Let’s revisit this comment in 5 years. I’m not convinced HN critics know more about this than SpaceX does.
No one can predict the future, and it's absolutely possible that orbital datacenters will fail (either for technology or business reasons).
But:
1. Without a time machine, we cannot be certain.
2. If forced to choose, I would rather root for their success and be wrong than root for their failure and be right.
When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.
Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.
Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.
Me, I bought me some SPCX.
I was confused at first too.
I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.
Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.
I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.
You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?
I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?
Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.
There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.
A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.
Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.
>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.
You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.
I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.