something which is orders of
| magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive
| than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no
| upside.
| jnsie wrote:
| Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the
| rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to
| gain even more power. Why would it be any different with
| Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an
| unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that
| Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.
| mmustapic wrote:
| Exactly, and there needs to be some economic justification
| for a giant rocket. There is no money to be made by going
| to Mars, and AI data centers in space could attract
| investors (who are just riding the data center hype).
| fsloth wrote:
| > I data centers in space could attract investors (who
| are just riding the data center hype).
|
| I find this to be the most obvious game plan here. Makes
| total sense from financial engineering point of view.
|
| You _might_ get to develop nice tech/IP to enable other
| space based businesses at the same time. "we sold them on
| X but delivered Y". So it's a bit of a hail mary, but
| makes total sense to me if you want to have a large
| budget for inventing the future.
|
| Once you can demonstrate even a fraction of this
| capability of operations ... I think you can sell a
| "space dominance" offering to Pentagon for example and
| just keep pedaling.
|
| "We are going to build the perfect weapon" does not
| necessarily entice as large engineer population as "we
| are going to Star Trek".
|
| Another thing - if Moon is going to be a thing, then
| _properties on Moon_ are going to be a thing.
|
| In theories of value in post-ai societies scarce assets
| like land are going to become more valuable. So it's a
| long term plan that makes sense if you believe Moon will
| be a realestate market.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very
| improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
|
| Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to
| compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some
| stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
| thephyber wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure about Tesla stock. Tesla has only
| weathered 1 market downturn cycle and that was when it was
| a very different company. The company has thus far had
| access to plentiful capital since the Model S started being
| delivered.
|
| Famous investors like to repeat the quote that "when the
| tide goes out, that's when we find out who's wearing no
| pants." When Tesla actually weathers its first market
| downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is
| maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Oh no! He promised my car would be self driving in 2018 but
| it took until 2026 before that was true.
|
| How dare he not have accurately predicted when one of the
| hardest technical problems in history is solved?
| testing22321 wrote:
| "At SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely
| late." -Elon
| greengrassi wrote:
| When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about
| the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data
| centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites
| not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center
| payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space
| developing the lunar satellites.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They are not. xAI/SpaceX is talking about millions of
| satellites in sun-synchronous orbit.
| nosianu wrote:
| Yeah, the cost of doing it on the moon would be even more
| astronomical. Then there also is the three second of round-
| trip latency to consider (ca. 2.6 s just the signal, but
| processing adds a bit more).
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.
|
| 1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise
| of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
|
| 2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing.
| The bytes you get before you max out a context window are
| trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about
| latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's
| going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future
| (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside
| sandboxes).
|
| 3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to
| errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can
| 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If
| you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the
| chips from radiation as well.
|
| 4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space
| radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an
| engineering problem.
|
| 5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters
| is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to
| ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're
| converting old jet engines into power plants to work around
| this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by
| anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they
| can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or
| low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the
| huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| > There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space
| radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an
| engineering problem.
|
| Well, it's a physics problem. The engineering solution is
| possibly not cost efficient. I'd put a lot of money that it
| isn't.
| bborud wrote:
| That bit reminded me of someone who wanted us to design a
| patch the size of a small postage stamp, at most 0.2mm
| thick, so you could stick on products. It was to deliver
| power for two years of operation, run an LTE modem, a GNSS
| receiver, an MCU, temperature and humidity sensor and would
| cost $0.10. And it would send back telemetry twice per day.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 'A mere matter of engineering'.
| verzali wrote:
| All you need to do is make use of a higher dimension to
| pack stuff into. And then mass produce to bring costs
| down. How hard can that be?
| bborud wrote:
| Skippy the Magnificent will solve this for us.
|
| (reference to a character in the Expiditionary Force
| series by Craig Alanson
|
| _Only a very small portion of his physical presence is
| in local spacetime, with the rest in higher spacetime. He
| can expand his physical presence from the size of an oil
| drum or shrink to the size of a lipstick tube. He can't
| maintain that for long without risking catastrophic
| effects. If he did, he would lose containment, fully
| materialize in local spacetime and occupy local space
| equal to one quarter the size of Paradise. The resulting
| explosion would eventually be seen in the Andromeda
| Galaxy._ )
| bborud wrote:
| The conversation went something like this (from memory):
|
| - We can't do that
|
| - Why not?
|
| - Well, physics for one.
|
| - What do you mean?
|
| - Well, at the very least we need to be able to emit
| enough RF-energy for a mobile base station to be able to
| detect it and allow itself to be convinced it is seeing
| valid signaling.
|
| - Yes?
|
| - The battery technology that fits within your
| constraints doesn't exist. Nevermind the electronics or
| antenna.
|
| - Can't you do something creative? We heard you were
| clever.
|
| I distinctly remember that last line. But I can't
| remember what my response was. It was probably something
| along the lines of "if I were that clever I'd be at home
| polishing my Nobel medal in physics".
|
| Even the sales guy who dragged me into this meeting
| couldn't keep it together. He spent the whole one hour
| drive back to the office muttering "can't you do
| something creative" and then laughing hysterically.
|
| I think the solution they went for was irreversible
| freeze and moisture indication stickers. Which was what I
| suggested they go for in the first 5 minutes of the
| meeting since that a) solved their problem, and b) is on
| the market, and c) can be had for the price point in
| bulk.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's so hilarious. I've had a couple that went in that
| direction but nothing to come close.
|
| To be fair though, there is a lot of tech that to me
| seems like complete magic and yet it exists. SDR for
| instance, still has me baffled. Who ever thought you'd
| simply digitize the antenna signal and call it a day,
| hardware wise, the rest is just math, after all.
|
| When you get used to enough miracles like that without
| actually understanding any of it and suddenly the
| impossible might just sound reasonable.
|
| > Can't you do something creative? We heard you were
| clever.
|
| Should be chiseled in marble.
| bborud wrote:
| The purely digital neighborhood of the SDRs is much
| easier to explain than the analog rat droppings between
| the DAC/ADC and the antenna. That part belongs to dark
| wizards with costly instruments that draw unsettling
| polar plots, and whose only consistent output is a
| request for even pricier gear from companies whose names
| sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
|
| The digital end of SDRs are simple. Sample it, then once
| you have trapped the signal in digital form beat the
| signal into submission with the stick labeled "linear
| algebra".
|
| (Nevermind that the math may be demanding. Math books are
| nowhere near as scary as the Sacred Texts Of The Dark
| Wizards)
|
| "Rohde & Schwarz -- live at the VNA, 96 dB dynamic range,
| one night only."
| jacquesm wrote:
| > whose names sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
|
| That had me laughing out loud, you should have left the
| name out to make it more of a puzzler :)
|
| I apparently have been drawn to the occult for a long
| time and feel more comfortable with coils, capacitors and
| transmission lines than I do with the math behind them.
| Of course it's great to be able to just say 'ridiculously
| steep bandpass filter here' and expect it to work but I
| know that building that same thing out of discrete
| components - even if the same math describes it - would
| run into various very real limitations soon.
|
| And here I am on a budget SDR speccing a 10 Hz bandfilter
| _and it just works_. I know there must be some downside
| to this but for the life of me I can 't find it.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What makes you so sure? SpaceX already has thousands of 6
| kW networking racks flying around in LEO and they dissipate
| their heat just fine, and are plenty cost-effective. You
| think they can't do any better than that with a new design
| specifically optimized for computing rather than
| networking?
| verzali wrote:
| Probably, but they likely can't do better than we can do
| on Earth. Networking in space offers specific advantages
| that are not easy to replicate on Earth. Data centers in
| space don't have clear advantages beyond easily debunked
| ideas about cooling and power.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I'm not talking about the whole idea, just the heat
| dissipation part. So many people in this thread seem so
| sure this is impossible because you can't radiate heat in
| space, completely ignorant to the fact that SpaceX is
| already dissipating over 20 MW of solar power in LEO in a
| reasonably cost-effective manner.
|
| The advantage of 24/7 solar power is clear, obvious, and
| undeniable, it's just a question of whether that's
| outweighed by the other disadvantages.
| undersuit wrote:
| The solar panels on the newest satellites can deliver 6kW
| but the power that satellite actually uses is less. The
| satellite is only using 300W[1] during the dark phase of
| it's orbit when it can use it's entire mass to cool down.
| Is that limit because of the battery or is it because the
| satellite needs to radiate all the heat it acquired from
| the other half of the time in the sun?
|
| [1] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-
| satellite-dim...
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Looks like that's a purely speculative assumption the
| blog author made, not a fact. I'm not sure why he made
| that assumption given that Starlink doesn't _actually_
| stop working at night.
|
| Fair point that in SSO you'd need 2-3x the radiator area
| (and half the solar panels, and minimal/no batteries). I
| don't think that invalidates my point though.
| drtz wrote:
| Not only is it not cost-effective, it's pointless (in this
| context).
|
| Radiators works almost just as well on Earth. Convection
| and conduction more than make up the difference.
| haspok wrote:
| > There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space
| radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an
| engineering problem.
|
| It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we
| take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look
| at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube,
| and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal,
| right?...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Musk's companies never tried to make the hyperloop, they
| never even started on it. SpaceX is a bit different.
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| so spacex worked on an orbital data center?
| Rover222 wrote:
| no, just merely more satellites than the rest of the
| world combined, with the first functioning laser links in
| a large constellation.
| monooso wrote:
| I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into
| whether or not this idea makes sense.
|
| That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the
| point:
|
| > Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise
| of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
|
| As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting
| things into space more cost effectively than other
| organisations that put things into space.
|
| That is not the benchmark here.
|
| It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres
| in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could.
| It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than
| running them on earth.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The cost of "launching" mass on Earth is not zero, though.
| monooso wrote:
| I didn't suggest that it was.
| tfehring wrote:
| I don't think that statement was missing the point. As you
| point out, what matters is the total cost of ownership of
| the system. The cost of launching mass into space today
| isn't the only reason terrestrial data centers are more
| cost effective today, but it's the main one. If you make it
| cheap enough to send giant solar arrays and radiators to
| space, the other costs of operating in space may start to
| look like a small price to pay to eliminate the need for
| inputs like land and batteries.
| clysm wrote:
| 3. There are WAY more things to get corrupted on a computer
| system than tokens. And non-determinism does NOT mean it's
| tolerant to faults. Random values are intentionally
| introduced at the right moment for LLMs.
| drtz wrote:
| > It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.
|
| It does not make sense.
|
| The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some
| extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data
| centers more appealing than terrestrial?"
|
| The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements
| contradict this.
|
| Terrestrial will always be better:
|
| 1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never
| be as cheap as zero launches.
|
| 2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from
| Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every
| way.
|
| 3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data
| errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade
| into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in
| any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you
| radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost
| more than standard (do they even exist for this
| application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than
| no shielding.
|
| 4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation
| for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective
| radiation.
|
| 5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase
| in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't
| offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial
| solar collection for around the price of a single 1U
| satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on
| upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a
| satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is
| obsolete.
|
| And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades,
| troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially
| impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.
| catoc wrote:
| _"just an engineering problem"_
|
| Sounds a bit like that Dilbert where the marketing guy has
| sold a new invisible computer and is telling the engineers to
| now do their job and actually make it.
| danans wrote:
| > Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise
| of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
|
| They have to solve for it being cheaper to launch and operate
| in space vs building and operating a datacenter with its own
| power generation on Earth.
| Rover222 wrote:
| My lord a sensible comment her. A hearty upvote.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| It really isn't. It's plainly incorrect and ignorant of the
| actual problems.
| energy123 wrote:
| > 5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth
|
| Sun-synchronous orbit means solar panels collect the same
| amount 24/7. I guess that's the #1 benefit. Cheap energy.
| donkey_brains wrote:
| Read the whole sentence. He's talking about the cost to make
| solar panels that can be deployed in space, not the efficacy
| of said panels.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Regarding 3, they're almost certainly thinking of putting these
| in SSO where the radiation environment isn't too much worse
| than you see on the ISS. If they were going to go outside the
| Van Allen belts it would be a different story.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The whole AI bubble makes way more sense if you model it _not_
| as rational economic activity, but rather as the actions of a
| rogue AI slowly taking over our institutions and redirecting
| them towards its goals. Data centers in space make no sense
| economically, but think of how survivable the rogue AI will be
| once we build those orbiting data centers! (I am joking about
| this, but it 's weird that my logic makes sense.)
| tgtweak wrote:
| Added some math on my comment that outlines the boundaries of
| economics of this considering most of what you mentioned.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| for the chips to both be radiation hardened and as powerful as
| our current chips they'd need to be massive. There's a reason
| the mars rover uses a PowerPC G3
| UltraSane wrote:
| It doesn't make sense. It is just Musk trying to pump up SpaceX
| valuation before the IPO.
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Three counterpoints:
|
| 1) Kessler syndrome is a contingency.
|
| 2) This is a logistics issue, not a physical impossibility.
|
| 3) Those are different tradeoffs (solar in space). There is not
| really an argument there.
|
| All in all this is extremely weak reasoning, which is quite the
| contrast with the definitive title.
|
| I throw this to the "nerds _need_ to feel smarter than Elon "
| pile of articles. :)
| Zanni wrote:
| Electric cars make no sense.
|
| Reusable rockets make no sense.
|
| Autonomous cars make no sense.
|
| Data centers in space make no sense. <--- You are here.
|
| Humanoid robots make no sense.
| jeltz wrote:
| Hyperloop: makes no sense
|
| Solar roof tiles: makes no sense
|
| Lot's of tiny tunnels under cities: makes no sense
|
| Performance of the new roadster: makes no sense
|
| All four of the above were likely scams. Musk is not beyond
| running a scam.
| oblio wrote:
| Cherry picking makes no sense.
| briandw wrote:
| Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or
| No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o) Goes into great
| detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least).
| TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes
| sense.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we
| could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible.
| The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible
| infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the
| biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control
| the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap
| and DIY-able.
|
| I think it's all farce and technically unsound, but I also think
| that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It's really got him ready
| to rally investors behind "spreading the light of consciousness
| to the universe". Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his
| machine girlfriend)'s machinations.
| benl wrote:
| Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm
| quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly
| don't make sense.
|
| 1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is
| because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of
| all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-
| reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at
| 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.
|
| 2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new
| ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is
| because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new
| chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep
| using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.
|
| 3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both
| earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space
| so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.
|
| As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good
| reasons.
| audunw wrote:
| 3. The falling costs won't benefit space as much. The cost of
| sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space
| solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting
| cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations
| that reduce installation costs. Those don't apply to space
| (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to
| space to make this viable)
| benl wrote:
| Yes, launch cost is the crux of the matter. My skepticism is
| based on whether they'll be able to get launch cost low
| enough and launch cadence high enough. SpaceX has shown the
| ability to get launch costs dramatically lower and cadence
| dramatically higher, but it's not a slam dunk that those
| curves will continue to the levels needed for this idea to
| work.
| jraby3 wrote:
| A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this
| Article:
|
| - SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million
| satellites.
|
| - the satellites already have some incredible anti collision
| software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.
|
| - the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of
| 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's
| perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years
| the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more,
| particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.
|
| 1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/31/spacex-seeks-federal-
| appro...
|
| 2. https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
|
| 3. https://www.netizen.page/2025/05/cost-per-kilogram-to-low-
| ea...
|
| Edit: added item 3
| estomagordo wrote:
| Elon has open sourced them, or the people at SpaceX who
| actually know or understand something did?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Open sourcing your company's secret sauce is probably the
| sort of decision that only the CEO approves.
| ZiiS wrote:
| 2) it is extremely common to add storage to existing servers.
| Only slightly less; RAM, CPUs etc. not to mention how often it
| is cost-effective to replace broken components.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Data centers in space make sense because its nigh impossible to
| build things terrestrially. NIMBYism is so out of control the
| largest solar array in the US in the middle of the mojave got
| cancelled because it would interfere with the view.
|
| "Just change the law" ok sure we'll get right on it.
| perfmode wrote:
| Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more
| per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to
| fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity--a threshold
| unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship's full
| reusability.
|
| While technically not impossible, the space data center vision
| appears primarily designed to support SpaceX's anticipated
| mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than
| solve near-term compute constraints.
| monocasa wrote:
| Another thing that doesn't make sense about them is that DCs get
| a lot of out of physical locality. Caches become hot as different
| use case spin up and down during the day near their customers.
|
| If the nodes are spinning around the earth at orbital velocities,
| then all the benefits of physical locality are thrown out the
| window.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO
| would mean that latency to a client via a ground station
| wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and
| Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better
| coverage.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too
| much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include
| some information to broaden the perspective.
|
| - In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia
| Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035.
| Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal
| by 2050 [1]
|
| - heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet
| technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface
| area by the factor of 5-10
|
| - data center in space could provide advantages for processing
| space data, instead of sending them all to earth. - the Lonestar
| project proved that data storage and edge processing in space
| (moon, cislunar) is possible.
|
| - A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat
| budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips
| (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce
| energy requirement by 10-50 times
|
| I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive
| advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,
|
| [1] https://ascend-horizon.eu/
| adastra22 wrote:
| > micro droplet technology
|
| _Intentionally_ causing Kessler Syndrome?
|
| > A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat
| budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips
| (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce
| energy requirement by 10-50 times
|
| It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by
| the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters
| make sense.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Kessler syndrome is only a problem if the satellites are in
| LEO. They don't have to be.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They do have to be if they want to be approved by the FCC.
|
| And btw Kessler syndrome applies to any orbital band.
| You've got the logic backwards. Kessler syndrome is usually
| only considered a threat for LEO because that's where most
| of the satellites are. But if you're throwing million(s) of
| satellites into orbit, it becomes an issue at whatever
| orbital height you pick.
| jraby3 wrote:
| https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Is sort of somewhat handling 10,000 by enabling them to
| make orbital adjustments more quickly. By the time you
| have a million, you will run out of prop way too quick.
| typ wrote:
| > reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
|
| This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much
| useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat
| dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited
| by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output
| cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat.
| Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature
| wouldn't be any better or worse.
| zbentley wrote:
| > Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero
| goal by 2050
|
| How unbelievably crass. "Let's build something out of immense
| quantities of environmentally-destructive-to-extract materials
| and shoot it into space on top of gargantuan amounts of heat
| and greenhouse gas emissions; since it won't use much earth-
| sourced energy once it's up there, that nets out to a win!"
|
| Insane.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Blue Origin at least runs its rockets on hydrogen whose
| exhaust is only water.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Where do they get the hydrogen without putting a load of
| CO2 into the atmosphere just to manufacture the hydrogen to
| begin with?
|
| One thing to think about is debt which is not in terms of
| money.
|
| People are becoming more familiar with "technical debt"
| since otherwise it comes due by surprise.
|
| With hamsterwheels in space you've got energy debt.
|
| Separate from all other forms of debt that are involved.
|
| Like financial debt, which is only a problem if you _can 't
| really afford_ to do the project so you have to beg,
| borrow, and/or steal to get it going.
|
| On that point I think I'd be a little skeptical if the
| richest known person can't actually afford this easily.
| Especially if he really wants it with all his heart, and
| has put in any worthwhile effort so far.
|
| Anyway, solar cells are kind of weak when you think about
| it, they don't produce the high output of a suitable
| chemical reaction, like the kind that launches the rockets
| themselves. Which releases so much energy so fast that it's
| always going to take a serious amount of time for the
| "little" solar cells to have finally produced an equal
| amount of energy before a net positive can begin to accrue.
|
| Keeping the assets safely on the home planet simply
| provides a jump-start that can not be matched.
|
| All other things being unequal or not.
| zbentley wrote:
| And heat and pressure. Negligible amounts in terms of the
| biosphere, but not in terms of flora and fauna in proximity
| to launch sites.
| quirkot wrote:
| What? A pump and dump scheme? I am shocked I tell you, shocked
| dumbfounder wrote:
| You can debate this until you are blue in the face. If the costs
| are less they will do it. If they aren't they won't do it. That's
| the only sense that needs to be made.
| TheDong wrote:
| Ah, yes, the "efficient market hypothesis", it's well known
| that no company has ever gone bankrupt because every company
| only does things that are optimally efficient and profitable.
|
| No company has ever made an investment in something that ended
| up being more expensive than calculated, or so expensive it
| bankrupted them.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| You are assuming they will commit to the solution and ride it
| to their grave trying to make it work. They will experiment
| and figure out a way to make it cheaper, or they will give
| up. They have plenty of money to experiment with this.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| This makes the same amount of sense as colonising Mars.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I'm surprised everyone is worried about heat dissipation.
|
| Datacenters in space is ambiguous enough to mean on lunar soil
| which provides plenty of heat dissipation using geothermal heat
| pumps.
|
| Similarly mass to orbit is also less problematic if silicon
| factories (including the refineries) are built on lunar soil as
| well.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They have filed actual plans with the FCC for their satellite
| constellation. They are not talking about lunar data centers.
| Jabrov wrote:
| What jurisdiction does a data center in space fall under, anyway?
| The one of the nation that launched it?
| andsoitis wrote:
| Data centers on earth alone don't make sense if we want to expand
| further into the galaxy.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Two reasons why it makes sense (really really good reasons):
|
| 1) Water scarcity and energy scarcity here on earth
|
| 2) It will drive down launch costs and promotes investment in
| orbital facilities and launch capabilities.
|
| those two reasons alone are enough.
| adastra22 wrote:
| What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers
| don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back
| out to whatever it would have done anyway.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| They need fresh water which is scarce unlike salt water, once
| they use it, it can't be used for anything else. They're
| competing with water supplies of municipalities these days.
| Not a big deal if you're near the great lakes or the
| missisipi, but a big deal in california, arizona, utah,etc..
| and that's just the US. There are places that are becoming
| unlivable because of water supply issues, and datacenters are
| needing to be built near them.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > once they use it, it can't be used for anything else
|
| This is not true!
| colordrops wrote:
| What if they diverted a decent sized asteroid into earth orbit
| and put the data center onto that? Could it be put into a sun-
| synchronous orbit, cover one side with solar cells, and use the
| backside of the asteroid itself for cooling?
| numpad0 wrote:
| no, no, no, the key enabler to space datacenter is complete out-
| of-world computer 3D printers. You print entire 130nm, hell, even
| 130 _micrometer_ GPUs and DDR2 VRAMs to go with, entirely on the
| Moon solely from Moon dusts, and shoot the complete satellites
| out into Earth LEO using maglev sleds. PUEs, opex, nothing matter
| because the Moon factory is self contained and don 't interact
| with Earthian economy at all. The ssh key into the factory will
| be the source to free money to whoever holding it.
|
| Is that possible in our lifetime? I'd be optimistic about that.
| Can SpaceX pull that off? Space what? ...
| stevep98 wrote:
| Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
|
| gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
|
| It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg
| per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
|
| So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX
| H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the
| radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the
| propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft
| stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about
| 20% of the mass budget.
|
| The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the
| temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat
| exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized
| for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special
| purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made
| much lighter than the current ones.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| Of course it makes sense.
|
| The regulatory framework is getting more and more difficult for
| data centers.
|
| The options are move to countries with less of an uphill
| regulatory burden (UAE?), but this comes with other issues.
|
| Space it is.
| utopcell wrote:
| I thought chips need to be radiation-hardened to work in space.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| The article kind of ended all of a sudden without much of a
| conclusion... but as most people by now have realised once they
| heard of the merging of Musk and Musk, it sounds more likely just
| a way of shifting money to pay himself rather than to actually
| build anything he says.
|
| I'd even bet that when they do IPO, there will be ZERO mention of
| "space data centres" in the prospectus!
| foxglacier wrote:
| It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels
| falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for
| a decade because it's dominated by other costs.
|
| Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data
| centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
|
| So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the
| feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the
| author's unsubstantiated opinion.
| seydor wrote:
| That's the point. Nonsensical ideas (like humans on mars) drive
| valuations higher. There is not even a point to argue about
| practical matters.
| Juliate wrote:
| If someone had the tech to cool stuff in space, that is required
| for this to happen, they'd have tons of easier and more lucrative
| opportunities right now on Earth to become the new richest
| person.
|
| Where is the tech?
| yawniek wrote:
| I think what many people miss is that energy became far less
| location dependent if you put compute next to its generation. The
| latency for token generation is not so important. So the ratios
| between energy consumed, bandwidth and latency would in theory
| favour building dark token factories in remote but optimal
| locations. But i guess construction and logistics are an issue.
| exe34 wrote:
| "Let him cook" makes so much sense here.
| gostsamo wrote:
| AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be
| distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting
| for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to
| cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your
| vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you
| throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax
| purposes).
|
| This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is
| Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.
|
| It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be
| asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them
| shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
| estomagordo wrote:
| I agree with the author and the bit about xAI and investors makes
| sense. But why does a company like Google invest in this
| ridiculous idea?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Let's do some napkin math on it
|
| Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of
| launching 1kg to space is ~$2000, so we're at $13.3(3)/Watt, that
| just power, let's assume that cooling will cost us same per kg,
| the same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
|
| One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to
| send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to
| send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of
| servers. Plus some extra for piping. We're already at $6.3 mil a
| pop for just hauling it up to orbit, with no cost of solar cells
| included
|
| I'd imagine comparable hardware for just some solar + batteries
| on ground is around $200k. I dunno where the repeated 5x cost
| number comes from. I suspect whoever pushed it was just lying
| abalone wrote:
| There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch
| externalities which are actually _greater_ than the launch costs
| themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations.
|
| However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the
| cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall
| scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only
| factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas with good
| sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for
| cleaning.
|
| When we really consider the challenges of deploying orders of
| magnitude more terrestrial solar, it really requires a more
| detailed and specific critique of the orbital vision. Positive
| includes near continuous solar exposure (in certain orbits) and
| no water requirements.
|
| Much has been said of cooling but remember, there is _a lot of
| literal space_ between the satellites for radiative cooling fins.
| It is envisioned they would network via optical links, and each
| mini satellite would be roughly on the order of a desktop GPU
| (not a whole data center rack). The vision is predicated on
| leveraging a ton of space for lots of mini satellites on the
| order of a Dell desktop tower. The terrestrial areas that are
| really cold are also not that great for solar exposure.
|
| Personally I don't know how it will play out but the core concern
| I have about making these kinds of absolutist predictions is they
| make weak assumptions about the sustainable scalability of
| terrestrial power. And that is definitely the case here in that
| it only looks at the manufacturing cost of solar.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun
| exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for
| cleaning.
|
| Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for
| ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol
| corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you
| need.
|
| More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
| rswail wrote:
| Utility scale PV farms should be seen as literally
| _harvesting_ solar power, not _generating_ it, while still
| allowing other agriculture like sheep grazing to occur using
| the same fields.
|
| You _plant_ a PV panel and add its irrigation (power
| interconnect) and remote monitoring, then you harvest power
| for the next 25+ years.
|
| Ethanol production excess is a specific US problem because of
| the misalignment of incentives and lobbying.
| abalone wrote:
| I'm all for it -- converting just a third of that land to
| solar would be enough to power the grid in terms of raw
| output -- but there is still a huge, unsolved problem of
| energy storage that scale. Without that you're only powering
| your data center for five hours a day.
| jtrn wrote:
| This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical
| thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost
| effective relative to normal data centers.
|
| I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the
| author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance,
| just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in
| space even at an cost.
|
| Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is
| immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods,
| fires, or grid collapses. Servers in orbit are physically
| isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots,
| local warfare, or physical break-ins.
|
| Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by
| removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up
| land for housing or nature. Space data centers do not deplete
| Earth's freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers
| which consume billions of gallons annually.
|
| Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours
| a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.
|
| Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders,
| protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction
| of unstable governments. Data transmission can be faster in space
| because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does
| through fiber optic cables.
|
| Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and
| future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw
| data back to Earth
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| They may well avoid terrestrial threats by having them in
| space, but then they become subject to different threats such
| as solar storms, high energy cosmic rays, space debris
| collisions etc.
|
| I think the main reason to host them in space is to escape
| Earth jurisdictions, but even that is dubious as there will be
| people involved that reside on the Earth.
| pointlessone wrote:
| While it's true that there are no floods or earthquakes in
| space it's not exactly a safe place to be. Radiation and cosmic
| rays become a much greater threat. Shielding provided by the
| atmosphere would have to be replaced.
|
| You also underestimate the cooling problem. The fact that space
| is cold doesn't mean it's easy to cool things off in space. On
| earth the main cooling strategy is to transfer heat through
| direct contact and move the hot stuff away. Be it air or water,
| as you mentioned. In space your only option is to radiate heat
| away. And that's while half of you is under intense sunlight.
|
| I think you also undersell the thread of warfare in space.
| Sure, a guy with Molotov can't get you space data center but
| we've had satellite shot down. So maybe not every war is a
| threat but, say China or Russia (or other space-faring nation)
| could take care of a satellite if absolutely needed.
|
| National seizures are also still a threat. If only being
| outside national borders was such a great defense we'd see some
| data centers in the sea by now.
|
| So being in space is immune to some of the known problems but
| also comes with a whole lot of novel issues, not solved at
| scale yet. And so far I haven't seen any sufficiently detailed
| proposed solutions to even consider the trade of known problems
| with readily available solutions for new issues with lots of
| unknowns.
| jtrn wrote:
| I am not saying it's viable or not. I'm saying that the
| statement the author put forward for why it's Absolutely not
| viable, is not valid.
|
| That's why I said I actually don't think it's realistic in my
| post. He might be right, but some of his reasons are wrong.
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| Essentially all of your concerns concerns can be mitigated by
| building somewhere else.
|
| Worried about natural disasters? Build some place less prone to
| natural disasters.
|
| Worried about the strain on local communities? Build some place
| more remote.
|
| Worried about energy availability? Build near a nuclear power
| plant or hydroelectric power station.
|
| Worried about hostile governments? Don't build data centers
| within the territories of hostile governments. (If you consider
| every country a hostile government, that is a you-problem.)
|
| For the cost of building a data center in space, you could
| instead build a second (or third, or fourth, ...) data center
| somewhere else.
| jtrn wrote:
| Omg. I dident say my reasons where good. I said that the
| claim that price vs ground based data center alone made space
| based compute a no God, was a bad argument. I obviously suck
| at framing my point
| jacquesm wrote:
| One of the bigger threats to life on earth right now is called
| Elon Musk.
| jtrn wrote:
| That's the stupidest thing I heard so far to day.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders,
| protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal
| jurisdiction of unstable governments.
|
| You are aware physical persons exist on Earth and can be taken
| into custody? Additionally, space weapons exist, several
| governments could destroy any orbital satellite.
|
| This whole pipe dream is nonsense.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Every artificial satellite falls around the Earth in a little
| bubble of terrestrial national law.
|
| On the ground, legal notions of private property provide some
| legal protections against national government interference. But
| there is no private real property in space. 100% of the volume
| of space is subject to the direct jurisdiction of terrestrial
| national governments. Every artificial satellite persists only
| because they are permitted to do so by their national
| government.
|
| Because of the speed and energy involved, in the U.S. all
| private space activity is a matter of national security. This
| means that there are far _fewer_ legal protections, not more.
| The U.S. president could directly order SpaceX to do almost
| anything, and they would have to comply. Musk spends tremendous
| energy and money maintaining alignment with the governments he
| needs to satisfy to stay in business.
| egorfine wrote:
| Truth doesn't matter.
|
| What matters is that investors and shareholders _love_ to hear
| about future space data centers.
|
| Obligatory /s.
| cess11 wrote:
| "Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost
| effective"
|
| The author forgot to add that this is only true from the
| perspective of their own bias.
|
| To someone else it might make a lot of sense, e.g. someone who
| expects militant resistance to the "data centers" from the
| general public or some other actor that is highly unlikely to
| achieve space capabilities.
| pftburger wrote:
| Reasonably sure this has less to do with putting data centres in
| space and more to do with getting them less auditable (see the
| other news about X getting raided about Grok)
| trashb wrote:
| As others point out this is a bad idea.
|
| Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption,
| cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the
| comments much is maintenance costs.
|
| Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in
| daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers
| require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5
| guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center.
| That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the
| current space fairing infrastructure).
| laverya wrote:
| Do those people actually _repair_ hardware, or do they swap bad
| hardware for good chips?
|
| Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is
| broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now
| overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?
| trashb wrote:
| From what I understand it is in part swapping it, in part
| upgrading it. Some of it is preventative some of it is
| reactive. They could overbuild the hardware and slowly
| disable capacity I think that will not really work. Data
| centers are static in infrastructure but not in the systems
| running within them. Actually they are constantly changing to
| meet the needs.
|
| Overbuilding also comes with a cost when talking about space,
| it is still very costly to get stuff up there and there is
| limited bandwidth downstream, you want to balance those two.
| So if you're overbuilding it costs a lot to get up there, if
| you disable what's up there you don't fully utilize the
| bandwidth.
|
| For example AI data centers now use very different hardware
| compared to 5 or 10 years ago that upgrade path is just a lot
| harder when your data center is in space.
| lisp2240 wrote:
| The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and
| it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make
| sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like
| reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have
| to make sense. The less sense the better.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's not a warrant, it is a summon for interview. That's
| actually very different: the way you phrased it suggests that
| there is a warrant for his arrest (mandat d'arret)...
| sam_goody wrote:
| I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you
| think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)
|
| BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we
| should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd
| to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that
| space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.
|
| People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a
| minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people
| are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to
| put a hard disk into orbit.
|
| I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The problem is that software people are clueless.
| nemo136 wrote:
| No, but protecting x/xAI from bankruptcy by linking it to the
| most promising company in Musk's portfolio does. You just need a
| justification.
|
| This is while they try to find a solution to earn money with it.
| alkonaut wrote:
| The worst thing about this isn't that it makes no sense. It's
| that it doesn't even _try_ to make sense.
|
| These companies wanted to merge for financial reasons and the
| invented reason is nonsensical. We shouldn't even give the
| nonsensical reason the benefit of trying to make sense of it.
| blauditore wrote:
| The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing
| a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot,
| but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is.
| Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface,
| and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot
| of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes,
| satellites move in certain orbits, not in random places, but
| space is large, and humans are bad with imagining large numbers
| and things. The illustrations with fat dots on tiny earth images
| are misleading too IMO.
|
| Apart of that, I do agree that space data centers are probably
| just a marketing stunt at this point, although some things could
| obviously be done to increase their chances, like more
| lightweight designs on GPUs, something that was never a big topic
| before.
| padjo wrote:
| The other way people get confused about Kessler syndrome is
| that they imagine it's like the movie Gravity where it happens
| suddenly rather than a slow process that plays out over
| years/decades.
| pointlessone wrote:
| Whatever it is it's not driven by sense or even feasibility of
| data centers in space.
|
| To me it looks like the next Musk's grift. Remember Mars? Have
| you heard about it recently? He threw it to the Internet and
| everyone got excited for a minute. Then nerds did quick math and
| it didn't make any sense. And so everyone forgot about Mars. This
| is the same. Hype everyone up for a week or two to inflate stock
| before the merger/purchase/IPO/whatever. That is all.
| hamburgererror wrote:
| Exactly, Musk is just playing pump and dump with industrial
| projects.
| InsideTehMatrix wrote:
| AST Spacemobile is successfully deploying cell towers in space;
| to compete with Elons Starlink. Not to mention ASTS is
| collaborating with American Tower, Google, ATT, Verizon, Nokia,
| and other big dogs for this venture. Now a DC is magnitudes
| different then a cell tower/satellite but hey .. if the RoI is
| there, it can be done
| OsamaJaber wrote:
| Keep talking like that and people will colonize space
| lambdaone wrote:
| The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete
| information on how these things are to be cooled, other than
| quotes like "space cooling is free".
|
| If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by
| the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily
| large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have
| to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something
| which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to
| actually exist yet as a practical technology.
|
| The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to
| use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would
| consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of
| which would have to be delivered to space first.
|
| Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually
| anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of
| power in space, using either these or any other technology?
| elvircrn wrote:
| Surprised nobody here linked https://andrewmccalip.com/space-
| datacenters.
| Snoozus wrote:
| This only makes sense if it somehow helps to evade some kind of
| regulation. I'm not quite sure which though.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I'm sorry I really don't understand this. I have a computer. I
| put it in a warehouse. You have a computer, you shoot it into
| space. What problem have you solved?
|
| Is this all an effort to utilize more efficient solar panels? Are
| solar panels really the limiting factor for data centres?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think some people like this because it pushes libertarian "no
| need for environmental or regulatory review" buttons. There's a
| kernel of a valid argument there, but it seems overstated given
| that companies seem to have little trouble getting approval for
| big datacenter buildouts here on earth.
|
| There's also the coolness factor, I guess.
|
| But why does no one talk about launching RackSpace servers into
| space? I think the whole thing is tied to AI because of the
| hype, not because sending servers into space has any kind of
| material advantages.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Not to mention the fact that you trade one source of
| pollution for another. You think giant rockets to lift tons
| of equipment into space is good for the environment?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| It's less about putting compute in space as _occupying_ that
| space before anyone else does. For any reason: spying, space
| warfare, network and communication.
|
| First mover advantage, and all.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Bingo. I elaborated on this idea more in my comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884246
|
| People are acting like a space data centre would be running a
| traditional workload. No, it's probably running a military one,
| some sort of AI powered modern version of Dead Hand
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand). Autonomous warfare
| could get real dark, real fast.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Thinking of power infra. Even solar. Doesn't that last 20 or 30
| years at least? With some maintenance, but before full overhaul.
| So in space you would probably decommission it at same time
| right? Wouldn't that be additional cost?
| NathanKP wrote:
| My dark theory is that the goal is to run an AI overlord in space
| such that it is difficult to counter it from Earth.
|
| If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then
| there is some reason why they want this workload running at great
| physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's
| probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll
| happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it
| rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment
| with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to
| protect the workload from us.
|
| What is a workload that is something that people would probably
| want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to
| offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing
| that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something
| that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial
| drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.
|
| It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and
| once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that
| effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state
| level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this
| thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching
| the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like
| a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a
| missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to
| attack the platform.
|
| It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen,
| there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI
| platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions,
| and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive
| solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us
| all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought
| experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just
| enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it
| firsthand.
| running101 wrote:
| This is when you know we reached peak AI. Data centers in space
| talk.
| fsloth wrote:
| Of course it makes sense. It's a cool story to pump up the
| valuation in the AI datacenter boom. This meme will keep on
| delivering until (if) the AI bubble bursts.
| mxfh wrote:
| The whole premise misses the point, that earth is _somehow_ in
| the very same space too.
|
| Adding a global UHVDC grid to even out dips in local PV
| performance due to cloud cover and the diurnal cycle on
| _spaceship earth_ seems to be magnitudes cheaper and scaleable
| than this loony pitch.
|
| The only thing making this _hard_ is requiring supranational
| collaboration.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Space - no. Moon - yes
|
| Space is cold but has little mass. Either heat can radiated or
| transfered. To transfer heat, mass which easily absorbs heat is
| required. The moon might be suitable for that.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| Elon announced this so he could troll the comments on HN and get
| all of this incredibly valuable armchair expertise in solving his
| problems.
| dhab wrote:
| By combining ai with space, in addition to any other plays that
| he might be playing around legal or financial areas, he's
| positioning (marketing) spaceX for the bandwagon that everyone
| else might jump into to deploy a space datacentre. He's providing
| the medium (spacex rockets) to realise this potentially
| unfeasible idea. He makes additional money that way - to then
| create a new type of money-making fuel after that. HN audience
| might be calculative - but the rest of the population is far less
| so.
|
| This might also be a new vehicle to mask any space warfare
| technology deployments.
| rando77 wrote:
| You might want some compute in space that you know is very hard
| to physically interfere with.
|
| But general purpose compute no
| andix wrote:
| It's a scam for investors.
|
| The self-driving car worked too well. Tesla is promising that for
| over a decade now, and still can't deliver. They came much closer
| to the goal, but are still very far away from it. Shareholders
| don't seem to care.
| danieljanes wrote:
| ViT (Vision Transformer) fine-tuned on a Starcloud satellite in
| space (using the Flower framework) -- to the best of our
| knowledge, this is a world first:
| https://flower.ai/blog/2026-02-02-flower-labs-and-starcloud-...
| chias wrote:
| Data centers in space make perfect sense, in exactly the same way
| as a jetpack made perfect sense. It is an excellent vehicle to
| ride out some juicy government contracts for as long as you can
| keep the grift going.
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-ma...
| Nevermark wrote:
| Heat energy shedding is often talked about as an Achilles Heal of
| orbital computation.
|
| But heat radiation rates are proportional to temperature to the
| 4th power!!!!
|
| That is a magical law. The quality of heat pumps used to
| concentrate heat, will drive the economics and structure of heat
| dissipation.
|
| Seldom do we get constraints that favorable to work with.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Feels like this is about as unserious as flamethrowers, the
| Boring Company, and Hyperloop.
|
| We're living in the Age of Distraction... amusing ourselves to
| death (as usual).
| wendgeabos wrote:
| Consider: If you genuinely believe that the only important goal
| is to make life multiplanetary, (and note I'm not defending this
| position here, just asserting it as an explanation of behavior)
|
| then anything that drives money towards your work on that goal is
| worth pursuing particularly if you think time is short.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This being a forum full of engineers, it is not surprising that
| everyone concentrates on the technical challenges thereof. But
| that may be a distraction.
|
| I suspect that Musk wants to build space data centers in order to
| mitigate _political and societal problems_ , which may yet prove
| more intractable than cooling in space.
|
| The current expansion of terrestrial data centers has already
| caused a huge backlash. Their adversaries may well try to
| regulate them out of existence, at least locally. If an important
| jurisdiction like California or Germany subjects building of new
| data centers to regulations similar to building, say, a new
| nuclear power station, they will achieve a de-facto stop on
| further development there even without banning them outright.
|
| Space, while not entirely lawless, is much harder to regulate
| this way. Local authorities have no power over it, nor do
| governments of nations without space capabilities. Big
| authorities of big nations (the FAA etc.) do, but they will
| likely be more friendly to already established launch businesses
| like SpaceX, not least because of the geopolitical dimensions of
| having a vibrant space sector.
|
| From Musk's POV, this may be worth the additional cost and
| technical troubles.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I don't know, it probably would have been useful if Cyberdyne
| Systems had developed its AI in space?
| ineedasername wrote:
| It makes sense if you want low-latency compute accessible to
| other things _in space_ making use of it: Pharmaceutical
| research, manufacturing. These are large, non speculative areas
| of likely growth in the space industry. Manufacturing especially
| will require lots of inference compute with the AI systems
| currently under development for industrial robotics.
|
| If you're looking at this and saying "Lol, no, we don't need data
| centers in space just to power more GPT sycophancy and some
| health insurance company's RAG workflows." Then you're right, so
| just move on from that usage and consider the things we'd like to
| do in space, and especially the things we're already doing but
| want to do more of.
|
| I know, my gut was telling me this is ridiculous, premature at
| best even through the lens of expanding space industry. But then
| with respect to the need for data centers-- had I even thought
| about it a year ago, my gut would have laughed if someone had
| said "Buy Wester Digital, HDD's are a growth stock".
| varispeed wrote:
| It makes sense if you want to avoid tax. You can put artificial
| costs and deduct them. Nobody is going to go to space and check.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| When an invention has not been made before it's usually because
| people are lacking an insight that the inventors have.
|
| You can't read a 300 word article in 1930 and know that a formula
| 1 engine could not be built.
| furyg3 wrote:
| This whole thing is Musk just trying to keep the hype train
| going. Musk has learned one neat trick from all of his (quite
| admirable) success with Tesla and SpaceX: hype is more profitable
| than actually doing stuff that generates value now.
|
| Tesla's valuation has been nuts for a while. The music was going
| to stop playing at some point, so something something robotaxis,
| something something androids, something something AI. Keep the
| investors duped while you can move money around and leverage it
| to stay relevant.
|
| Cars are out, social media as well (especially X), but Space is
| still in, and even more so AI. So let's move the cost center with
| world domination potential (AI) over to the one company that's
| making money and has a still has a cash-out potential via an IPO.
|
| I'm just so tired of it all. I actually think 'boutique'
| businesses (companies that generate real value to real users and
| are profitable now) are the only thing that can save our economy
| medium-term, but investors and the government are having none of
| it. And the result is that these bait-and-switch scams will
| continue.
| jongjong wrote:
| Clearly the desire to have data centers in space is so that AI
| can control humans remotely without having to worry about
| backlash and potential dismantling.
|
| Besides this, it's concerning how much stuff we're sending to
| space. One day we'll have to start worrying about satellite parts
| falling on us.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Can't wait for competitors destroying the other guys installation
| because just like international waters, there is no police or
| border there.
| cbeach wrote:
| I'm glad I read HN.
|
| My take-away is - SpaceX is still an extremely good stock to
| hold. However, the stupid money will buy the stock at IPO on the
| promise of space datacentres.
|
| When SpaceX inevitably u-turns on this plan and the stock
| plummets temporarily, THAT will be a good time to buy in.
| indycliff wrote:
| It sounds cool and gets investors.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| One major point I haven't seen mentioned is maintenance.
|
| Nvidia GPUs, particularly H100s, have a failure rate orders of
| magnitudes higher than traditional CPU-only hardware. I myself
| have accidentally melted an H100 during a large-scale training
| run.
|
| While it's trivial to replace a broken GPU in the ground, it
| seems to be infeasible in space during the life of the satellite.
| Getting a human or robot "fixer" spacecraft to it would likely
| cost more than the $30K GPU itself.
| t312227 wrote:
| hello,
|
| as always: imho. (!)
|
| we already had this topic before, an example for another good
| article regarding _physical_ arguments against this idea would
| be:
|
| "Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea" ~
| late 2025
|
| * https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
|
| TL;DR: It's not going to work.
|
| idk ... maybe elon has something else in mind with this merger!?
|
| cheers,
|
| a..z
| kgwxd wrote:
| This sound like a Musk "idea". _click_. Of course.
| qoez wrote:
| > Training and serving frontier AI at scale takes hundreds of
| thousands of GPUs. xAI's Colossus cluster reportedly has 200,000
| GPUs. OpenAI has plans for millions of them. Competing in this
| market would require launching hundreds of thousands, if not
| millions, of satellites into space
|
| No? You'd only need one with lots of gpus on the ship at the same
| time
| tgtweak wrote:
| The crux of it is that radiative cooling in space is dependent on
| exposed surface, not total surface area like a radiator or
| heatsink on earth - this means if you just put an existing finned
| heatsink in space it would radiate most of it's heat back to
| itself - the only net cooling you'd have is the amount that can
| radiate outwards without hitting itself.
|
| For a benchmark - the IIS uses about 4500sqft (420 sqm) of
| radiators just to keep it's onboard equipment (~70KW) cooled.
| That's ~150-200 W/sqm.
|
| That means, per GPU, you'd need about 2.5-3.0 sqm of passive
| radiators.
|
| For a 1MW satellite (~8 datacenter racks of GB200/NVL72) you'd
| need basically half a football field of bleeding-edge solar
| panels (that also need to radiate their heat on the reverse side)
| and a similar sized cooling array of heat radiators for the
| electronics.
|
| This is on the scale of 40-50 tons - about 10% of the IIS. This
| should fit on falcon heavy or starship - assuming the solar array
| and radiators can fold up to fit inside. You could, purely based
| on weight, launch 2 of these per starship launch.
|
| If you consider the Opex savings (electricity, rent, facilities
| maintenance) and putting 2 of these on a single starship launch,
| I still think the ROI would be too long. You're saving about ~$1M
| per year in Opex but it's costing you $25M to launch it into
| space and likely an extra ~$50M in satellite equipment (based on
| starlink satellite costs) on top of the compute. Will those GPUs
| still be useful in 10 years? Probably not.
|
| I don't think the math is there that justifies the free
| electricity - even at gigawatt scale (thousands of satellites
| mass-produced) and at a dramatically lower cost per satellite and
| per launch. Getting costs down on this would involve tightly
| integrating the compute and the satellite hardware which would
| make upgrading the compute independently from the cooling/power
| infrastructure in the future a significant challenge.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Makes me wonder:
|
| Back in the early 1990s I read some children's futurist book
| that suggested that we might send solar panels to space that
| would then beam energy via microwaves to the surface. The book
| was more fantasy than science, so I took it with a huge grain
| of salt and appreciated it for its entertainment value.
|
| But do you think schemes that try to direct solar energy to the
| surface are more practical then running datacenters in space?
| tgtweak wrote:
| I don't think there is calculus that makes the cost of
| getting it to space worth putting it there - Elon of all
| people knows this - if you scale up the ground-based solar
| and add battery storage, the costs are still far lower than
| trying to put that in space to gain more hours of usable sun
| and higher intensity sun... it's just not cost effective
| until panels are paper thin, weigh nothing and the cost of
| launches and thus per-ton to orbit gets an order of magnitude
| cheaper.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Space based power arrays with microwave transmission to
| massive ground fields has been discussed for nearly sixty
| years. It doesn't make economic sense, at all.
|
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-
| so...
|
| I would love it to be a thing, but it is not a thing.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The lifetime of a GPU in practice is around 3 years. There is
| no way this plan is going to work. Musk knows that, he's just
| counting on stupid people to buy into the SpaceX IPO on hype.
| est wrote:
| Data centers in space have one advantage: FBIs can't physically
| raid them.
| TGower wrote:
| I wonder if the author was making similar arguments against solar
| power 20 years ago. The case for both isn't one of immediate
| ecenomic advantage, though that may come with sufficient
| development like solar has had. If you take it as a given that
| compute demand continues scaling, at some point we will need to
| shift power generation off Earth, and it's a lot easier to move
| computed data streams instead of terrawatts of power.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Until someone actually launches a prototype, this is not
| happening. The economy of just doing everything on the ground is
| underestimated. And the technology simply is still not ready. LEO
| sats randomly falling down is a daily occurrence. I would love to
| see the Excel spreadsheet these investors are drooling over. It
| probably has less than 6 tabs.
| originalvichy wrote:
| This is the same guy that had his followers preach about how
| cars in tunnels for public transit is better than... trains in
| tunnels... Do not expect logical arguments when dealing with
| this guy and his followers.
| wkoszek wrote:
| Starship payload: 100,000 kg (100 tons). Looks like they talked
| about 150 tons and even 250 tons. My understanding is that they
| can be adding more engines to get more thrust.
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/spacex-reusable-rocket...
| -- looks like target price for Starship launch would be $3--$5m
| according to the author.
|
| Wouldn't the /kg price to SpaceX be:
|
| 3000000/100000 = $30/kg -- 5000000/100000 = $50/kg?
|
| If they recover everything and produce fuel at scale, wouldn't it
| drop the cost even more.
|
| What many people quote here are commercial rates, I think. SpaceX
| won't pay those prices.
|
| Can someone check my math
| zouhair wrote:
| Data centers on earth don't make sense either.
| alcomatt wrote:
| heat dissipation is one thing - another is the recycling -
| anything he shoots into the orbit will essentially be disposable,
| single use DCs. Once they fail, it will be just a dangerous junk
| waiting to be deorbited. And all the precious materials which
| normally get recycled will be lost....
| krick wrote:
| Honestly, it is funny that people even seriously discuss this. I
| mean, _now_. It is such a blatant bullshit that you 'd expect
| this time people would say "okay, now Musk went too far, nobody
| would buy into this". Yeah, I wish.
| formvoltron wrote:
| With all that great tech to land and reuse rockets, they still
| need to be propelled into space using... kerosene. That's right.
| 1 million satellites launched into orbit using kerosene.
|
| Does not feel like a vibe.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Cool! If there are people working on something, despite others
| saying "it makes no sense" I assume it's a hard and interesting
| enough problem.
| ck2 wrote:
| I mean everything he does is so honest, rational and well thought
| out in detail, right?
|
| How's that full-self driving promised for decades working out?
|
| How's the destruction of USAID working out (oh you wouldn't know
| a million dead now)
|
| We already have a data-center in space, sort-of, here's how many
| radiation panels it has to deploy for just the heat produced from
| the small number of low-power computers
|
| * https://i.sstatic.net/cpIBo.jpg
|
| (ISS, all those white panels are thermal heat radiators)
| gadders wrote:
| This blog post has some sliders you can tweak to see if you can
| make the numbers make sense: https://andrewmccalip.com/space-
| datacenters
|
| "So here's what I did. I built a simple model that reduces the
| debate to one parameter: cost per watt of usable power for
| compute. The infographic below lets you change the assumptions
| directly. If you disagree with the inputs, great. Move the
| sliders. But at least we'll be arguing over numbers that map to
| reality.
|
| The model is deliberately boring. No secret sauce. Just publicly
| available numbers and first-principles physics: solar flux, cell
| efficiency, radiator performance, launch cost, hardware mass, and
| a terrestrial benchmark that represents the real alternative: a
| tilt-wall datacenter sitting on top of cheap power. "
|
| "Here's the headline result: it's not obviously stupid, and it's
| not a sure thing. It's actually more reasonable than my intuition
| thought! If you run the numbers honestly, the physics doesn't
| immediately kill it, but the economics are savage. It only gets
| within striking distance under aggressive assumptions, and the
| list of organizations positioned to even try that is basically
| one."
| garettmd wrote:
| prompt: what's the term for financial moves where you keep
| finding new investors to pay off the previous ones
|
| GPT-4o mini: The term for financial moves where new investors are
| continually recruited to pay off previous ones is often referred
| to as a "Ponzi scheme." Another similar term is "pyramid scheme,"
| where returns are paid to earlier investors from the
| contributions of newer investors, but with a structure that
| typically requires participants to recruit others to earn
| returns. Both schemes are unsustainable and illegal.
| maxdo wrote:
| I have my personal reasons to hate Elon. But the article is full
| of fluff and lacks imagination, typical of the "the world is
| static and will never change" mindset.
|
| What they are trying to do is an a very ambitious engineering
| challenge in several highly integrated domains, from spaceships
| to robotics, gpu, server design , ai. Typical stakes are high
| margins are high.
|
| Project also pushes boundaries of what human can do the same way
| starlink did. 20 years ago starlink scale was also an
| "impossible" thing. Is it possible now to push one gpu and serve
| it from space? Yes, can you do it at scale? Big question.
|
| Obstacles :
|
| Price per kg to orbit. They aim to go from $150 to $10 per kg.
| Can they deliver? Big question, but having something that demands
| so many starship, like GPU heavy tasks, will help them achieve
| this goal. Benefits? No rent, no cooling issues, cheap sun-
| powered electricity 24 hours a day, unlike anywhere else on
| Earth.
|
| Jurisdiction. Servers can't be shut down or taken away by police,
| etc.
|
| Cooling. Yes, it's a vacuum, but with $10 per kg, you can deliver
| pipes and coolant, and since you don't have space constraints,
| you can build these pipes with a robot, making that datacenter
| extremely cheap.
|
| 3. Labor. If a robot can do primitive tasks combined with design
| that is fully remote, you labor costs goes almost to 0.
|
| the output: with $10 per pg, delivering solar panels, coolant +
| robot for some urgent fixes. Robots even with current technology
| can swap a harddrive for example, especially if hardware is built
| to be mantained by robots not human. You don't need large
| construction, you invest into design, that once assembled , cost
| you maybe comparable amount of hardware to deliver. After that it
| runs for free!
|
| The economy if this obviously beating anything exised on earth.
| infinitewars wrote:
| Elon is that you?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Jurisdiction. Servers can't be shut down or taken away by
| police, etc.
|
| Total pipe dream. They can't take away your servers, but they
| can imprison you until you provide access. And SpaceX would
| still fall under the laws of whichever country it's based in.
| If lawful access is really a problem, laws will be written to
| make it SpaceX's problem. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
| maxdo wrote:
| yes... and no. Right now you need a server lets say in
| france. You are fully in their jurisdiction, for latency etc.
|
| What if your server fly over france , but not in France,
| hence: you don't need to build servers in france, unlike
| before, you don't need to deal with local government on so
| many issues, water, electricity etc to be local in france.
|
| And , taxes : crypto payments + compute , and same
| transaction in france doesn't have to be taxed anymore :)
|
| Yes, you have to pay taxes to US government, but not to
| france.
| foobiekr wrote:
| And if France decides to jam you until you play nice?
| maxdo wrote:
| it's extreemly hard to jam starlink, ask russians at war.
| also that gpu run results can be connected somewhere in
| england, and requested using ipv6 e.g. you need to start
| moderating internet heavily etc.
| septune wrote:
| You're missing one important point: radiated power scales with
| the fourth power of temperature. Could it be that xAI has a chip
| capable of operating at very high temperatures?
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| Ground-based data centers will always be cheaper. There is no
| advantage in space that makes it worth spending more.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's fun to debate this and all, but the reality is that
| datacenters in space are going to happen, and soon - maybe even
| this year. If we've come this far, then there's already a viable
| plan that we just don't know about yet.
| pranavm27 wrote:
| I had this idea in the beginning of last year and since I wanted
| to somehow get into space infra started doing some calculations -
| the area of arrays required kinda made me scrap the whole thing.
| But kinda curious since this is back as a mainstream topic.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "So if this is clearly nonsense, why are serious companies and
| investors piling into it?"
|
| What does "serious" mean
| hermitShell wrote:
| After looking for a top level comment pointing to _why_ instead
| of _how_ , I logged in just for this as I could not find one.
| Extremely bullish on this move, let me try to explain.
|
| As most engineers realize right away, it is not going to be
| profitable to operate a regular datacenter in space, per the
| article (and I agree), so something else is going on here. Almost
| all the discussion is about feasibility, which is not by itself
| going to explain the situation.
|
| It is clearly somewhat feasible to build Starlink level
| infrastructure and operate it profitably. I would posit that the
| narrative is a funding vehicle for a more conservative,
| incremental objective.
|
| The very fact that the infrastructure is in space places the
| datacenter on the legal and geopolitical high ground. It's hard
| to raid servers if they are in orbit. It's hard to disable,
| audit, or arm-wrestle into submission. It doesn't have to have
| the scale we've come to expect in 2026 to be useful. And it's for
| inference, not training, of course. Useful levels of inference is
| computationally cheap. There are implications with the financial
| system as well.
|
| In combination with PLTR technology, what I see is another
| intelligent and strategic move by Musk to enable and be part of
| hegemony. He is a central player not making decisions in
| isolation. They are playing a game with different rules, and
| therefore different unit economics.
| rishabhjain1198 wrote:
| > Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost
| effective relative to normal data centers.
|
| This statement is actually completely false. The bottleneck is
| not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible on
| the planet. How much we're willing to pay for increasing that is
| currently very unclear, but it's far more than the current cost
| of building a terrestrial data center.
|
| As Jensen Huang famously touted their performance per watt,
| saying "Our customers won't buy our competitor's chips even if
| they were free."
| danans wrote:
| > This statement is actually completely false. The bottleneck
| is not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible
| on the planet.
|
| How much of energy will it take to launch the same amount of
| compute, connectivity, and PV to power it into space?
| rishabhjain1198 wrote:
| Good question.
| NedCode wrote:
| But data centers in the sea...
| ZebusJesus wrote:
| We really need to stop letting Musk and others just put what ever
| they want in space we are getting close to the Kessler limit and
| that could be very very bad if it happens. They have some ideas
| but this is already and issue, China had an issue after a launch
| were debris hit the capsule breaking it forcing them to send a
| second capsule.
|
| https://climatecosmos.com/sustainability/how-close-are-we-to...
| xorcist wrote:
| It's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to _be cool_ and
| signal that demand for the stock will not go down.
| devin wrote:
| As long as we're pointing out things that don't make sense: A
| long time ago in the United States we decided to run electricity
| _everywhere_, even farmhouses in the middle of nowhere. The
| solution to broadband in the United States is somehow,
| inexplicably "Let's use satellites" rather than increase tower
| coverage or run hard lines. It is a _terrible_ solution to this
| problem based on the cost alone.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I've used Starlink and it's fantastic in rural areas. Why dig
| thousands of miles of holes for physical wires when the problem
| is already solved?
| devin wrote:
| Think. You don't even need to dig. We have myriad wireless
| internet solutions. We did not need to send satellites into
| space to fix this problem in a far more cost effective way.
| midtake wrote:
| Terrestrial wireless internet solutions are stupid. With a
| satellite you can be anywhere with line of sight to the
| southern sky and receive signal. With some shitty tower
| you're still constrained to your location just as you would
| be with wired, except that instead of a fast, low latency
| cable you have a noisy, outage prone wireless tower.
| devin wrote:
| This is not a problem that needed to be solved by
| satellites. It is a failure of US politics that rural
| areas don't have broadband. We didn't need some private
| company to put satellites into low earth orbit for
| someone to watch a youtube video from their house
| reliably. The ongoing costs and complexities of running a
| global satellite network vs running a cable is insane.
| Eggpants wrote:
| Back when I worked at AWS, I wrote a one page "press release"
| about this concept where the value add was the weight/power
| reduction of customer sats that could offload on board processing
| to the "Cloud above the Clouds". There is a bottleneck with the
| down/uplink ground stations to do the on the ground processing.
|
| The biggest problem folks had was even with equipment with 99.9%
| reliability something breaks every day due the huge raw number of
| devices involved. And most network equipment is not any where
| close to being radiation hardened.
|
| I had some fun with it with Bezo's fist bumping folks because
| SpaceX was cleaning BlueOrigin clock.
|
| I talked to one of their lawyers and didn't hear anything
| afterwards. I left AWS and a couple of years later Amazon
| announced AWS ground station. I wonder how much my paper
| contributed to green lighting that project.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Data centers in space make no sense because cooling things in
| space is insanely hard!
|
| Yeah, space is cold, but also you don't have access to large
| thermal masses with which to exchange heat, so the fact that
| space is cold does not help much.
|
| In space the only option for cooling is large radiators. If you
| had a data center in space you'd need enormous radiators -- much
| larger than the data center itself.
|
| (On Earth we can exchange heat with the environment, and the
| environment includes convection and the water cycle and
| ultimately can expel excess heat via high altitude condensation
| of water vapor where most of the heat released escapes to space.
| As well clouds can both block insolation as well as keep heat
| below trapped, but altogether between high altitude condensation
| and blocking insolation this is the mechanism by which Earth
| keeps its temperature as a random walk around the average that we
| enjoy.)
| tshadley wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It's not supposed to make sense when you're screening for
| supporters who will believe anything you say.
| UltraSane wrote:
| After the hyperloop fiasco I don't understand why anyone gives
| Musk any credibility at all
| tpurves wrote:
| Closest thing to a usecase I can think of are all military in
| nature. There's an argument that AI in space only begins to make
| any sense if the data source you are processing is also
| originating in space, and you need (for reasons) to run models on
| it in space before downlinking the results.
|
| Maybe there's a very latency sensitive need to send realtime
| targeting information to a tomahawk missile in flight? But it's
| also too bandwidth, compute or cost intensive to send a firehose
| of raw spy-satellite data to a disposable one-way attack
| munition?
|
| The data centers in space are actually for the spy satellites to
| use. That's all I got for practical applications.
| zippyman55 wrote:
| I loved when we would have an HPC server crash and we would
| analyze the issue and the vendor would respond, "probably a
| neutrino strike". I can't imagine this being more complex, given
| all the constraints of being in an orbit. The hardware
| depreciation, and the need to eliminate charge buildup and excess
| heat. Placing servers in the Arctic seems a better solution, at
| least the cooling issue is resolved.
| amelius wrote:
| How do you protect a datacenter in space from evil nation states
| that have an appetite for your GPU cards?
| loourr wrote:
| I think the thing I often see missed in these discussions is the
| cost and time burden imposed by regulation. It's nearly
| impossible to build power plants in the US today. Launching
| satellites while hard, solves this problem.
|
| Even if it's more expensive, Spacex will be able to deploy
| hardware when no one else can because all the gas turbines and
| existing power plants have been exhausted and the lead time to
| build new ones is 5+ years out because of the bureaucratic
| overhead.
| mchusma wrote:
| The bull case IMO is that you can just produce very standardized
| ai satellites, load them into Starship, blast them off and have
| them work. And that the cost of that versus permitting etc will
| be less than trying to do it on land. I kind of believe it could
| get there. We could build nuclear reactors next to giant
| facilities but...we can't really seem to do it in the US? China
| seems to be able to do it.
|
| PS. I think the authors argument that millions of satellites
| might run into each other is silly. There are like 1.5 B cars.
| Rover222 wrote:
| The top comment: "Musk is up to something here."
|
| It never fails here. Ya'll are soooo determined to assume
| ulterior motivations. He has always been direct about his
| motivations, whether it's about politics or business decisions.
|
| To suspect his whole plan for datacenters in space is a ruse or
| something to drive up some stock price (or whatever), is... just
| ridiculous. You really think they person who leads SpaceX (more
| satellites than the rest of the world combined) and Xai (with a
| competitive frontier model in 2 years starting from scratch), and
| Tesla (more inference compute than any company on Earth) really
| knows less than you about the math and physics of this idea??
|
| His immediate focus for Starship has shifted from Mars
| colonisation to exponential expansion of intelligence, as he
| thinks it's the best path to extend consciousness. Ridiculous or
| not, he believes that, and that's the motivation.
| cowthulhu wrote:
| What is the real-world advantage of putting datacenters in space?
| niemandhier wrote:
| Data Centers in space make no sense due to radiation.
|
| You cannot do two things at the same time:
|
| 1. Make electronics small. 2. Make electronics radiation
| resistant.
|
| It's a numbers game. The denser things are packed, the higher the
| probability that a random high energy particle or ray will damage
| something.
|
| 20 years ago NASA was buying old chips, because those were less
| susceptible, modern "radiation hardened by design" chips are
| better than those, but still slower than those for planetary use.
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