Datacenters in space aren't going to work
taranis.ie
taranis.ie
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.
Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
It's further complicated by the fact that most of the worst examples of AI hype are not public. Like, if and when the bubble bursts, the hyperscalers will likely get burned, but they're not going to go to zero or anywhere near it.
And that's assuming you already have stocks; it's very different, risk-wise, from shorting or buying puts.
> Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
It really doesn't, due to inflation.
Myself, I made the decision to go to cash a while ago, right before the recent AI pullback. Things were going great for a week until I started seeing all that money go unclaimed. I get back in, and the pullback I predicted happens. It was my own conscious decision to look past the gorilla in the room to get more free treats. I'll be fine but this is a good anecdote for how these things unfold.
Sears went bankrupt in 2018. It took a long time for the market to catch on.
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.")
Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.
They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow.
That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
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 ).
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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.
And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.
That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
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”.
Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
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
If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-...
And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
SDA’s “Battle Management Layer will provide automated space-based battle management through command and control, tasking, mission processing and dissemination” to support time-sensitive kill-chain closure. https://www.sda.mil/battle-management
Golden Dome and future missile tracking and ISR will depend on real -time insights, which requires Edge Computing on orbit, running advanced AI/ML algorithms.” https://unibap.com/news/defense-in-the-foreground
sorry can't help you with your user feuds
Is SDA "tracking and targeting" on consumer satellites, or are they not? Let's narrow this down to your initial claim.
Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
But then again no one is really serious about Mars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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-...
Communication might be a bit rough.
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...
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
>"A City on Mars" (2024)
https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
> 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.
People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.
> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.
>read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation"
He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.
Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296094-nasas-space-launc...
Hmmm.
Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/why-arent-the...
> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.
> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i... - page 14 shows them extended and testing at Lockheed.
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.
It’s like saying “why climb Everest? We can send a drone up instead.”
Trash, exploitation and littered with corpses.
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.
It’s a little worrying so many don’t know that.
Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.
“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”
Yes.
“That means you’d need huge radiators!”
Yes.
OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”
We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
Even optimistically, capex goes up by a lot to reduce opex, which means you need a really really long breakeven time, which means a long time where nothing breaks. How many months of reduced electricity costs is wiped out if you have to send a tech to orbit?
Oh, and don't forget the radiation slowly destroying all your transistors. Does that count as opex? Can you break even before your customers start complaining about corruption?
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.
- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night
- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation
- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps
You need to rework your physical equipment quite substantially to make up for the fact you can't shed 70-90% of the heat in the same manner as you can down here on Earth
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.
Fun fact though, make your radiator hotter and you can dump just as much if not more energy then you would typically via convective cooling. At 1400C (just below the melting point of steel) you can shed 450kW of heat per square meter, all you need is a really fancy heat pump!
>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector
Yes we're talking about radiating not convection
And a kilowatt from one square meter is awful. You can do far more than that with access to an atmosphere, never mind water.
Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.
A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.
The fact that people aren’t using something isn’t evidence that it’s not possible or even a great idea, it could be that a practical application didn’t exist before or someone enterprising enough hasn’t come along yet.
Radiative cooling is great for achieving temperature a bit below ambient at night when you don’t have any modern refrigeration equipment. That’s about all. It’s used in space applications because it’s literally the only option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fiscal rules are sort of man made.
Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.
Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.
https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY (from YCombinator)
> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.
These aren't small things. You can't hide it.
> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.
The US Government further publishes tracking on pretty much every single thing in orbit of the earth larger than a few centimeters, to help satellite operators avoid space debris. They do obfuscate the current orbit of their own spy satellites (only publishing their initial orbit), but other countries and even private citizens around the world keep obsessive tabs on these things (e.g. https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/). This sort of thing is easily within the reach of even a medium sized nation state that was interested in the investment: just need a couple of big ole radars and you can do it just like the US does. So if you do try and hide the resources of a nation-state can easily counter.
The solution to oppressive government is not technological, it's political. Prevent countries from going bad, retrieve the ones that have gone bad, it works out a lot better for everyone.
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/Ionospheric_heater
Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.
Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.
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.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system?
Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.
Otherwise? Go wild. The space doesn't lack for space.
And with all the LEO megaconstellations? GEO isn't as vital as it once was.
Starlink can even bounce data P2P, from one client terminal to another.
And how does decentralized ground infrastructure save you from a centralized executive?
Uncle Sam could bring Starlink down, probably. For anyone else, that would pretty much require WW3.
Executives don't matter as much as you think they do. No credible executive is going to cave to random death threats, and carrying them out would cause new executives.
Now, would SpaceX eventually become a shell of its former self without Musk calling the shots? Maybe. But if the shell you're worrying about is Starlink orbital shell, and the time you're worrying about is today and not in ten years? Killing Musk doesn't help you much.
It would take zero anti-satellite weapons to take down Starlink. Just point a good old fashioned gun at the SpaceX engineer who can issue maneuvering commands to the satellites.
--- >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.
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.
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.
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.
See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.
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!
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...
Hitting something in orbit just requires you to be in the way at the right time.
Basically an intercept is a lot easier.
You want to push things out of orbit not turn a massive structure into a supersonic shard field for 20 years
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.
The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.
Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.
Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.
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.
Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.
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).
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.
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.
Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...
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.
It is not. This is like saying your phone is already a small data centre. While technically true, we're not talking about the same scale here. StarLink's compute power is a tiny fraction of a modern data centre GPU/TPU. Most of the power budget goes into communication (i.e. its purpose!).
If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.
Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.
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.)
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.
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)
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...
- 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.
If you want to avoid national laws and have great cooling, then submerse your datacenter in the ocean instead.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
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...
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
> 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.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
wait, no it doesn't. why would that be, d'you think
Let's say that pod needs to be serviced once every two years. That means having a ship that services one pod every 3 days when scaled up.
From the standpoint of a single pod data center and "does this work?" - the answer is "yes, it works better than we thought it would." From the standpoint of "can we scale this to a full data center?" - the answer is "we'd need a ship servicing a twice a week, with the logistics that entails for the ship (and backup ship)." That second part becomes less practical compared to building a data center on terra firma where it's much easier to walk into a building to service it and hook up the power.
Cooling was great! Everything else sucked.
DCs in space will have all the stuff that sucked, but cooling will suck too.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.
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.
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).
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.
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.
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.
It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
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.
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.
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.
But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.
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.
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).
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.
I never said it's going to be easy. In fact, I compared it to setting up research stations in Antarctica. Which is costly, and definitely harder than going to the ice vending machine.
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.
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.
And with Direct-To-Cell, content delivery satellites in space are unstoppable.
Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.
> 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.
I’m under the impression you need to radiate through matter (air, water, physical materials, etc).
Is my understanding of the theory just wrong?
The main way that heat dissipates from space stations and satellites is through thermal radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation.
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.
I man you totally can radiate excess heat energy on earth, but your comment implies that the parents idea of radiating off excess "energy", specifically HEAT energy in space is possible, which it isn't.
You can radiate excess energy for sure, but you'd first have to convert it away from heat energy into light or radio waves or similar.
I don't think we even have that tech at this point in time, and neither do we have any concepts how this could be done in theory.
That's technically correct I guess, at some temperature threshold it becomes possible to bleed some fractions of energy while the material is exceedingly hot.
Reminds me of the hyperloop. Well yes, things in vacuum tube go fast. Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...
You're worried about rates when we can't even get the ball rolling on safety for human occupancy, maintenance, workability.
I swear, nothing on Earth more dangerous than someone with dollar signs in their eyes.
So, it makes sense to always start there.
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.
>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)
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?
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elon Musk considered data centers in space simply for the fact that more solar power is available in space than Earth
What better way to cover up such space compute capabilities than the AI madness.
[^1]: Provided that ChatGPT doesn't hoard all of them :-)
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...
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.
Any active cooling solution you can think of actually makes the problem worse (unless it's "eject hot mass").
>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.
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.
> 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
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)
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.
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.
(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.
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."
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.
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...
If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.
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.
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.
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?
The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.