"It really seems like anyone with some renders and a white paper written by someone being gassed up by an overly agreeable AI can get VC funding these days."
Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
Free space laser communications are possible, but even then you are only talking about 10s of GB/s, and you cant add more lasers or receivers on a satellite already in orbit.
If it was a solved problem it would be widely used, but it isn’t. Ever looked at the reports of starlink speeds? It’s not reliable at all, everything other than a fully clear sky with cold weather (meaning less moisture and particles in the air) affects the communication. It physically can’t be a good or better alternative to fiber (or anything else that isn’t wireless).
These chucklefucks are just trying to get some sucker… er I mean investor to fund the whole thing so their respective space companies can do the job.
And after doing to some very cursorary research other issues like…
Radiation and reliability - apparently cosmic radiation is a bitch
Lifecycle costs - I should have thought about this one. It’s not like when a drive dies in space you just drive down to the DC to replace it. And not mention we recycle out compute about every 5-6 years or so.
Connection - somebody mention this already in the thread but yeah you ain’t hanging a fiber cable to a satellite
Solar sail effect is going to be dwarfed by regular atmospheric drag in low earth orbit. At perfect right angles the radiation pressure on the panels is 4.5 micro-Pascals. Meanwhile, in low orbit there’s enough residual atmosphere to generate a dynamic pressure (for drag) of 5 milli-Pascals, give or take (and strongly depending on the space weather).
So atmospheric drag is around 1000 times more than photon pressure. And the drag is big enough to be noticeable over weeks and months, requiring regular boosts to stay in orbit.
Not to my knowledge. But I assume this is nothing new and any reasonable person could come up with the same thing. I did google the ISS thing so that part may have come from there.
Radiators work because they have something to radiate heat into. Space is famously empty, so a radiator the size of a planet would only work as a heat sink until the total heat in the system was high enough to make everything glow like a heating element, at which point you dump waste energy as visible light.
Your car radiator is actually using convection to convect heat into the air.
The spacecraft radiators use radiation to dump heat by emitting infrared photons. Photons do not require a medium. This type of radiator works by maximizing the area of hot surface exposed to empty space (which has an effective temperature of 3 K). They have to be pointed into a dark area and away from the sun. There’s no advantage to fins, because you want to maximize area perpendicular to the dark sky.
Both devices are called radiators, but they are different kinds of devices.
You can radiate heat into the vacuum of space, it’s just extremely slow compared to doing it into atmosphere. Vacuum is not a perfect insulator in this regard.
Think of it this way, if a vacuum was a perfect insulator, how would the sun radiate heat to Earth?
Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
Send it to a cold moon like Europa. Free cooling, plus A.I. is kept at a safe distance
Ummm….
Even better, the A.I. problem is solved. Hooray!
There’s also the very real problem of data transfer.
On land you just lay down another fiber optic cable and you can double your data transfer rate.
In space, you have to deal with cross talk and interference on a limited spectrum.
Free space laser communications are possible, but even then you are only talking about 10s of GB/s, and you cant add more lasers or receivers on a satellite already in orbit.
But if you have a constellation of thousands of LEO communications satellites to leverage…
That’s what the lasers are for. It’s a solved problem.
If it was a solved problem it would be widely used, but it isn’t. Ever looked at the reports of starlink speeds? It’s not reliable at all, everything other than a fully clear sky with cold weather (meaning less moisture and particles in the air) affects the communication. It physically can’t be a good or better alternative to fiber (or anything else that isn’t wireless).
Agreed on the downlink.
I thought this was about the node to node communications. Blue origin and probably others are also using it for in orbit communication.
Not really, because it can’t be solved, just worked around.
Lasers are still subject to the inverse square law, but with a slightly different multiplier.
Also, lasers still have the bandwidth issue of not being able to double up the communication lines due to cross talk and other fun physics issues.
There’s a reason why fiber will never go out of style.
You’re just too small minded to comprehend the grand vision of business genius™ Elon Musk!
And Bezos apparently…
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bezos-says-the-only-thing-holding-back-orbital-data-centers-is-cost-not-science-as-he-says-ai-will-create-jobs-fc49d5d5
These chucklefucks are just trying to get some sucker… er I mean investor to fund the whole thing so their respective space companies can do the job.
And after doing to some very cursorary research other issues like…
iirc the power is not very doable, You’d need hundreds of times as many solar pannels as are on the ISS to power a single modest data centre.
And at that point wouldn’t the solar panels act as a sail and fuck with the data centers orbit?
Solar sail effect is going to be dwarfed by regular atmospheric drag in low earth orbit. At perfect right angles the radiation pressure on the panels is 4.5 micro-Pascals. Meanwhile, in low orbit there’s enough residual atmosphere to generate a dynamic pressure (for drag) of 5 milli-Pascals, give or take (and strongly depending on the space weather).
So atmospheric drag is around 1000 times more than photon pressure. And the drag is big enough to be noticeable over weeks and months, requiring regular boosts to stay in orbit.
Maybe? Probably? For all I know, a solar-sail effect might help it stay in orbit.
What if we run a really long tube down to earth to send water back and forth? You gotta think like Elon to be innovative.
It would also be extremely vulnerable to rockets.
Do you have a podcast? I saw a podcast clip on tiktok saying almost verbatim the same thing
Not to my knowledge. But I assume this is nothing new and any reasonable person could come up with the same thing. I did google the ISS thing so that part may have come from there.
The radiators would be about the same size as the solar panels. Both would have to be huge to run a rack full of GPUs.
Radiators work because they have something to radiate heat into. Space is famously empty, so a radiator the size of a planet would only work as a heat sink until the total heat in the system was high enough to make everything glow like a heating element, at which point you dump waste energy as visible light.
Your car radiator is actually using convection to convect heat into the air.
The spacecraft radiators use radiation to dump heat by emitting infrared photons. Photons do not require a medium. This type of radiator works by maximizing the area of hot surface exposed to empty space (which has an effective temperature of 3 K). They have to be pointed into a dark area and away from the sun. There’s no advantage to fins, because you want to maximize area perpendicular to the dark sky.
Both devices are called radiators, but they are different kinds of devices.
You can radiate heat into the vacuum of space, it’s just extremely slow compared to doing it into atmosphere. Vacuum is not a perfect insulator in this regard.
Think of it this way, if a vacuum was a perfect insulator, how would the sun radiate heat to Earth?
The radiators dissipate the heat as infrared radiation. They work as long as they are pointed away from the sun or earth.
If they couldn’t get rid of the heat, there would be no satellites or space stations.
The solution, then, is a downsized dc.