I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
There’s a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven’t thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven’t though about all sorts of other basic stuff like “you can’t do maintenance on satellites” or “there’s radiation in space” or whatnot.
Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers
The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it’s "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They’re creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.
Yes, it’s to “raise the stock value.” Isn’t that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.
Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers
That’s where you’re wrong, this is like the hyperloop or solar roadways, where all of the experts agree it’s a dumb idea but you have a rich person trying to sell that to the public with the promise that they’ll solve the issues by the time they get to production.
You can’t cool things in space effectively, the only way things lose heat in space is through radiation. According to Wikipedia the radiators expel from 100 to 350 W per square meter. My PC generates more heat than that, imagine a data center. A quick Google tells me it’s 5-15kW per rack or 40-60kW per AI rack. Let’s imagine an AI data center, a single rack produces 50kW, so you need 140 square meters per rack. To put this in perspective the space station could host one rack if we removed everything else that produces heat from inside. So you need a megastructure just to host one rack, that will become obsolete in a couple years.
It’s not feasible, it’s just as stupid an idea as a vacuum tube for trains, and brought to you by the same person too.
Here’s the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it’s perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.
What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they’d get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn’t be necessary here though.
Unless I missed something, all of his math assumes 20kW of computers, that’s not even one rack for heavy stuff, of course you can run a data center in space if you send one satellite up for each computer, that’s just unpractical.
Let me put this into perspective, what you’re saying is like someone has an idea for a revolutionary parking plaza, and they’re showing you it’s feasible to spend millions of dollars to park one motorcycle in it.
The actual Starmind satellites will have 175kW of compute on them, Scott made that video before the specs were released so he assumed a minimum package. But all of this scales linearly, if you double the power usage you just double the size of the solar panels and double the size of the radiators. If a 20kW satellite works then you can bolt ten of them together and get a 200kW satellite that works too.
Cool, so we moved from a single motorcycle to a couple of cars, still a long way from a parking lot. You’re not understanding the issue, the scale is not feasible, you’ll spend millions of dollars to launch a single satellite that’s not even 1/10th of a tiny data center.
They’re not putting up just one satellite. It’s going to be a constellation. The constellation as a whole will be equivalent to a data center.
Also, it won’t cost them millions of dollars to launch a single satellite. That’s why this project is paired up with Starship development, the two go hand in hand. Starship makes the launches cheap, Starmind gives Starship the scale of demand a ship like that needs for its economics to work.
Even by their own estimates it’s 2-10 million dollars per launch, imagine thinking that spending 6 million dollars to get a single rack in space where it can’t be maintained and will become garbage in a couple of years is a good investment. And that’s just the launch price, you still need to build the satellite, with its hundreds of square meters of solar panels and radiators. There’s no point arguing this any more than there was a point arguing hyperloop, until they present a feasible product it’s just big talk.
Yea. Heat pump it upto 500k? 6.4 kW/m² (double-sided) for 120 kW total output? 20 sq meters. That’s nothing.
I suppose one could, They’re going with 160 m² radiators (double sided of course) so they won’t need heat pumps, though, I guess they found that to be a better tradeoff of mass and complexity.
160 m² makes sense at 80C… That’s right on the money.
My theory is that it’s so they are beyond the reach of protesters, the law, etc. I think that is going to be a very in-demand property for servers going forward.
With the money that it costs to send an entire data center to space you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
The law is anyway already largely under their control right? They don’t have to go to space to evade the law.
And to the extent that the law still applies to them and constraints then, doesn’t it also still apply to the necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers? As in, if the state wants to shut them down, they can still do so?
necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers?
They could be configured such that no off switch exists, no manual administration is required, and it’s a fully self-sovereign system that can only be shut down by sending a missile to space, and physically accessing it to extract the data or encryption keys it contains is even harder.
you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
Only if your definition of “protester” excludes anyone using weaponized drones, but that misses the point. The current meta for fortifications right now clearly favors the attackers, and that’s especially going to be true for a facility requiring large power inputs. That meta no longer applies if your data castle is in space.
Shooting down satellites isn’t scifi anymore. Any medium sized country can do it if they want to.
Why don’t they already then? Russia could shoot down satellites providing communications to Ukrainian drones for instance, couldn’t they? I think it is because doing so triggers a large shitstorm and real geopolitical consequences, if it becomes the norm then no one will get to benefit from any satellites, so a smaller and less influential country is not getting off easy if they do that, same kind of deal as nukes and access to them except probably a little less so. The similarity being that there is a cutoff point below which no one has access, and above which heavy coercion and other manipulation can be imposed as an effective deterrent.
They could be configured such that no off switch exists
Power grid dependence can be a weak point. Democracy can clash with CIA/oligarchy. A big enough mob can overwhelm security forces not particularly ideologically aligned to defending skynet.
Because they’re money for space projects and some billionaire wants it.
To get space data.
Not space centers?
I don’t think we’ve found the space center. There might not be one. We’d need way more space data to figure it out.
To protect them from missiles and drones
You answered half of your own question.
“it would raise the value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.”
The other thing is a complete lack of jurisdiction. At least theoretically, nobody can go after them for generating grossly illegal content in space.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
This is the weirdest take on data centers ever.
but … it checks out?
This idea is a total scam. This is just a way of asking investors for an enormous amount of money, with literally no intention of actually following through with it.
They might throw a couple of cheap satellites in orbit, just to say they “did it”…but no one with any actual comprehension of these things is honestly expecting it to yield results. The vast majority of that investment money, is going to be used for unrelated things.
In any sane world, this would be considered fraud. But, here we are.
I wish you could make money off of nowing when a company is spouting bullshit, but after watching Tesla stock for a decade…
Remember when Microsoft dumped containers of servers in the ocean to test things.
If they couldn’t make that work they obviously can’t make space work.
It was always a scam.
Microsoft? Hahaha. Like Microsoft would know shit about doing anything in space?
While Elon has no issues crashing and burning, no matter how many times it takes, until he succeeds… That’s a true commitment to trial and error!
The microsoft thing worked. It also highlighted a lot of issues that would also exists in space, but way worse.
But “genius billionaire buffoon” can’t read apparently.
It functioned, mostly, but I wouldn’t say it worked.
You’re talking about project Natick. All reports I saw was that it was actually a resounding success. The only reason I’ve seen for why it was cancelled is because it wasn’t able to be kept at the bleeding edge as they couldn’t upgrade the servers randomly. It doesn’t really compare to launching them into space which gives basically zero benefit but adds an insane amount to the cost.
IDK about success.
I think it went predictably in that the cooling was ok but maintenance was an issue.
Seawater is a real bitch. If you could cool things with it we would just pump it onshore.
Not only upgrading hardware, but maintaining any issues along the way. Hard drives fail, Memory fails, etc. That’s just stuff that happens and can be easily remedied in a normal data center.
Now take all of those issues, and instead of being underwater… move it 500 miles into the vacuum of space. And take the heat dissipation of all that water, and make it a fraction because the vacuum of space is terrible at radiating heat despite the ambient temperature being so cold.
Cosmic radiation causes random bit flips. You would have to shield everything and make it redundant. More power, more heat, more cooling, more power… Welcome to the loop.
Yeah… No maintenance… Which is a thing that datacenters require.
Enterprise Hardware can have redundancy but things still break.
If it was a success they would have done it. Ergo, not a success.
“resounding success” but given up as a bad idea.
The fact that it could possibly “work” was not really in question, it was whether it would be worth the costs and drawbacks. It was not.
But either way you are right, space even worse than water with no benefit compared to ocean.
The core reason space datacenters are uneconomical, is the 5 year replacement cycle. Includes trashing the solar and radiators every 5 years even if they could last 30+ because datacenter modules need to auto-deploy their own power and radiators. Ocean deployments would be far better. Wind/solar/batteries doesn’t need frequent change. Just drop in a new module every 5 years, while taking out the old one, and rebuilding its insides.
Nah nah, we aren’t allowed to do wind and solar anymore. The US president is paying a shitload of money to a lot of companies to stop them from developing renewables in the US and abroad.
There is zero economic reason. Most optimistic cost estimates are 5x more expensive than earth systems powered by solar and batteries. With near term optimism 10x more expensive.
The only reason is skynet that is immune for anyone in the US pulling the plug from skynet. Russia/China can already hit sattelites or terrestrial datacenters with missiles, and space ones are more vulnerable because Americans are more likely to cheer destruction of skynet assets used to oppress them.
The other factor is international law permits squatters rights to the most desirable orbits. 300 years from now, we may need power/data beemed to/from space. Privatizing it for oligarchy is a great long term investment if it is subsidized by US government.
I remember watching a real engineering video, the white paper for it doesn’t go into properly explaining the cooling mechanism. There were plenty of other problems too, but this alone was enough for me to know it’s running on pure hopium.
Oh and you cannot just use the corporate maths in this and not count initial costs, and costs of assembling the whole thing. Estimated area of solar panels for a datacenter of 5GW was 12.5km² assuming the best of the solar technologies used. The initial cost of putting it up there would be so high, it might even dwarf the lifetime operation cost.
In my opinion, it’s just another grift like hyperloop ko keep the AI bubble from popping.
Edit:5 not 4gw
Why put trains underground? The question isn’t of practicality, but if the idea would sound cool to a 10 year old.
ummm…As a ex-Londoner, wat?
Look up Hyperloop and The Boring Company.
“trains underground” are Musk’s “HyperLoop”
“data centers in space” are also from him.
Yes, Elon Musk projects are most often bad.Trains underground? What you mean like subways? There are actual reasons why you would want to do that, like making public transport infrastructure in dense urban locations where you can’t just demolish buildings to make space for your train tracks.
I’m assuming they were thinking of freight trains, possibly specifically in the US, where they have to cross thousands of miles. That would in fact be a massive waste of tunnel digging.
Im specifically referencing hyperloop. Of course there are some contexts (usually dense urban ones) where trains in tunnels make sense, just like there are some contexts where putting data infrastructure in space makes sense.
Wait, does the hyperloop make sense to you?
No, in the same sense that “putting a data center in space” doesn’t make any sense either. If they had decided to put high speed rail above ground in 2013, it could have been done and dusted by now. It could extend the whole coast of California by now. Digging that shit underground? They would be lucky to have 100 miles done. Its completely ignorant of the context, costs and impact associated with its design decisions, something that has become a pattern in the companies this particular manchild collects like playtoys.
Ever wonder why these guys never touch paypal? Because its their perfect cash cow. Its their credit card company double skim off the top scam. If they ran paypal like they ran the any of their other companies or the government, they would destroy it. They know that they are incouragable fuckups incapable of bettering society. Its why they go about scheming to have control of it instead. I’m convinced hyperloop was never anything more than a sales pitch to derail any real progress on a genuine public asset that would cause fewer electric cars to be sold.
Elon Musk’s biographer has apparently confirmed exactly that, that all the hyperloop hype was intended to derail investment into high speed rail.
Isaacson is a ball gargler of the first order.
So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.
Like every other real “ai” use case:
This is fucking awful, nobody would do this in a just world, and I hope there’s a hell so every single person involved can get some fraction of the suffering they deserve.
Good news: There is a hell!
Another psycho christian who thinks eternal punishment is somehow loving.
Fuck off, death cultist.
I’m the same one you’ve been following the past few days, lol
If you’re gnostic it’s right here!
Admire the plug, to call that community hell is really something
How consistent is modern day gnosticism with that of the first/second centuries?
Oh no one of the threads most forms of Gnosticism gave in common is the idea that earth / corporeal existence is hell in the same way that the Buddha says all feeling is suffering. It’s like that bit in the good place where she realizes they’re actually in hell already.
No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.
I don’t think it makes any sense either:
- Cooling will be large and expensive as hell
- Getting computers there will be expensive
- Getting solar cells there will be expensive
- The radiolink to earthbound networks will be expensive and slow
The only positive is that the energy will be cheap, and that the computers are safe except from nation state actors and untracked space debris.
This idea makes sense only for starlink and similar networks.
The main issue with such satelite internet is ping. It takes few milliseconds for light (transmitting data) to travel to satelite and again back to servers on earth. This communication happens quite a few times for example in case of loading a website. There are probably some usecases where companies/users would be willing to pay for such speed increase.
Polluting sky with servers could reduce latency by half. For people using fibre on earth this does not make sense. We are better off with servers on the ground.
Direct solar, easy heat dissipation, SpaceX stock price
Overheating is a massive issue outside the atmosphere. There’s no passive airflow to transfer heat through convection and there’s no air at all to utilize conduction. The only method left is radiation - the mechanism that let’s you feel the heat of a fire from the side. That’s the slowest option of them all.
Space is not cold in any sense of thermal management because space is essentially empty. Representations of people/fluids freezing when evacuated into space isn’t a good representation of actual thermal management. While there is some freezing effect, it’s because the rapid vaporizaiton of water cools the remaining water and can go below the freezing point. But, realistically, bodies don’t really freeze to an appreciable degree. Meanwhile, for everything else not containing water, there’s nothing to cool it down. In fact, of the very few particles that are flying around, they’re actually quite hot. Atoms flying for millions of years are still over 20,000 degrees.
So no. Thermal management makes orbital data centers the actual worst option.
The heat radiation is actually significant, but still stupid for data centers (high power density).
Those particles flying around are very easily many many orders of magnitude hotter than 20’000 K/°C/°F. To convert average kinetic energy to temperature via the kinetic theory of gases: T = 2E / (3 * k_B) k_B = 8.6E-5 eV/K So roughly T = 7736E Example with 1 TeV: 7736 * 1 TeV (1E12) = 7.7E15 Kelvin
Even solar wind is ~1’000 eV and thus well above 1 million Kelvin. Wiki has a nice graph of amount of particles vs. their energy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
1 TeV is almost completely to the left of that plot and there is about 1 such particle every second per m². At the right side, around once per km² per year, with 1E19 eV the “temperature” is about 1E23 Kelvin. One(!!!) such particle has dozenz of Joules in energy.
“easy heat dissipation” lol there is nothing easy about getting rid of heat in space.
Can’t raid Elons CP database if its floating in space.
We’re not even raiding CP factories down on Earth, no need to go in space for that.
