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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

The people who want to put data centers in orbit must be either much smarter than me, or much dumber than me, because I just don't get how that makes any technical or economic sense.

Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")

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From what I've seen (Google paper, IIRC), it only makes sense economically if Musk's stretch goals for price/kg to orbit for Starship become true.

Technically it's fine, just take something like Starlink and use most of the power for compute rather than for comms.

But financially, it depends on price to orbit being extremely low; not just lower than Falcon, but as low as Musk's best public claims about what may be coming at some point.

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"

Land is expensive, water is scarce, people don’t want sound pollution anywhere near them.

Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.

Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.

You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.

If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.

With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.

In the Sahara there is plenty of space and plenty of solar. Any heat you can radiate away in space, you can radiate away on Earth. Or, more simply, dig into the ground and pump heat into the cool earth.

I wish you good luck in building a datacenter in the middle of Sahara.

It would be a hell of a lot easier than placing one in space. Much less thousands of them.

Remember that one satellite doesn't represent a data center, it represents maybe 0.1% of a data center.

In theory it "should" be much easier to build on earth, but in some ways it's just different challenges. On earth you're forced to deal with those pesky government things and in the Sahara not a lot of them are exactly reliable or good-faith actors. Then there's night time. So out of the gate, you're dealing with needing massive power storage for the night time.

So you invest $5b into a solar farm and data center outside of Tunis and 5 years after you finish construction a popular uprising topples the government and now you're dealing with new management? Nah, nobody is going to do that. And who's going to work there? How are you going to get data out of there? You're going to end up using satellite comms anyway. It's not 1953 any more and (thankfully) nobody is in a position to "Operation Ajax" your popular uprising when that happens too. I mean, maybe, but yeah, I would not do it.

Even in relatively stable places like the US or the EU, let's say you bought some random parcel of land in the New Mexico or West Texas desert region. Or even in Southern Spain or something. Even if you get the land cheap, with relatively easy fiber access (doubtful, but whatever), you're still beholden to the communities there. You think they have spare water to cool your facility? How are the schools for the kids of the engineers working there? You think that people are going to be head-over heels in love with Amarillo or Extremadura? The land is cheap because people don't want to live in these places, so picky people are going to steer clear. And at the end of the day, you're still going to have to get everything permitted, approved, stamped 80 times, and the project will grind on for months.

No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. You can park the satellites in a sun synchronous halo that lives about on the terminator, and just pull in power constantly and radiate directly away from the sun in the other direction. It's going to be expensive, it's going to be technically challenging but we will do it. Also, think about the California high-speed rail stuff. If you try to build on earth you're going to be permitted and social-media'd to death anywhere on earth you decide to build one of these. For better or worse people hate Elon. I mean, I understand it, he's kind of insufferable and his dalliance with politics was a bit of a disaster (seriously, USAID cuts are killing people), but he's certainly no moron and I do not think he's entirely un-selfaware. He knows that people aren't going to let him build these wherever he wants. You're going to have to ask for permission thousands of times, there's going to be social media campaigns to stop him, literally any screw up (his fault or not) is going to be loudly shouted to everyone. If he decides he wants to expand his facility, that's more permits, more restrictions, more permissions.

So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. Initially that was red states or at least relatively "non-hostile" states like where Tennessee, but even there people will squawk about it. I don't mean to say "squawk" to dismiss those folks, well, maybe I do, but I just think it's a bit silly in the context of us burning gazillions of gallons to bomb the Iranians. Nobody is going to do a damn thing about the climate or anything right now, and stopping data centers from getting built feels like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, but I digress.

Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. The technicians and engineers can live in California, or work remotely from anywhere really, and you won't have to deal with increasingly well funded and clever NIMBYs. The real challenge is going to be finding optimal launch sites for this stuff. Hilariously, my neck of the woods up here in Alaska is uniquely suited to launch into inclinations that would allow for constant sunlight. It's what, 98 degrees inclination for an SSO? So you can launch launch north out of Poker Flat and south out of Cape Chiniak. Though we don't have the infrastructure up here to support that out of Poker Flat yet. And nobody will squawk too loudly about it up here. I think those lunatics trying to slingshot satellites into space are trying to launch out of Adak too, so, hypothetically, that's an option as well other than the logistics of getting vehicles up here.

Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a book report, but these companies are not optimizing for cost savings right now, they're optimizing to avoid people telling them no.

>> No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there.

>> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone.

>> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical.

This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage. There is also no defense in space.

You think Grand Forks ND or Tempe Arizona is going to say, “we’re going to shoot down your datacenters?”

Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities?

Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t stand in the way.

Destroying a satelite is much easier than launching one, even with existing systems. Worse, given rate of improvements, I think we're going to get ground-to-orbit anti-satelite lasers before 10% of this constellation gets launched.

And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.

I do not think this is true? I mean, the point seems valid, but how many countries have ASAT capabilities? Then how many countries actually want to use that? Then even if we could get ground-to-orbit ASAT lasers (obligatory "pew pew"), then what countries will push that particular button?

I'm sorry, at least in this exact moment I don't see it. Even if france wants to bring charges against Musk, are they going to start downing his satellites? That seems like a leap. This kind of further illustrates my point. In space, you're literally kind of "above" the fray...

Almost entirely depends on how much it costs to deal with the ground having night, and if this is more or less than the cost of putting it somewhere that doesn't have night.

Both are already things that can be done in principle, the question is just how expensive the solutions are.

For scale: if these million satellites were 25kW each, that's 25 GW total; Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year between cars and PowerWall units, so provided they didn't need replacing more than every four years this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, so you'd just need to put this all somewhere without much cloud cover.

Solar capacity factor is 10-20%. So your state of the art chips are utilized 10-20%. That just makes no sense. Adding batteries help, but does not solve it entirely.

Batteries can solve it entirely, but they have a price for doing so which you can then simply compare to launch costs.

787 is vastly more expensive than Starship, but Starship uses 7x more fuel to get to orbit than a typical 787 flight. _IF_ Starship can achieve same re-usability as 787, then cost to orbit will be like $7.5/kg.

It probably makes economic sense for a company on the scale of Google/Alphabet to spend something like $100M per year on the technology. There's relatively little downside (that amount is a rounding error compared to annual spending), the research involved might yield discoveries that benefit other projects, and the investment pays off if launch costs go down by 10x and/or the situation for terrestrial datacenters in terms of grid access, water, permitting, local opposition, etc. gets significantly worse.

The list of people saying they're going to put compute in space is getting long. Unlikely they're all dumb or faking it. It is clearly technically feasible but how the economics will develop is still unknown.

   Starcloud
   Axiom Space
   SpaceX (Starlink orbital data center constellation)
   Google (Project Suncatcher)
   Lonestar Data Holdings
   Blue Origin (TeraWave/Project Sunrise)
   Aetherflux (Galactic Brain)
   Kepler Communications
   Sophia Space
   Madari Space
   Adaspace / ADA Space / Guoxing Aerospace (China)
   Orbital (LA-based AI inference constellation)
   Atomic-6
   Planet Labs (with Google)
   Crusoe (partnership with Starcloud)
   Edge Aerospace
   Rotonium
   Lux Aeterna
   Star Catcher
   Loft Orbital
   Cowboy Space
   OrbitsEdge
   Galaxia (Canada)
   China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)
   Beijing Orbital Twilight / Orbital Chenguang
   Astro-Future Institute
   Space Compass (NTT + SKY Perfect JSAT JV, with JAXA support)
   NASA + HPE (Spaceborne Computer)
   European Union / ESA / ASCEND (Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, ArianeGroup, HPE, Orange)
   UNOOSA (with Madari Space)
   Canada’s Department of National Defence (with Galaxia)

Dumb and faking it and trying to sell the project to even dumber people.

There's economic case (or rather economics is not factor) for space force edge computing, but who knows how big demand that is. But it is 100% going to happen, and market can be fooled into conflating military economics with civilian economics.

Perhaps the reasons are not technical. Perhaps it has more to do with jurisdiction, not being physically dependent (or susceptible) to any physical state.

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