Datacenters in space aren't going to work

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/

by mindracer • 8 months ago

498 437 8 months ago

So many ideas involving AI just seems to be built off of sci-fi (not in a good way), including this one. Like sci-fi, there are little practical considerations made.

0_____02• 8 months ago

Sci-fi isn't even really about the tech. It's about what happens to us, humans, when the tech changes in dramatic ways. Sci-fi authors dream up types of technology that create new social orders, factions, rifts, types of interpersonal relationships, types of fascism, where the unforseen consequences of human ingenuity hoist us upon our collective petard.

But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.

shigawire• 8 months ago

This is a good point and is why I prefer to refer to the genre as Speculative Fiction - not only is it broader but it better gets at the idea behind this type of fiction. Not just space lasers.

kwertyoowiyop• 8 months ago

“Terrible, horrible, no good” is the new “considered harmful.”

Sharlin2• 8 months ago

Apparently the book whose title the phrase comes from [1] was published in 1972, four years after Dijkstra published "Considered Harmful".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...

MarkusQ• 8 months ago

Additionally, their distributions were different. People who read Dijkstra circa 1968 started using the phrase in their own publications within a decade, whereas people who read Viorst (or had it read to them) in 1972 and following years had at least a few decades of further delay before publishing anything using the corresponding phrase.

Avicebron3• 8 months ago

"Mind-bogglingly poorly thought out to the degree of a cynical money-grubbing scheme worthy of the finest cambodian slave camp" was taken and is disrespectful to the hard work and education of said slave camp's operators.

yardie2• 8 months ago

I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.'

After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that sentence.

ReptileMan3• 8 months ago

You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part. In theory.

fhars• 8 months ago

There are even commercially available prototypes of that vacuum cooling technology, if you want to perform your own experiments with that concept: https://www.amazon.com/Thermos-Stainless-Ounce-Drink-Bottle/...

Sharlin2• 8 months ago

Yes. And it's an absolutely terrible way to get rid of heat. Cooling in space is a major problem because the actually effective ways to do it are not available.

dayjah• 8 months ago

Serious question: how in theory?

I’m under the impression you need to radiate through matter (air, water, physical materials, etc).

Is my understanding of the theory just wrong?

Avicebron3• 8 months ago

It's not the Sun..it's the lack of medium.

ethmarks4• 8 months ago

There's no air and negligible thermal medium to convect heat away. The only way heat leaves is through convection from the extremely sparse atmosphere in low Earth orbit (less than a single atom per cubic millimeter) and through thermal radiation. Both of which are much, much slower than convection with water or air.

Space stations need enormous radiator panels to dissipate the heat from the onboard computers and the body heat of a few humans. Cooling an entire data center would require utterly colossal radiator panels.

jhanschoo2• 8 months ago

You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part on Earth almost just as well..., though corrosion is an issue.

Ekaros2• 8 months ago

I wonder if there should be levels of "in theory". Yes theoretically black body radiation exist and well stuff cools down to near background radiation via that. But the next level is theoretical implementation. Like actually moving around the heat from source and so on. Maybe this could be the spherical cow step...

Reminds me of the hyperloop. Well yes, things in vacuum tube go fast. Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...

morshu90013• 8 months ago

Passively yeah. Can't imagine it's anywhere near as fast as evap or chillers

adastra229• 8 months ago

No, you can't. You need to radiate away all the heat being received from the sun facing half, AND excess heat from the compute. Even in theory, the non-sun-facing part doesn't give you any benefit. It's already part of the system that accounted for the temperature of the sun-facing side.

smokel2• 8 months ago

You could help by using the thumbs down button below the answer.

doctorzook• 8 months ago

Why is it my job to train the machines?

yardie2• 8 months ago

AI is a tool. If it doesn't work I'm not going to fix the tool; I'd rather find another tool that can do the job.

greyadept• 8 months ago

I would be tempted to give the thumbs up to terrible answers like that.

smokel2• 8 months ago

Interestingly, this comment gets a lot of downvotes.

If you don't want to help improve the world, then how are you expecting things to become better?

I understand that people don't like it that this will give Google an advantage. But what is the proper alternative? We have no non-profit organizations who could muster the money to build these systems. I suppose those who are critical of large companies would also be critical of governments building these systems.

So is what you (downvoters) propose here to just complain and do nothing about it? I'd be curious to hear what alternatives you propose.

throaway1232132• 8 months ago

I'mma guess that AI mixed up "datacenter" with "Dyson" to get nonsensical returns involving both vacuums AND space!

tim3332• 8 months ago

I tried Google and it pointed me to a ycombinator video about Starcloud https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY They launched a satellite with one H100 in on Nov 2nd.

I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data centers are being built in space, that sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not to YC. (8:00)

kevdev• 8 months ago

As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.

On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.

foobarian7• 8 months ago

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

dzhiurgis2• 8 months ago

Breakeven in X years probably makes sense for storage (slow depreciation), not GPUs (depreciates in like 4 years)

skywhopper5• 8 months ago

But the cooling cost wouldn’t be smaller. There’s no good way to eliminate the waste heat into space. It’s actually far far harder to radiate the waste heat into space directly than it would be to get rid of it on Earth.

cmptrnerd6• 8 months ago

Cooling is more difficult in space, yes it's colder, but transferring heat is more difficult.

andrewflnr2• 8 months ago

This question is thoroughly covered in the linked article.

noselasd2• 8 months ago

Is it an advantage though ? One of the main objections in the article is exactly that.

There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.

jcranmer• 8 months ago

Strictly speaking, the thermosphere is actually much warmer than the atmosphere we experience--on the order of 100's or even a 1000 degrees Celsius, if you're measuring by temperature (the average kinetic energy of molecules). However, since particle density is so low, the number of molecules is quite low, and so total heat content of the thermosphere is low. But since particle count is low, conduction and convection are essentially nonexistent, which means cooling needs to rely entirely on radiation, which is much less efficient than other modes at cooling.

In other words, a) background temperature (to the extent it's even meaningful) is much warmer than Earth's surface and b) cooling is much, much more difficult than on Earth.

wat1000015• 8 months ago

Things on earth also have access to that coldness for about half of each day. How many data centers use radiative cooling into the night sky to supplement their regular cooling? The fact that the answer is “zero” should tell you all you need to know about how useful this is.

RobotToaster• 8 months ago

As someone with only a basic knowledge of space technology, my first thought when I read the idea was "how the hell are they going to cool it".

hedora3• 8 months ago

Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.

The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.

I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.

It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.

ACCount377• 8 months ago

If you're using GPUs, you're running AI workloads. In which case: do you care?

One of the funniest things about modern AI systems is just how many random bitflips they can tank before their performance begins to really suffer.

sdenton4• 8 months ago

It strikes me that neutral network inference loads are probably pretty resilient to these kinds of problems (as we see the bits per activation steadily decreasing), and where they aren't, you can add them as augmentations at training time and they will essentially act as regularization.

jeltz5• 8 months ago

Sounds like it would remove a lot of the benefits gain from more solar power.

inejge• 8 months ago

On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs

As a sibling post noted, SEUs are possible all the way down to sea level. The recent Airbus mass intervention was essentially a fix for a badly handled SEU in a corner case.

api2• 8 months ago

What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.

Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.

Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.

morcus• 8 months ago

The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?

api2• 8 months ago

Not if you bury it in regolith. That’s an idea for a Lunar base too. The design is called “Hobbit holes.” Bury the occupied structures in piles of basically any local mass you can bury them in.

It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.

adamwong246• 8 months ago

We will need to develop very robust, space-worthy electronics eventually. We can't rely on natural magnetic fields forever.

hackeraccount• 8 months ago

I had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true.

That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.

marcosdumay• 8 months ago

You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.

perihelions• 8 months ago

It's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation,

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...

(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).

Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.

steve_taylor• 8 months ago

Regardless of how terrible an idea it is, I wouldn't mind some billionaires funding R&D that advances the state of the art in thermal management in space.

aallaall2• 8 months ago

Perhaps Elmo can move his toxic, illegal, cancer inducing, gas generators there, instead of doing it in Memphis. https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-...

awei4• 8 months ago

The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.

Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.

Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.

cactusfrog• 8 months ago

We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.

0_____02• 8 months ago

Falcon heavy is only $1,500/kg to LEO. This rate is considerably undercut here on Earth by me, a weasley little nerd, who will move a kilogram in exchange for a pat on the head (if your praise is desirable) or up to tens of dollars (if it isn't).

moffkalast2• 8 months ago

Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.

Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.

More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel
Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

awei4• 8 months ago

I like the underwater idea did not think of that

LegionMammal9783• 8 months ago

There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.

awei4• 8 months ago

We also have to build a lot more solar and nuclear in addition of the datacenters themselves, which we need to do anyway but it would compound the land we use for energy production.

creatonez3• 8 months ago

What use is having lots of space, when to actually build out that space you need mass, which is absurdly expensive to launch?

toast0• 8 months ago

Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.

There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.

According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.

notahacker2• 8 months ago

You can't just "leave them there" though. They orbit at high speed, which effectively means they actually take up vastly more space, with other objects orbiting at high speed intersecting those orbits. The orbits that are most useful are relatively narrow bands shared with a lot of other satellites and a fair amount of debris, and orbits tend to decay over time (which is a problem if you're in low earth orbit because they'll decay all the way into the atmosphere, and a problem if you're in geostationary orbit because you'll lose the advantage of stationary bit for maintaining comms links). This is a solvable problem with propulsion, but that entails bringing the propellant with you and end-of-life (or an expensive refuelling operation) when it runs out. The cost of maintaining real estate space is vastly more than out right owning land.

Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.

skywhopper5• 8 months ago

Starship is on a fast track to failure. It is not a cheaper way to get to orbit and will never get there at the current pace. And even if it were, it would not make getting to orbit so cheap that it would somehow make it economically viable to put a datacenter there.

You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling solution, radiation shielding, orbital boosting, data transmission bandwidth, and you have to launch all of that.

And then, there are zero benefits to putting a datacenter in space over building it on Earth. So why would you want to add all that extra expense?

tjpnz• 8 months ago

It will make getting to orbit cheaper, significantly so, but I can't see it being rapidly reusable. Rapidly refurbishable perhaps if Starship were modular and the heat shield could be quickly swapped out on site where necessary. But being able to top off the methalox and fly again? That's a pipe dream. Orbital spaceflight isn't like air travel in any sense.

moomoo11• 8 months ago

Why does what it powers matter? As long as it can power something.

The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.

cuuupid• 8 months ago

I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work."

There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.

From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.

wiz21c2• 8 months ago

From: https://engine.xyz/resident-companies/northwood-space

Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.

if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.

Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps

nradov2• 8 months ago

Cooling data centers in space effectively can't be done right now … or ever.

notahacker2• 8 months ago

That's not the argument though. The argument is "it can be done, the methods to do it are known, but the claims about space being an optimal location to locate our AI datacenters are false and the tradeoffs and unit economics of doing it makes no sense compared with building a data centre on earth somewhere with power and water, preferably not too hot.

But for a more nuanced and optimistic take, this one is good and highlights all the same issues and more https://www.peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/

(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)

skywhopper5• 8 months ago

What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?

brandonagr22• 8 months ago

The surface area of the earth is the limit (which only gets sunlight half the time) and only gets 1 billionth the energy emitted by the sun vs relatively unlimited surface area of solar panels in space

sollewitt• 8 months ago

It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.

It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.

denkmoon• 8 months ago

Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.

wpollock• 8 months ago

The obvious solution is for half of the hardware to run on dark energy, counteracting the heat generated by the other half. Venture capitalists, use my gofundme site to give me the millions needed to research this, thanks.

wat1000015• 8 months ago

There are things which are difficult and have unsolved problems, and there are things that just fundamentally make no sense.

Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.

Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?

This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.

vintermann• 8 months ago

Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.

Avicebron3• 8 months ago

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a non zero number of pitch meetings start with, "in order to not disrupt your life too much as the mobs of the starving and displaced beat down your door"

widforss• 8 months ago

The reason why we don't see satellite-targeting missiles is not because the problem is hard. All relevant actors are capable of that.

amitav13• 8 months ago

All relevant actors are also capable of destroying ground-based data centres, but somehow that's not a huge problem for data centres.

throwaway1988462• 8 months ago

It is far easier to build them at remote places and bunkers (or both). Even at the middle of the ocean will make more sense and provide better cooling (See Microsoft attempt at that).

bigbadfeline• 8 months ago

Not exactly at the middle but close to shore is pretty good too, a lot of solar and wind around to feed the compute.

One of these projects is bonkers IMO: china-has-an-underwater-data-center-the-us-will-build-them-in-space

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suwannagauntlett/2025/10/20/chi...

brazukadev• 8 months ago

it is not far easier to distribute content from a bunker than from the space.

marcellus23• 8 months ago

What makes an orbital facility at less risk of getting bombed?

teeray• 8 months ago

Probably needs more delta-v to match orbit than a suborbital ICBM would. Not less risk—just more expensive. Depends how valuable the target is.

ikiris2• 8 months ago

Because its stupid, not that its hard.

You want to push things out of orbit not turn a massive structure into a supersonic shard field for 20 years

tomatotomato372• 8 months ago

The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb

Spooky232• 8 months ago

Who knows what tech is in space already. Maybe an “AI data center in space” would be the equivalent of a flock camera for an entire region.

whoisthemachine• 8 months ago

None of these problems seem intractable, just really hard and probably not being solved soon, but one has to start somewhere... so at least the billionaires will fund some scientists and engineers who will do that work?

skywhopper5• 8 months ago

But for what benefit?

xnx• 8 months ago

Datacenters in Antarctica or floating on the ocean make more sense than space.

ethmarks4• 8 months ago

Building datacenters in the arctic also has the added benefit that sysadmins would have to take polar bear safety lessons, which would be pretty funny.

dpacmittal• 8 months ago

Pantheon style

burnt-resistor• 8 months ago

- Costs to keep it in orbit.

- More junk whizzing around Earth.

- Inaccessibility for maintenance.

- Power costs.

- Susceptibility to solar storms and cosmic rays.

Risky/untried things aren't dumb because they're hard, they're dumb when they're more expensive/harder than cheaper/easier alternatives that already exist that do the same thing.

aunty_helen• 8 months ago

I agree with most of this post and think the problems are harder than the proponents are making them seem.

But, 1) literally the smartest people and AI in the world will be working on this and 2) man I want to see us get to a type 2 civilisation bad.

The layout of this blog post is also very interesting, it presents a bunch of very hard items to solve and funny enough the last has been solved recently with starlink. So we can approach this problem, it requires great engineering but it’s possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as CERNs LHC but we have one of those.

Next up then is the strong why? When you’re in space, if you set the cost of electricity to zero, the equation gets massively skewed.

Thermal is the biggest challenge but if you have unlimited electricity, lots of stuff becomes possible. Fluorinert cooling, piezoelectric pumps and dual/multi stage cooling loops with step ups. We can put liquid cooling with piezos on phones now, so that technology is moving in the right direction.

For a thought experiment, if launch costs were $0/kg, would this be possible? If the answers yes, then at some point above $0/kg it becomes uneconomical, the challenge is then to beat that number.

fwip• 8 months ago

The problem isn't "how to cool the chips", it's "how to cool the whole friggin data center."

Any active cooling solution you can think of actually makes the problem worse (unless it's "eject hot mass").

aallaall2• 8 months ago

It’s better than having your DC confiscated (by Putin, in Russia), or bombed (in Ukraine, by Russia). As some hyperscalers realized.

aftbit• 8 months ago

If you think about it, all the existing data centers are in space already. They're just attached to a big ball of rock, water, and air that acts as a support system for them, simplifying cooling and radiation protection.

If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.

skybrian3• 8 months ago

Google’s paper [1] does talk about radiation hardening and thermal management. Maybe their ideas are naive and it’s a bad paper? I’m not an expert so I couldn’t tell from a brief skim.

It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.

[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...

fragmede2• 8 months ago

Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.

skybrian3• 8 months ago

Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it?

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...

adgjlsfhk12• 8 months ago

The only sentence in the whole "paper" about cooling is

Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures

Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.

0manrho• 8 months ago

Only legit thing I can see this being used for is redundant archival storage or just general research into hardening equipment to radiation or micrograv (eg for liquid cooling). But anything that generates significant amounts of heat seems like it'd be a huge problem.

Then again there's lots of space in space, perhaps it's possible to isolate racks/aisles into their own individual satellites, each with massive radiant heatshedding panels? It's an interesting problem space that would be very interesting to try to solve, but ultimately I agree with OP when we come back around to "But, why?" Research for the sake of research is a valid answer, but "For prod"? I don't see it.

jauntywundrkind2• 8 months ago

One thing I haven't seen talked about at all: how quickly would space heat up?

I presume Earth's gravity largely keeps the exosphere it has around it. With some modest fractional % lost year by year. There is a colossal vast volume out there! But given that there's so little matter up in space, what if any temperature rise would we expect from say a constant 1TW of heat being added?

tylerhou• 8 months ago

The sun’s radiation hitting earth is 44,000 terawatts. I think we’re fine with an “extra” terawatt. (It’s not even extra, because it would be derived from the sun’s existing energy.)

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...

jauntywundrkind2• 8 months ago

At sea-level there can be 1.225 kg/m^3 of particles. There's a lot of matter to absorb heat.

In the exosphere we have 1e-13 kg/m^3 of particles.

My point is that the exosphere while huge has an incredibly tiny thermal battery. I'm not convinced that, were we able to dump heat into it, that it really would be insignificant heating over time.

And there's little way for the articles here to cool down. There's no matter to transfer their energy to.

I guess the thing is, it doesn't matter. It seems like the exosphere is actually already >500 degrees: that after you leave the 80km menopause temperatures soar quickly, in what scant air is left. I was still using a model of thermal transfer. But the only cooling possible is passive radiative cooling, is to glow your energy away. Some of this will find other exospheric particles to hit & excite more, but they're already incredibly energetic up there, and there's just not many particles at all, so perhaps a lot of that radiation might escape the exosphere without collision. Again my mistake: thermal transfer is simply not that relevant (aside some shielding against these particles in vulnerable spots), it's all passive radiation being used to cool.

It would still be interesting to me to have some guestimates for what the current energy balance of the exosphere is. What is heating it, how much, and where/how-much is it able to dissipate its energy?

more_corn2• 8 months ago

Except you don’t build a data center, you add a GPU to an individual starlink node. If you can do that a couple hundred or thousand times you’ve got a lot of compute in space. The next question is how would you redesign compute around your distributed power and cooling profiles? The article doesn’t talk about the actual engineering challenges. (Such as scaling down the radiative cooling design, matching compute node to the maximum feasible power profile, etc)

I’m not arguing it’ll be easy or will ultimately work, but articles like this are unhelpful because they don’t address the fundamental insight being proposed.

ianburrell• 8 months ago

OpenAI has over 1 million GPU.

Starlink satellites would be pointless for doing computation because they are spread across the Earth resulting in horrible latency. AI companies spend lots of money on super fast connects within a datacenter.

Starlink with GPU might have some advantage for running edge GPU. But most Starlink customers are close to ground station and it makes a lot more sense to have GPUs there. It is a lot easier to manage them than launching new satellites which could take years.

dzhiurgis2• 8 months ago

You probably wanna launch these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfk0vTe46ds

kibwen• 8 months ago

Shhh, I'm begging people, if brain-dead VCs want to waste their money on things that are obviously farcical (and not actively destructive), please let them and stop doing their due diligence for them. The alternative is that they turn their impossible amounts of capital towards societally-destructive acts like buying up all the real estate in the world and turning us back into land-slaves.

thegrim33• 8 months ago

"[..] deploying a solar array with photovoltaic cells – something essentially equivalent to what I have on the roof of my house here in Ireland, just in space. It works, but it isn't somehow magically better than installing solar panels on the ground – you don't lose that much power through the atmosphere"

As an armchair layman, this claim intuitively doesn't feel very correct.

Of course AI is far from a trustworthy source, but just using it here to get a rough idea of what it thinks about the issue:

"Ground sites average only a few kWh/m²/day compared to ~32.7 kWh/m²/day of continuous, top-of-atmosphere sunlight." .. "continuous exposure (depending on orbit), no weather, and the ability to use high-efficiency cells — all make space solar far denser in delivered energy per m² of panel."

wmf2• 8 months ago

Orbital data centers are very hard but this isn't a good explanation of why. There really is more light in space since certain orbits are always in daylight. Radiators are no larger than the solar panels so if you can build multi square kilometer solar arrays you can probably also build massive radiators.

mbesto• 8 months ago

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power.

Follow the rationale:

1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three and basically negate any use of crypto.

2. So, if you have data centers that no longer rely on power derived from a nation state, land controller by a nation state or connectivity provided by the nation state's cabling infra, then you can always access your currency and assets.

zie• 8 months ago

Except the people that run and manage that satellite will be on earth, under some nation state's rules...

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

corporations will use their knowledge in tax dodging to avoid that too.

Analemma_• 8 months ago

I'm sorry, but this is stupid. It's the same dumb thinking behind Sealand: "we're outside state borders! nobody can touch us!", which was only true as long as nobody cared what they were doing. Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that. "Datacenters in space" wouldn't fare any better: multiple nations have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons.

MichaelNolan• 8 months ago

Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that.

What did the royal navy do? There is no mention of the UK using force against sealand in either the Wikipedia page or this BBC article about sealand. (Though obviously the royal navy could retake sealand if they wanted)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-41135081

dudeinjapan• 8 months ago

Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.

ikiris2• 8 months ago

Or just blast it with a laser...

hedora3• 8 months ago

Or just triangulate any signals being sent to it, and fire missiles at the source.

__turbobrew__• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

echelon2• 8 months ago

My favorite F-15 kill:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT

Spooky232• 8 months ago

Data centers in space is about leading investors to circumvent their brains and jump on the hype train at worst, and developing technology around data center infrastructure at best.

Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.

wat1000015• 8 months ago

Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.

echelon2• 8 months ago

They've always been able to do this.

Microsoft was talking about submarine data centers powered by tidal forces in the early 2000s.

There have been talks of data centers on Sealand-like nation states.

Geothermal ...

Exotic data center builds will always be hyped. Always be within the realm of feasibility when cost is no object, but probably outside of practicality or need.

Next it'll be fusion-powered data centers.

bouncycastle• 8 months ago

Recently the USA blew out some some boats in international waters and came back to finish off the survivors, despite thin evidence and no due process, while maintaining that it was legal. If those data centers on ships ever become declared as a 'threat to national security' then they might get the same treatment.

AndrewStephens• 8 months ago

This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 8 months ago

By the same argument Google could start literal star wars by blowing up AWS data centres. Because it is the wild west up there right? No pesky laws.

tetha• 8 months ago

This is one of the early tipping points in the background of the game "Eclipse Phase", which I always found interesting:

--- >8 ---

The power of nation states is rooted in control of land and safety, as well as resources, which is an extension of the control of land. But once mining asteroids became economically viable, the connection between land and resources disappeared. Once space habitation in space and secretly developed weapon systems from space became viable, the connection between safety, habitation and land disappeared.

This allowed corporations and new organizations to rise to power large enough to challenge nation states. Those in power did feared to lose their power, which caused the great war which gave rise to the grey mass and destroyed earth.

--- 8< ---

It's a very cool back story, which gives rise to a rogue nanite swarm (the gray mass), which forces an evacuation of earth within days. The only way this was even possible was by uploading human minds onto storage and planting them in robots later on. Naturally, most humans are then forced to work for these corporations. Other humans are still biological and they don't like robots, to say the least.

_heimdall• 8 months ago

If a company were to go on its own and build data centers in space only to avoid nation state jurisdiction, they better be prepares to defend that hardware in space.

If a country doesn't like what is happening they can shoot it down, and with no humans onboard or nations claiming jurisdiction there really isn't much to stop them or to answer for.

zbentley2• 8 months ago

Space is the least nation-state-independent place to do computing in existence.

All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).

Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.

Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.

EDIT: Removed unnecessary snark and fixed a mistaken double negative (s/dependent/independent) in the first sentence.

dragonelite2• 8 months ago

That really depends on the cost asymmetry between building + launching sats being cheaper or more expensive than taking down all those sats.

larodi• 8 months ago

many a cloud equipment has very short lifespan

DennisP5• 8 months ago

If crypto were the reason for the orbital data centers, then an easier path would be to use crypto that doesn't require huge data centers. That's pretty much any proof-of-stake blockchain, especially the more decentralized ones.

snowwrestler2• 8 months ago

If you can control satellites from the ground, then so can the government governing that ground location. An armed 10-person strike team could force SpaceX to access or even de-orbit the entire Starlink constellation. They don’t because doing so would be illegal and dangerous, not because it is somehow technically difficult.

woctordho• 8 months ago

What if we deploy reversible computing, which does not produce heat?

radar1310• 8 months ago

It’s a really ridiculous idea.

titzer• 8 months ago

In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time. Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on.

So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines. Have everything fail in place? Have robots do it? What about the regular supply missions to keep replacing all the failing hardware (there's only so many spare HDDs you can have on hand).

The whole thing is farcical.

hedora3• 8 months ago

Nah; let it fail in place.

See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.

fragmede2• 8 months ago

So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines.

Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!

jasomill• 8 months ago

As long as the rotations aren't for more than a month or two, sign me up as well!

mc32• 8 months ago

Plus, in space, their electronic components would experience much more radiation (and the effects on components). They could build with rad-hardened components but those are both more expensive and several generations older than SOTA found in the habitable zone.

mbac32768• 8 months ago

Yes. Anyone who thinks you can ship a datacenter to space and save has never managed a datacenter.

jeffrallen2• 8 months ago

Or worked in space.

fguerraz• 8 months ago

So what?

Of course it’s stupid and it’s never going to work. The same is true for Carbon Capture and Storage, blue hydrogen, etc. It’s nonsense from the start, but it didn’t stop governments around the world to spend billions on it.

It works like this: companies spend a few millions on PR to market a sci-fi project that’s barely plausible. Governments who really want to preserve the status quo but are pressured to “do something” can just announce that they’re sinking billions in it and voila! They’re green, they’re going to save the world.

It’s just a scam to get public money really.

javierluraschi• 8 months ago

Worth sharing Starcloud’s paper in this post:

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

jandrese• 8 months ago

So if the big idea is to have a data center outside of legal jurisdictions why not build a floating data center in the Southern Pacific Ocean? You can power it with floating solar panels provide data via Starlink or a regular communication satellite and still be outside of the law. You might say that it will be vulnerable to pirates, but practically speaking nobody is going down there. Sure you will have to deal with weather, but overall the problems are way easier to solve than building an orbital data center.

But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.

Animats3• 8 months ago

Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...

vee-kay• 8 months ago

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

Very true..

Here's a recent HN link to a chilling documentary about one of the most isolated settlements in the world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040459

schiffern2• 8 months ago

  >"A City on Mars" (2024)

I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too.

https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...

Coffeewine2• 8 months ago

I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.

As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.

So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.

TheOtherHobbes2• 8 months ago

"One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."

Hmmm.

kmontrose• 8 months ago

This rebuttal is... poor, I guess? Not disingenuous or anything, but lots of wishful thinking and (for lack of a better term) "inside baseball"-objections.

Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?

There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?

A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.

adastra229• 8 months ago

I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.

DennisP5• 8 months ago

Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.

mercutio25• 8 months ago

Yeah. A City on Mars made me want to throw the book at the window so many times. Building and tearing down straw-men right and left. Almost every legitimate note of caution suffered from the nirvana fallacy.

GMoromisato5• 8 months ago

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.

The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.

All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.

And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).

Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).

kaashif2• 8 months ago

The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).

So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.

GMoromisato5• 8 months ago

Starlink cost maybe $10 billion. A 100,000 gpu data center costs between $20 and $40 billion to build.

Also remember that data centers last for about 5 years; after that the gpus are obsolete. That’s no different than the lifetime of a Starlink satellite.

phsau• 8 months ago

Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink

Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...

GMoromisato5• 8 months ago

Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!

It needs to be scaled up, but there is no obstacle to that (at least none that the article mentions).

The only valid objection is cost, but space prices keep dropping and earth prices keep rising.

morshu90013• 8 months ago

At what price per MW of load?

GMoromisato5• 8 months ago

The Starlink constellation cost $10 billion. That’s comparable to a small data center (maybe 50,000 gpus).

If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.

santoshalper• 8 months ago

The facts you quoted just made me even more convinced that space-based datacenters will not be cost effective any time soon. If an entire generation of satellites costing many billions of dollars can't power more GPUs than a single terrestrial datacenter, how could it possibly be cost effective?

GMoromisato5• 8 months ago

A data center costs $20 to $40 billion! And launch costs keep dropping.

Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.

runako• 8 months ago

Starlink solves for a problem where there is not a good alternative: high-speed Internet access for rural environments. Land-based solutions for this are potentially even more expensive than putting satellites in space.

But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.

An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.

There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)

shagie8• 8 months ago

I'd be most curious to see what type of processing power they would put on such a data center.

For example, the JWST uses a RAD750 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 ) which is based on a PowerPC 750 running at 110 MHz to 200 MHz.

Its successor is the RAD5500 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 )... which runs at between 66 MHz and 462 MHz.

The RAD5545 processor employs four RAD5500 cores, achieving performance characteristics of up to 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and over 3.7 GFLOPS. Power consumption is 20 watts with all peripherals operating.

That's kind of neat... but not exactly data center performance.

Back to the older RAD750...

The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $349,639 in 2024).

That isn't exactly price performance. Well, unless you're constrained by "it costs millions to replace it."

So... I'm not really sure what devices they'd be putting up there.

The "data centers in space" is much more a "space launch is a hot technology, AI and data centers are a hot technology... put the two together and its too the moon!" (Or at least that's what we tell the investors before we try to spend all their money)

rzerowan• 8 months ago

I think the last time they put commodity hardware in orbit was via the HPE[1] project and the results were quite mixed with failure rates for components that were quite high. In addition to running the system in a twin config to get any meaningful work done.

Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.

Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/updated_hpe_spaceborn...

hk1337• 8 months ago

Seems like it would be a nice way to keep the temperatures down.

collinmcnulty2• 8 months ago

To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.

mangecoeur2• 8 months ago

Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.

Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.

The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.

smcin• 8 months ago

If Arthur C Clarke was still alive, he would be much in demand as sci-fi frontperson for these.

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

At the point, it's beginning to feel a bit like the 419 scam (where you make the details deliberately absurd so as to ward off people inclined to be sceptical early, leaving you with only the easiest marks.) SMRs! Data centres in space! "phD level AIs".

Ekaros2• 8 months ago

It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.

TheOtherHobbes2• 8 months ago

Classic misaligned incentives - pretendgineering is far more profitable than building stuff that works reliably and is useful.

We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")

thelastgallon3• 8 months ago

There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative

Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.

mr_toad5• 8 months ago

The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.

yoz-y• 8 months ago

Is there an orbit which has 24/7 sun and a visibility to same location?

newsclues• 8 months ago

The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited

shagie8• 8 months ago

For 24/7 solar... you are either in a sun synchronous orbit or in a very high orbit.

The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work.

A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k / kg to a polar orbit.

The next option is being far enough out of the way that the earth's shadow isn't an issue. For that, instead of a 500 km sun synchronous orbit, you'd be going to 36,000 km orbit. This is a lot further from the surface, takes a lot more fuel... and it's a geostationary orbit.

However, as a geostationary orbit, these spots are valuable. Slots in this orbit are divided into slots.

https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/wealthy-nations-...

There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.
Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.

Furthermore, the "out of a nations control" - those slots are owned by nations. Countries would likely be very annoyed for someone to be putting satellites there without authorization. Furthermore, they only work with the countries on those areas. They also require spacing to ensure that you can properly point an antenna to that satellite.

Furthermore, geosynchronous orbits have a 0.5 second round trip lag. This could be a problem for data centers.

Misbehaving satellites in the geosynchronous orbit are also of concern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_15 ).

----

Putting things in these orbits is pricy. For LEO, you'd need a lot of them. For geosynchronous, the idea of servicing them is pretty much a "you can't do that" (in 10 - 20 years they use their last fuel and get pushed to a higher orbit and pretty much get forgotten about).

Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are things that need to be especially well behaved because any orbital debris in that area could really ruin everyone's day.

Compute in space doesn't make sense.

adam_gyroscope• 8 months ago

The article covers why this doesn’t work in detail.

vid• 8 months ago

I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.

Zigurd• 8 months ago

Google "atoms for peace." You will find an entire multidimensional cluster of hype ranging from Rickover maneuvering to get a nuclear navy, which seems to work pretty well, but on the way there it created a subsidized nuclear reactor business which was never in the money but for subsidies, loss leaders, and underbids. There was no Golden Age of nuclear power. There were fixed bid contracts that masked cost overruns until they didn't anymore. There was FOMO about Soviet gigantism and (subsidized) European nuclear projects.

amanaplanacanal2• 8 months ago

Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.

JJMcJ• 8 months ago

Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?

mercutio25• 8 months ago

You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight.

Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.

exomonk5• 8 months ago

Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing)

Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.

bigyabai3• 8 months ago

Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting

Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.

Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.

SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.

Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old

wheels• 8 months ago

This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.

mybestday• 8 months ago

It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons.

Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?

ndsipa_pomu• 8 months ago

Is the answer slavery? Once you've been taken to Mars and given your underground living quarters, you're going to be stuck there and not have any option but to carry on working or be thrown out to die on the surface.

exomonk5• 8 months ago

It's basically nuclear preparedness research.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

wombatpm• 8 months ago

They should be doing that somewhere inhospitable to prove out the technology and concept. Set up in the arctic and work only with loads of materials that correspond to a starship load.

But then again no one is really serious about Mars.

myhf• 8 months ago

To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.

titanomachy• 8 months ago

Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?

more_corn2• 8 months ago

Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way.

He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai)

Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.

CrossVR• 8 months ago

Datacenters in space would make 0 sense because the only way to lose heat is through radiation, which makes for terrible cooling.

If you want to avoid national laws and have great cooling, then submerse your datacenter in the ocean instead.

dawnerd• 8 months ago

And they've already at least tried datacenters in the ocean.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

fbu3• 8 months ago

Maybe if you build the datacenter inside an asteroid, and use the whole surface as an infrared radiator.

CivilR• 8 months ago

Eager space did a pretty thorough hypothetical cost breakdown of orbital data centers that I recommend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o

jalk• 8 months ago

Sounds like the people behind Solar Roadways found a new project.

abalone• 8 months ago

I am skeptical as well BUT on the cooling question, which is one of the main concerns we all seem to have, the article is doing a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between the ISS and a cluster of small satellites.

It cites the ISS's centralized 16kW cooling system which is for a big space station that needs to collect and shunt heat over a relatively large area. The Suncatcher prototype is puny in comparison: just 4 TPUs and a total power budget of ballpark 2kW.

Suncatcher imagines a large cluster of small satellites separated by optical links, not little datacenter space stations in the sky. They would not be pulling heat from multiple systems tens of meters away like on the ISS, which bodes well for simpler passive cooling systems. And while the combined panel surface area of a large satellite cluster would be substantial, the footprint of any individual satellite, the more important metric, would likely be reasonable.

Personally I am more concerned with the climate impact of launches and the relatively short envisioned mission life of 5 years. If the whole point is better sustainability, you can't just look at the dollar cost of launches that don't internalize the environmental externalities of stuff like polluting the stratosphere.

ACCount377• 8 months ago

Starlink v2 Mini has about 35 kW of solar power at peak irradiance. 2 kW is quite far from the limit of how much juice we can pack into modern mass produced satellites.

mjevans2• 8 months ago

Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?

That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.

mr_toad5• 8 months ago

Some of the proposals are much much bigger than this. Five GW, and 16 square kilometres.

It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.

mercutio25• 8 months ago

There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.

So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:

  1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
  2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
  3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
  4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic

Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.

If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.

jvanderbot• 8 months ago

In theory rocket launches sound bad, with burning fuels all the way up to the top layers of the atmosphere, but it's not clear right away that we're significantly increasing the "burnt up stuff" vs say, the ~100 tons of meteorites that hit every night.

Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?

What's the actual atmospheric burden here?

This essentially says "We dont know"

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/04/rockets-affect-...

AtlasBarfed2• 8 months ago

I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue.

Communication might be a bit rough.

xhkkffbf• 8 months ago

I think the interest in outer space comes from the lack of an atmosphere to absorb the sunlight/power.

rgmerk2• 8 months ago

Seriously?

I know Silicon Valley runs on out there ideas and outright BS because 0.1% of the ideas pan out and pay for the other 99.9%, but this is just laughable for the reasons pointed out in the article.

iDon• 8 months ago

Related (posted just 2hours before this article) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086833 "Blimps lifting quantum data centers to the stratosphere? (newatlas.com)" "... blimps, to lift quantum computers to the stratosphere. There, at an altitude of about 20 km (12.4 miles), temperatures are in the -50 °C range (about -58 °F) and would be cold enough to allow the qubits to function correctly."

jillesvangurp• 8 months ago

There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things.

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.

2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.

3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.

5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.

In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

adastra229• 8 months ago

Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse.

Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.

Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)

Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.

fbu3• 8 months ago

The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.

KaiserPro2• 8 months ago

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology.

Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.

3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.

You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.

That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)

5) Learning effects

Great, but it gets us nothing.

mr_toad5• 8 months ago

even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.

There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.

khalic• 8 months ago

Can you please tell me your credentials compared to someone who actually built material that went into space? Like the author of the article

calcifer• 8 months ago

In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.

wat1000015• 8 months ago

It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology.

Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.

Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.

fbu3• 8 months ago

What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ?

Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.

dsign• 8 months ago

Even if they are a terrible idea, we should try it out. Specially if paid with private equity. Imagine the things we will learn, the STEM jobs this will create[^1], and the fact we will bootstrap other industries.

[^1]: Provided that ChatGPT doesn't hoard all of them :-)

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 8 months ago

Not a space geek but would have guessed at all these things. Feels like common sense. How is anything easier in space? None of it makes sense to me either.

The only thing I could think of is maybe 24h sunlight if far enough away from earth.

Maybe is anothet bubble to grab investor money. A bored ape larping as science.

StephenHerlihyy• 8 months ago

It’s not about putting data centers into orbit. It’s about the cost-yield inversion to data centers cooling infrastructure that happens at terawatt scale. All things being equal - a chilled circuit performs better and produces less heat than a hot one. There is a high up front cost to pre-cooling but if you can get in the -60C range, and stay there, you can increase performance and cut energy costs.

When they say data centers in space - they mean data centers you can’t get to because they are flooded with ultra cold dielectric fluid and it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring them back up to human temperatures.

Right now it’s not worth the hassle. At terawatt scale it’s almost mandatory.

When you walk down that line it’s pretty close to putting them in space. No access. Super cold. No air. Tiny, insulated capsule. Thermal management hell. They’ll be buried in mines though, not launched into orbit.

It’s just corporate propaganda to simplify an otherwise insane situation.

craighay1• 8 months ago

Really the only potential upside to this, and it's a niche one, is for time or security sensitive compute tasks where the raw data originates in orbit. Every happens over inter satellite link and there's no downlink to Earth until the end of the process (downlink is still a problem as Earth is mostly ocean and wilderness)

E.g. one satellite's wide area sensor payload is processed and "potential wildfire detected". The result is passed to another satellite with finer grained sensing capabilities which is due to pass over in the next X minutes which then tees up a capture.

gaigalas5• 8 months ago

You don't need massive datacenters in space.

You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs.

So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations.

If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica (research focused, still disputed but not armed, probably not lots of shady stuff happening there, costly but still pays off to be there).

deno2• 8 months ago

This makes no sense. The company will still be on the ground in some country and it has to connect to the Earth internet on the ground in some country. Unless you are talking about actual space pirate station, but in that case it better come equipped with missile defense because it will be attacked sooo fast.

gaigalas5• 8 months ago

The company will still be on the ground in some country

But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot.

it has to connect to the Earth internet

Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be serving React apps or anything like that. Those will be weird, non-typical servers.

Want some zero internet use cases?

- Training a cyber-ops LLM without poking eyes and reduced risk of leaks.

- Illegal data-heavy research (bio, weaponry).

- Storing data for surveillance satellites.

All of those can use private links, can be built by private companies under classified contracts, and you would not dare attack an NRO-launched satellite.

james-bcn• 8 months ago

You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there.

That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.

gaigalas5• 8 months ago

I can see you lack imagination. That's good! It indeed makes no sense, you're right.

amitav13• 8 months ago

I think what the parent was saying is that unlike on Earth, there are no zoning laws or environmental regulations or NIMBYs to stall scaling.

mjhay2• 8 months ago

There’s laws in space. Specifically, those of the country (or country of the subject) that launched the satellite.

gaigalas5• 8 months ago

There are laws in Cayman Islands too.

cladopa• 8 months ago

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.

The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.

E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.

You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.

The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.

dijit• 8 months ago

I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.

Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.

I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.

Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.

eldenring2• 8 months ago

The comment you were replying to mentioned this. Yes you cant remove heat via convection, but you can use radiators to emit heat as radiation into space.

georgefrowny• 8 months ago

Even diffusion into air is too slow for some use cases. The whole complaint of datacentres "consuming" water is due to heating it and dumping it back or evaporating it for cooling. This is done because mass air cooling is much less efficient and requires lots of energy to run the fans to force the air through the heat exchangers, which is also extremely loud. And that is, in turn, much more effective than passive radiation, even if you have a ~3K background.

The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.

So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.

The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.

zbentley2• 8 months ago

Selection bias.

Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.

The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.

themgt• 8 months ago

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”.

This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.

It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.

Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.

mlinhares• 8 months ago

That doesn't sell though, so people very often ignore it, even when most recent innovations are due to that, like the atomic bomb.

zurfer• 8 months ago

I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.

To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.

thelastgallon3• 8 months ago

The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!

thisisauserid• 8 months ago

Please don't propagate the myth that Einstein couldn't wrap his head about Heisenberg.

The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).

Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.

peppersghost93• 8 months ago

Counterpoint: oceangate

Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.

mangecoeur2• 8 months ago

The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.

nkrisc• 8 months ago

What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.

You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.

computerdork• 8 months ago

Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).

When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.

So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).

capyba• 8 months ago

Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.

andreybaskov• 8 months ago

Thank you for saying this. It's almost like others are saying we should stop trying things because they are hard and challenging.

I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.

pfdietz• 8 months ago

I'm not impressed by these arguments.

(1) Solar panels can be made much lighter in space. On Earth, panels have to withstand wind and gravity loads, flying debris, and precipitation including hail. The PV material itself doesn't have to be thick: thin film CdTe cells can be ~1 micron thick (the absorption length of the relevant photons in CdTe is something like 0.1 microns.) There has to be a protective layer to prevent solar wind ions from degrading the cells but this doesn't have to be very thick. It's not like shielding against high energy particles.

(2) Heat dissipation can be addressed by refrigeration. Yes, this takes energy, and yes that extra energy also has to be radiated. But the area of the radiator goes down as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. If you radiate 2x as much heat but at 2x the absolute temperature, the area of the radiator declines by a factor of 8. Even with inefficiencies one should be able to come out ahead by pumping the waste heat to higher temperature before radiating it.

(3) Ionizing radiation is dealt with by shielding. The amount of shielding per unit of capacity declines as you make your installation larger, by the square cube law. So this is really just a matter of scale. We're talking about potentially enormous amounts of capacity here so shielding shouldn't be a problem at scale.

thelastgallon3• 8 months ago

The first reason for doing this that seems to come up is abundant access to power in space. This really isn't the case. You basically have two options: solar and nuclear.

I guess that rules our any funding from US govt or Saudi money. Unless someone figures out a way to use fossil fuels to run the data centers! It has to be private equity or a new data center coin offering. Offered to the public and take away the pain and suffering of carrying their current paper currency. We need a new messiah (SBF + Musk + WeWork guy) to craft this narrative.

est2• 8 months ago

Datacenters in space have one asymmetrical advantage: FBI cant physically raid them.

And with Direct-To-Cell, content delivery satellites in space are unstoppable.

wat1000015• 8 months ago

“Dear T-Mobile/Verizon/Starlink, cease your illegal operation within 24 hours or we will start imprisoning executives.”

est2• 8 months ago

You don't need other carrier's permission if the direct-to-cell satellite allows anyone to receive data.

k_bx• 8 months ago

roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI's upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200

So.. 500 reusable rocket travels in space to match an on-ground datacenter? If this is the central argument then it doesn't hold.

Don't get me wrong. I too think whole idea is so outlandish it's likely to never happen, but mostly because the complexity of the whole project is too high.

flowingfocus• 8 months ago

Another great write-up on datacenters in space that goes a bit deeper in cost calculations: https://angadh.com/space-data-centers-1

dragonelite2• 8 months ago

It probably shouldn't be so hard to find military application for more compute in space. Especially give the global surveillance and communication networks like starlink and intelligence sats.

What better way to cover up such space compute capabilities than the AI madness.

IX-103• 8 months ago

One mistake that the article seems to make is to assume that the data center is in one huge satellite.

I think a better model would be a fleet of rack or server level satellites. That significantly reduces the heat and cooling requirements and improves redundancy since losing a single satellite sure to radiation would be less significant. Further, due to economies of scale these satellites could be produced in mass, similar to the starlink satellites of today.

One issue is that these satellites would be to be connected via high bandwidth free space optical links instead of Ethernet, requiring precise formations, but that is currently being tested by multiple companies.

That being said, I don't see this ever being cheaper than terrestrial data centers. I just don't think the idea is as stupid as the article implies - it just requires doing things differently than NASA has done in the past.

deviation• 8 months ago

I think it's important to be distinct here... These "Space DC" companies are not showing up on some Techy-Shark-Tank (or walking into VC meetings) with a promise to investors that they have an established strategy which will pay off.

IMO, they are just answering the question: "If we pour 100B into R&D, could it have a reasonable chance at succeeding?".

For Nvidia (or these other massive companies) the investment is chump change.

sesuximo• 8 months ago

100B is roughly NVIDIA’s yearly profit

tim3332• 8 months ago

Datacenters in space may not work now but in the future when we get the robots a bit better who knows? From the Google blog:

The Sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system, emitting more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.

xmorse• 8 months ago

The advantage of space is that you have infinite scale. Maybe data centers in space do not work at low scale but you have to think of them at much larger scale.

Elon Musk considered data centers in space simply for the fact that more solar power is available in space than Earth

sebastianconcpt• 8 months ago

Well we need like successful technological disruptions like in 7 dimensions before this can be scale and ROI positive.

lvl155• 8 months ago

It works if you figure out a way to have a permanent dark/light side. But really the issue is that we can do compute with light/photon and radiation and not much has been done in those areas.

Havoc• 8 months ago

It's interesting that there are a bunch of people saying definitely impossible, yet there does seem to be some money behind it like the hn one

jeltz5• 8 months ago

There was money behind Theranos too so I disagree about it being very interesting.

rklaehn• 8 months ago

This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.

Power:

It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.

The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.

Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...

Cooling:

Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.

A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.

Cosmic radiation:

The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.

Communications:

Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...

This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.

cess114• 8 months ago

Any honest discussion will conclude that it ought not to be attempted so it doesn't matter for such discussions whether it's possible or not.

jeffrallen2• 8 months ago

This idea is so spectacularly stupid that it's a shame such a smart guy needed to spend even 5 minutes refuting it.

elisbce• 8 months ago

When SpaceX came about, they said it was impossible for the rocket to come back from space and get reused. They said it wasn't going to work to combine multiple thrusters to form a big thruster and be reliable enough. When Starlink was introduced, they said it was stupid because the bandwidth is too small to be useful. Where are we now? 10 years ago, AI couldn't even beat a high-rank amateur Go player, let alone the best of pros. Everyone takes the excuse of dimensionality curse. Now what?

People who only look at the past/present and conclude impossibility are never going to be the ones who invent the future. Even math and science evolve, let alone engineering. The problems described in this article don't even remotely feel like the kind of barriers we faced when Go was solved, when protein fold was predicted and when LLM was solving problems with one prompt. If there is a strong NEED for datacenters to be up in the space, there will eventually be datacenters in the space.

jerdman76• 8 months ago

This article was an awesome read! More please!

Fruitmaniac• 8 months ago

Underwater datacenters make way more sense

gyb997• 8 months ago

The last project to deploy nodes in space was a blockchain project; history often repeats itself.

Datacenters in space aren't going to work

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