Hacker News Reader

Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and others here)

View on HN

datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.

This is basically the same argument made by people in domain-specific language models but rather than physical space (in space) it's mind-share, so actually your argument makes more sense? lol.

It can't work if you're launching from Earth. Datacenters are too heavy with or without the solar and radiator panels.

If you could make those panels and chips on the Moon, Deimos, Mars, high Jupiter, wherever, then space datacenters can totally work.

Except none of that data center grade chips can work in the space. No GPUs, no memory, no SSD. They are not radiation-hardened (rad-hard). Rad-hard chips generally cost an oder of magnitude or more compared to normal commercial chips, and they are in general an order of magnitude less complex, plus they operate much lower frequencies. Data centers in space is straight up stupid.

Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?

Also not a rocket surgeon, but to my understanding, modern satellites already have solar panels and radiators that account for the system's overall energy absorption and dissipation in low Earth orbit [1]. Therefore, plugging a supercomputer into the solar array instead of another instrument would likely not affect the overall heat profile meaningfully. Most energy in LEO is ultimately derived from solar irradiance and passes through the spacecraft regardless of internal usage. That said, take this with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned lack of astrochirurgical bona fides.

Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4].

[1] https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI

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

[3] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

[4] https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

Yes, you would need massive amounts of radiators

And solar panels. I don't think we can put 1GW+ of solar panels into orbit?

I think it's more of a classic mirror move where IF they do work, they're at danger of falling behind.

Falling behind? No, they're shadowing us, waiting until we make a mistake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com