As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.
As a first cut, this would require:
- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant
- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.
- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon.
Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect low failure rates for a long period and it's quite likely it'd be cheaper to not replace components and just ensure enough redundancy for key systems (power, cooling, networking) that you could just shut down and disable any dead servers, and then replace the whole unit when enough parts have failed.
Exactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and then simply replace faulty servers around once per year.
Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve crossed 9 points).
Wonder if you could game that in theory by burning in the components on the surface before launch or if the launch would cause a big enough spike from the vibration damage that it's not worth it.
I suspect you'd absolutely want to burn in before launch, maybe even including simulating some mechanical stress to "shake out" more issues, but it is a valid question how much burn in is worth doing before and after launch.
Vibration testing is a completely standard part of space payload pre-flight testing. You would absolutely want to vibe-test (no, not that kind) at both a component level and fully integrated before launch.
The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.
Redundancy is a small issue on Earth, but completely changes the calculations for space because you need more of everything, which makes the already-unfavourable space and mass requirements even less plausible.
Without backup cooling and power one small failure could take the entire facility offline.
And active cooling - which is a given at these power densities - requires complex pumps and plumbing which have to survive a launch.
The whole idea is bonkers.
IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
I have no idea if that's any more economic, but at least it solves the most obvious redundancy and deployment issues.
> The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.
The analysis is a third party analysis that among other things presumes they'll launch unmodified Nvidia racks, which would make no sense. It might be this means Starcloud are bonkers, but it might also mean the analysis is based on flawed assumptions about what they're planning to do. Or a bit of both.
> IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
This would get you significantly less redundancy other than against physical strikes than having the same redundancy in a single unit and letting you control what feeds what, the same way we have smart, redundant power supplies and cooling in every data center (and in the racks they're talking about using as the basis).
If power and cooling die faster than the servers, you'd either need to overprovision or shut down servers to compensate, but it's certainly not all or nothing.
Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes, there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate, but dramatically simplifies things.
even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS, they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April and it happens about once a year.
the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.
serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space?
on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...
I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space.
Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
Connectors have to survive the extreme vibration of a rocket launch. Parts routinely shake off boards in testing even when using non-COTS space rated packaging designed for extreme environments. That amplifies the cost of everything.
The Russians are the only ones who package their unmanned platform electronics in pressure vessels. Everyone else operates in vacuum, so no fans.
The original article even addresses this directly. Plus hardware returns over fast enough that you'll simply be replacing modules with a smattering of dead servers with entirely new generations anyways.
It would be interesting to see if the failure rate across time holds true after a rocket launch and time spent in space. My guess is that it wouldn’t, but that’s just a guess.
I think it's likely the overall rate would be higher, and you might find you need more aggressive burn-in, but even then you'd need an extremely high failure rate before it's more efficient to replace components than writing them off.
The bathtub curve isn’t the same for all components of a server though. Writing off the entire server because a single ram chip or ssd or network card failed would limit the entire server to the lifetime of the weakest part. I think you would want redundant hot spares of certain components with lower mean time between failures.
We do often write off an entire server because a single component fails because the lifetime of the shortest-lifetime components is usually long enough that even on-earth with easy access it's often not worth the cost to try to repair. In an easy-to-access data centre, the component most likely to get replaced would be hot-swappable drives or power supplies, but it's been about 2 decades since the last time I worked anywhere where anyone bothered to check for failed RAM or failed CPUs to salvage a server. And lot of servers don't have network devices you can replace without soldering, and haven't for a long time outside of really high end networking.
And at sufficient scale, once you plan for that it means you can massively simplify the servers. The amount of waste a sever case suitable for hot-swapping drives adds if you're not actually going to use the capability is massive.
I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.
Electronics can be extremely resilient to vibration and g forces. Self guided artillery shells such as the M982 Excalibur include fairly normal electronics for GPS guidance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
On the ground vibration testing is a standard part of pre-launch spacecraft testing. This would trigger most (not all) vibration/G-force related failures on the ground rather than at the actual launch.
The big question mark is how many failures you cause and catch on the first cycle and how much you're just putting extra wear on the components that pass the test the first time and don't get replaced.
Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there).
> The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.
6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways) and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail.
That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.
Indeed, MS had it easier with a huge, readily available cooling reservoir and a layer of water that additionally protects (a little) against cosmic rays, plus the whole thing had to be heavy enough to sink. An orbital datacenter would be in a opposite situation: all cooling is radiative, many more high-energy particles, and the weight should be as light as possible.
> In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected
Underwater pods are the polar opposite of space in terms of failure risks. They don't require a rocket launch to get there, and they further insulate the servers from radiation compared to operating on the surface of the Earth, rather than increasing exposure.
The biggest difference is radiation. Even in LEO, you will get radiation-caused Single Events that will affect the hardware. That could be a small error or a destructive error, depending on what gets hit.
Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.
But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well".
> "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space."
So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to get past some boundary below which things don't have gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough gravity to matter.
Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold reached after certain mass.
"Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas Adams put it best
> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
From an education site:
> Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more massive an object is, the more it bends
They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts far more influence
As mentioned in the article the Starcloud design requires solar arrays that are ~2x more efficient than those deployed on the ISS. Simply scaling them up introduces more drag and weight problems as do the batteries needed to suffice for the 45 minutes of darkness the satellite will receive.
>The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
And once you remove all the moving parts, you just fill the whole thing with oil rather than air and let heat transfer more smoothly to the radiators.
Oil, like air, doesn't convent well in 0G, you'll need pretty hefty pumps and well designed layouts to ensure no hot spots form. Heat pipes are at least passive and don't depend on gravity.
A light oil has a density of 700kg per cubic meter. Most common oils are denser.
Then you'd need vanes, agitators, and pumps to keep the oil moving around without forming eddies. These would need to be fairly bulky compared to fans and fan motors.
I'd have to see what an engineering team came up with, but at first glance the liquid solution would be much heavier and likely more maintenance intensive.
On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.
If you want to have people you need to add in a whole lot of life support and additional safety to keep people alive. Robots are easier, since they don't die so easily. If you can get them to work at all, that is.
That isn't going to last for much longer with the way power density projections are looking.
Consider that we've been at the point where layers of monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite some time now.
No, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans.
DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim hundreds of lives a year.
This sort of work is ideal for robots. We don't do it much on Earth because you can pay a tech $20/hr to swap hardware modules, not because it's hard for robots to do.
It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).
(Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)
It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.
Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.
The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.
The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.
Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won’t ever happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn’t viable. But THAT’S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap about size of radiators.
(And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about 10 years ago in 2015).
I suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the landing bit
I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for parted out supercomptuers)
I used to build and operate data center infrastructure. There is very limited reason to do anything more than a warranty replacement on a GPU. With a high quality hardware vendor that properly engineers the physical machine, failure rates can be contained to less than .5% per year. Particularly if the network has redundancy to avoid critical mass failures.
In this case, I see no reason to perform any replacements of any kind. Proper networked serial port and power controls would allow maintenance for firmware/software issues.
Thanks for the thorough comment—yes, the heat pipes etc haven’t been accounted for. Might be a future addition but the idea was to look at some key large parts and see where that takes us in terms of launch. The pipes would definitely skew the business case further. Similarly, the analysis is missing trusses.
Don’t even get me started on the costs of maintenance. I am sweating bricks just thinking of the mission architecture for assembly and how the robotic system might actually look. Unless there’s a single 4 km long deployable array (of what width?), which would be ridiculous to imagine.
What if we just integrate the hardware so it fails softly?
That is, as hardware fails, the system looses capacity.
That seems easier than replacing things on orbit, especially if StarShip becomes the cheapest way to launch to orbit because StarShip launches huge payloads, not a few rack mounted servers.
Don’t you need to look at different failure scenarios or patterns in orbit due to exposure to cosmic rays as well?
It just seems funny, I recall when servers started getting more energy dense it was a revelation to many computer folks that safe operating temps in a datacenter should be quite high.
I’d imagine operating in space has lots of revelations in store. It’s a fascinating idea with big potential impact… but I wouldn’t expect this investment to pay out!
Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time.
Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation?
I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the materials later.
The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty. For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle.
This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
Good points. Spin “gravity” is also quite challenging to acclimatize to because it’s not uniform like planetary gravity. Lots of nausea and unintuitive gyroscopic effects when moving. It’s definitely not a “just”
Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well. It’s a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn’t decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a mystery.
I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things:
1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things.
2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radiating surfaces need to be in harmony during the whole mission.
Preventing the vehicle from getting too hot is usually a much bigger problem than preventing it from getting too cold. This might be surprising because laypeople usually associate space with cold. In reality you can always heat if you have energy but cooling is hard if all you have is radiation and you are operating at a fixed and relatively low temperature level.
The bottom line is that running a datacenter in space makes not much sense from a thermal standpoint and there must be other compelling reasons for a decision to do so.
Sure it is doable. My point is that at room temperature convection is a so much more efficient heat transfer mechanism that I wonder why someone would even think about doing without it.
The caveat to this is that that this also dependent on where in the lifecycle of the satellite you are at. For example after launch, you might just have your survival heaters on, which will keep you within generally an industrial range (e.g. >-40c), and you might not reach higher temps until you hit nominal operations. But a lot of the hardware specs for temperature often are closer standard "industrial" specs rather than special mil or NASA specs.
Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif).
Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast...
People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of complaining about her sudden use of the force where previously she did not show any such talents.)
Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
But I think what people/movies don't understand is that there's almost no conductive thermal transfer going on, because there's not much matter to do it. It's all radiation, which is why heat is a much bigger problem, because you can only radiate heat away, you can't conduct it. And whatever you use to radiate heat away can also potentially receive radiation from things like the Sun, making your craft even hotter.
> Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
What is this “empty space” you speak of? Genuinely empty space is empty and does not have a clearly defined temperature. If you are in space in our universe, very far from everything else, then the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is what matters, and that’s a few K. If you’re in our solar system in an orbit near Earth, the radiation field is wildly far from any sort of thermal equilibrium, and the steady state temperature of a passive black body will depend strongly on whether it’s in the Earth’s shadow, and it’s a lot hotter than a few K when exposed to sunlight.
Wouldn't a body essentially freeze dry as a wet being exposed to vacuum? I.e. the temperature of the space is still irrelevant and the cooling comes from vaporization.
Any exposed fluids (mostly saliva) technically boils but you can think of it as evaporation to avoid layperson associations with heat -- it's all about low pressure, not about heat in layperson terms.
Whether you freeze or not depends on whether you're in the sun or not. Spacesuits are white to reflect as much light as feasible mostly to keep the astronauts from cooking. For example, surface of the moon can heat to 120° C / 250° Fahrenheit / 400 K.
I'm reading through the Expanse books and a passage that I read after seeing your comment jumped out at me. It's a quote from Havelock:
"As a boy living planetside, he had always thought of space as cold. And while that was technically true, mostly it was a vacuum. And so a ship, mostly, was a thermos. The heat from their bodies and systems would bleed into the void off over years and decades of it had the chance."
It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough fluids. I don’t know whether you freeze over or dry out first, but I’m sure someone at NASA has done the math.
Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place?
Free cooling?
Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive.
Access to solar energy?
Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place?
Physical isolation and security?
Against manipulation maybe, but not against denial of service. Willfully damaged satellite is something I expect to see in the news in the foreseeable future.
Low latency comms?
Latency is limited by distance and speed of light. Everyone with a satellite internet connections knows that low latency is not a particular strength of it.
Marketing and PR?
That, probably.
EDIT:
Thought of another one:
Environmental impact?
No land use, no thermal stress for rivers on one hand but the huge overhead of a space launch on the other.
I've talked to the founder of Starcloud about this, there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the future, and further and further out into space. He thinks now is the right time to learn how to compute up there because people will want to process, and maybe orchestrate processing between many devices, in space. He's fully aware of all of the objections in this hn comments section, he just doesn't believe they are insurmountable and he believes interoperable compute hubs in space will be required over the next 20/30 years. He's in his mid 20s, so it seems like a reasonable mission to be on to me.
Seems far more likely that the "data generative stuff" will get smaller and cheaper to run (like cell phones with on-device models) much faster than "run a giant supercomputer in orbit" will become easy.
My headlights aren't good enough so I'm unsure but generally that maps. To me the interoperability part is what is interesting, your data and my data in real time being consumed by some understanding agent doing automated research? I could imagine putting something like a Stoffel MPC layer in there, then nations states can more easily work together? I presume space data/research will be highly competitive, even friendly nations may want to combine data without knowing the underneath. We're so far out here that it's kinda silly, but I don't think we're out to lunch? Have a great weekend Chris! :)
There are certainly nation states that are looking for ways to 1) prevent their satellites colliding with one another (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/850.pdf) and 2) being able to do forms of computation that might be risky to do on earth for national security reasons.
Earth is the closest spot for most of space. It makes most sense for satellites to send data back to Earth. They would have to find a use where with lots of compute but latency really matters.
For farther out, computer on ships, stations, or bases makes sense, but that is different than free floating satellites. They already have power, cooling, and maintenance.
It is like saying there should be compute in the air for all the airplanes flying around.
My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment.
Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.
Space is terrible for that. There's only a handful of countries with launch vehicles and/or launch sites. You obviously need to be in their good graces for the launch to be approved.
If you want permissive regulatory environment, just spend the money buying a Mercedes for some politician in a corrupt country, you'll get a lot further...
The US government does questionable things to people in places like Guantanamo Bay because the constitution gives those people rights if they set foot on US soil. Data doesn't have rights, and governments have the capability to waive their own laws for things like national security.
Corporations operating in space are bound to the laws of the country the spacecraft belongs to, so there's no difference between a data harbor in Whogivesastan vs. a data harbor on a spacecraft operated by Whogivesastan.
Which is a good analogy; international waters are far from lawless.
You're still subject to the law of your flag state, just as if you were on their territory. In addition to that, you're subject to everyone's jurisdiction if you commit certain crimes - including piracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction
> A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which contributes to climate change—so migrating to space would alleviate the toll on Earth’s thermal budget. This seems like a compelling environmental argument. TDCs already consume about 1-1.5% of global electricity and it’s safe to assume that this will only grow in the pursuit of AGI.
The comparison here is between solar powered TDCs in Space vs TDCs on Earth.
- A TDC in space contributes to global warming due to mining+manufacturing emissions and spaceflight emissions.
- A comparable TDC on Earth would be solar+battery run. You will likely need a larger solar panel array than in space. Note a solar panel in operation does not really contribute to global warming. So the question is whether the additional Earth solar panel+battery manufacturing emissions are greater than launching the smaller array + TDC into space.
I would guess launching into space has much higher emissions.
Low Earth orbits are in the dark about 49% of time, but suffer no seasonal variability. Low Earth orbit is also very hot, and regular solar panels become less efficient the hotter they get.
The only sensible way to count pollution from solar+battery power manufacturing & disposal is do it on a per kWh basis.
The size of solar panels and radiators needed for an actual data center would be crazy in LEO. LEO still touches the atmosphere. ISS needs to be pushed higher regularly because of atmospheric drag.
Speed of light is actually quite an advantage, in theory at least. Speed of light in optical fiber is quite a bit slower (takes 50% longer) than in vacuum.
Not really. Fiber is more 2/3 of free space propagation and that puts the break-even point of direct fiber connection vs LEO up- and downlink at a geodesic distance of about 12000 km. So, for most data centers you want to reach a fiber is the better option.
There was a video from Scott Manley about this several years back. And he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit. And they haven't yet.
> he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit.
I am a big Manley fan, but I don't understand that. Fuel, oxidizers, and water can all likely withstand 10,000 G loads, and are quite useful in orbit. Also, IIRC correctly one big factor regarding SpinLaunch's G load is that it builds slowly.
Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.
Here is how to think about them:
It doesn't matter how open your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea and working hard and never giving up developing strength and technique to jump higher.
Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping harder.
The atmosphere and gravity are only some of the problems with spinlaunch. Spinlaunch rotates at 600 rpm. That means the projectile is tumbling at 600 rpm when let go.
Maybe for solid masses not in an atmosphere, meaning the payload can be a ball and doesn't have to have a pencil shape and doesn't need to point in any particular direction, maybe that can work to simply lob rocks or aluminum ingots into earth orbit.
Except just think about that for a second. Lobbing rocks from the moon towards earth...
And why would we want to do this anyway? What resources are so valuable on the moon that it's worth getting them that way?
The payload would actually have to have rockets, fuel, computers, heat shielding, and a means to reshape itself so that it can: stop it's own tumble after launch, deploy glide wings, and survive reentry to a controlled landing so that we don't have to use rockets from Earth to go collect the payload from orbit.
It's all surely physically doable but why?
Even if orbit was the final usage destination not Earth, like to build stations, that still seems like a stretch.
2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
3. Profit!
It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module) docks and mirrors the data.
>
2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
Just to make me understand the business plan better: why would people or companies to be willing to pay much more to have their data (or computations) done in space?
The only reason that I can imagine is that the satellite which contains the data center also has a lot of sensors mounted (think military spying devices), and either for security, capacity or latency reasons you prefer the sensor data to be processed in space instead of transferring it down to earth, process it there, and sending the results back to space.
In other words: the business model is getting big money defense contracts (somewhat ignoring whether the idea really makes military sense or not).
Except space hasn't been "more secure" for nation states against other nation states in decades. US, Russia, and China all have various capabilities to destroy or steal or manipulate or tamper with satellites. It mostly doesn't happen right now because nobody is at full blown war. Shooting down satellites was expected to be a part of any superpower war since the 80s. Those weapons will be plenty effective against even massive installations in space.
Meanwhile, space gets you zero protection from the infosec threats that plague national security installations.
While I think that you gave some valid considerations that I really have to think about, this makes me question a lot more what the plan for Starcloud then is to make money.
Yes cooling is difficult. Half the "solar panels" on the ISS aren't solar panels but heat radiation panels. That's the only way you can get rid of it and it's very inefficient so you need a huge surface.
This isn’t true. The radiators on ISS are MUCH smaller than the solar panels. I know it’s every single armchair engineer’s idea that heat rejection is this impossible problem in space, but your own example of ISS proves this is untrue. Radiators are no more of a problem than solar panels.
The radiators are significantly smaller than the PV arrays, but not by a massive ratio; looks like about 1:3.6 based on the published area numbers that I could find.
It looks like the ISS active cooling system has a maximum cooling capacity that could handle the equivalent of a single-digit number of racks (down to 1 for an AI-focused rack).
The heat load of the ISS is a handful of astronauts and some equipment and whatever it absorbs from the sun. Not an entire data center or a nuclear rocket which is where the radiator discussion comes into play.
The heat load is equal to the load from the solar panels, to first order. So actually yeah, you CAN compare the size of solar panels to the size of the radiators.
seems oddly paradoxical. ISS interior at some roughly livable temperature. Exterior is ... freakin' space! Temperature gradient seems as if it should take of it ...
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
There's nothing paradoxical about it. There's no such thing as a temperature gradient in a vacuum, there's nothing to hold or measure temperature against. And thus a vacuum is a really good insulator. Which is why a vacuum flask, which ultimately became one of Thermos' most well known products, is used to control temperature both in and outside the lab.
Except a thermos has a really low emissivity, otherwise (if it had high emissivity), it’d be a poor insulator due to thermal radiation, the same reason why ISS’s radiators are much smaller than its solar panels.
I’d settle for at least a high school physics education. This idea seemed insane when I first heard about it a few weeks back. This analysis just makes it that much more crazy.
If YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I can think of some more enjoyable ways.
Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e. in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake, tbh.
Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law. The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an overblown gotcha, considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine.
The problem is not that radiators don't work. The problem is the need for liquid cooling. The heat prduced per area in the GPU/CPU is much bigger than the cooling capacity per area of your radiator.
Even here on earth, contemporary GPU racks for AI have had to move to liquid cooling because it is the only way to extract enough heat. At 120 kW for 18x 1U servers (GB200 NVL72), the power density is waaay beyond what you can do with air even.
The last time Starcloud was doing the rounds on HN, I estimated that they need to be pumping water at a flow rate of 60 000 liters per second, if you use the numbers in their whitepaper. That's a tenth of the Sacramento river, flowing in space through a network with a million junctions and hoping nothing leaks.
The point is: the power consumption requirements (quote: considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine) for satellite X is not even close to racks of hyperscaler compute.
A great interactive example of this is the game Oxygen Not Included. By the late game, you're biggest problem is your base getting too hot from the waste heat of all your industry.
If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.
The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.
For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.
Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.
I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.
> For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand wavy “modular”. I have trained large models on thousands of GPUs, hardware failure happen all the time. Last example in date: an infiniband interface flapping which ultimately had to be physically replaced.
What do you do if your DC is in space? Do you just jettison the entire multi million $ DGX pod that contains the faulty 300$ interface before sending a new one? Do you have an army of astronauts + Dragons to do this manually? Do we hope we have achieve super intelligence by then and have robots that can do this for us ?
Waving the “Modular” magic key word doesn’t really cut it for me.
> Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries.
Something tells me that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter - which will also need batteries - into space.
The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh. Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million. Realistically you'd need at least 16 hours worth of batteries to cover winter months when the night is longer, raising your battery costs to $65 million. You'd also need ≈5x more solar panels than in space, and these panels would be more expensive due to shielding from weather. 120MW of ground-based solar panels would cost around $100 million.
Assuming the $165M of panels and batteries last for a decade, and there are no maintenance costs, they'll provide 3,504,000MWh over that time for an energy cost of 4.7 cents per kWh. This is competitive with grid power in some places. It also has the advantage of not needing backup generators. But maintenance costs do exist, and it makes more financial sense to buy power as you use it rather than pay upfront.
> Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million.
A 40MW data center doesn't run constantly at 40MW. That's its load rating. Like any industrial facility, actual peak loads are probably around 80% and average loads are lower.
Also, why do you assume that the data center has to be off-grid? That's a constraint of a space-based datacenter, not a ground based datacenter.
Datacenters with storage can complement grid power.
> The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh.
If we are comparing ground based data centers to hypothetical space based ones, then consider that grid scale iron air batteries are coming soon at $20/kWh.
You quoted me saying, "There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries." and suggested, "...that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter." So I replied with some napkin calculations estimating the cost of powering a datacenter 24/7 with current solar + batteries. You could assume those solar panels and batteries are on the grid, allowing excess capacity to be sold to others, but then you need another $20 million for backup generators.
I assumed the battery + solar setup would need to provide 40MW because while datacenters usually do run below capacity, you'd also want some extra capacity to account for cooling systems, battery/panel degradation, and the fact that for some tasks (such as AI training), you actually do get close to 100% capacity for long periods of time. Feel free to cut my numbers by 20%, but I don't think that would change the bottom line: off-grid datacenters could be cost competitive in some regions, but the upfront costs don't make them worthwhile right now. If battery costs go down (as I hope they will), that will likely change.
An orbital datacenter would not need significant batteries because it would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. The panels would only be occluded during solar eclipses, which in low earth orbit last a few seconds. Starcloud is betting that launch costs will plummet but battery costs will not, and that they'll be able to cheaply solve space-specific issues related to cooling, maintenance, and reliability.
If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see I predict they will fail. A lot of people are coming to the same conclusion, but for mistaken reasons (eg: thinking that space-based datacenters would need as many batteries as ones on the ground). I'm just trying to correct that.
> If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see I predict they will fail.
Yep, we agree on that.
> off-grid datacenters could be cost competitive in some regions, but the upfront costs don't make them worthwhile right now.
I still don't understand why the alternative to space based datacenters being proposed is off-grid datacenters.
Why not compare it to grid-connected datacenters with enough behind the meter generation and storage to avoid peak grid prices? After all the ultimate comparison metric is cost (and ideally C02 emissions)
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are a little different because there are safety, economic, and physical constraints that mean they will always be worse than battery electric or gas cars. I and many others correctly predicted this.[1] For hydrogen to succeed, batteries would have to get more expensive and/or have worse energy density than they did in 2015.
Satellite data centers seem unlikely to me, but at least their feasibility doesn't require that existing stuff get more expensive/worse. Starcloud is a bet that three things will happen in the next decade:
- SpaceX Starship will succeed and drastically reduce launch costs.
- Batteries will not get 10x cheaper.
- There will be valuable applications for high latency, high performance compute (eg: AI training).
If any one of these things does not happen, Starcloud is doomed (or will have to pivot). If they all happen, Starcloud has a chance at success.
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal warrant etc.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
They don't need to do that if they go after your ground station operators.
To escape the law you need to hide or protect something on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother putting the computers in space?
I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.
> I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.
Who said that Starcloud's business model is about commercial services? At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I rather speculate that Starcloud's business model is about getting big money defense contracts.
What if you’re a stateless person? (Not an easy status to acquire these days, but any US citizen can just renounce their citizenship without getting a new one, for example.)
nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them.
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
Those kinds of countries don't tend to be the kinds of countries with active space programs.
And more critically - they have successor states.
The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
That is not how international law works, you don't get to say "we are a new country and therefore not bound by treaties that earlier forms did."
This principle was established when Nazis were convicted for war crimes at Nuremburg for violating treaties that their predecessor state the Weimar Republic signed, even after the Nazi's repudiated those treaties and claimed they were signed by an illegitimate state, and that they were a new Reich, not like the Wiemar Republic.
Basically if territory changes hand to an existing state that state will obviously still have obligations, and if a new state is formed, then generally it is assumed to still carry the obligations of the previous state. There is no "one weird trick" to avoid international law. I assure you that the diplomats and lawyers 80 years ago thought of these possibilities. They saw what resulted from the Soviet and Nazi mutual POW slaughters, and set up international law so no one could ignore it.
The 'Principality of Sealand', anywhere else on the high seas or Antarctica have their issues with practicality too, but considerably less likelihood of background radiation flipping bits...
:-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them.
Unless the company blasts its HQ and all its employees into space, no, they are very much subject to the jurisdiction of the countries they operate in. The physical location of the data center is irrelevant.
[Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]
> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
I know there's the fantasy of orbital CSAM storage able to beam obscenity to any point on the ground with zero accountability, but that is not going to survive real world politics.
>Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.
This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.
At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.
If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
I'm sorry but what logic is it you're referring to here? Is it the idea that there are fashions in corruption? If so by that logic we are probably in an era of high corruption.
Is it the idea that if I were a corrupt politician and I had equally corrupt enemies I would use my knowledge of their corruption to dirty trick them? Because ... dirty tricking them and getting them to lose all their finance at one time is not quite the same as passing a law making it difficult for everyone to get more finance from hereon out.
I'm not following exactly what logic of mine you think you've defeated with observing that there are a lot of corrupt politicians nowadays?
The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...
Yes, and also just because a space data center isn’t useful today doesn’t mean it won’t be required tomorrow. When all the computing is between the ground and some nearby satellites, of course the tradeoffs won’t be worth it.
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
We'd build it then? The problems of a space data center are extremely generic and only worth solving when you actually need one. Which would never be in low earth orbit.
> what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
How would this work? Planets orbit at different speeds, so you can't build a chain of relays to another planet. I can imagine these things orbiting planets, but is that worth it compared to ground-based systems?
You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all far more predictable.
Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating. Space radiators use a high emissivity coating. Literally every satellite manages to deal with heat rejection just fine, and with radiators (if needed) much smaller than the solar arrays.
Latency is potentially an issue if in a high orbit, but in LEO can be very small.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance is impossible? Literally, what is ISS, where this is done all the time?
Radiation shielding isn't free, but it's not necessarily that expensive either.
Orbital maintainence is not a serious problem with low cost launch.
The upside is effectively unlimited energy. No other place can give you terawatts of power. At that scale, this can be cheaper than terrestrially.
> The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays.
Modern solar panels are way more efficient than the ancient ones in ISS, at least 10x. The cooling radiators are smaller than solar panels because they are stacked and therefore effectively 5x efficient.
Unless there are at least 2x performance improvements on the cooling system, the cooling system would have to be larger than solar panels in a modern deployment.
This is false. It’s pretty straightforward to prove using Stefan-Boltzmann. Radiating from both sides at 300K, a square radiator that’s 1 meter on a side emits 920W.
Additionally, you wouldn’t use cutting edge 35% triple junction cells for a space datacenter, you’d use silicon cells like Starlink and ISS use. 22% efficient with 90% full factor, given 1350W/m^2 and thus 270W/m^2, to provide enough power for that radiator you’d need a solar panel 3.4 times as big, and that’s if you were in 24/7 sunshine. If you’re in a low orbit that’s obscured almost half the time, it’s 6-7 times as big.
Why do people keep making these obviously wrong claims when a paragraph of arithmetic shows they’re wrong? Do the math.
We’re probably thinking of it the wrong way. Instead of a single datacenter it’s more likely we build constellations and then change the way we write software.
There will probably be a lot more edge computing in the future. 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal. Space infrastructure will probably have some parallels.
That sounds like the Guoxing Aerospace / ADA Space “Three-Body Computing Constellation”, currently at 12 satellites (out of a planned 2,800).
The Chinese project involves a larger number of less powerful inference-only nodes for edge computing, compared to Starcloud's training-capable hyperscale data centers.
> 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal.
Are there many startups actually taking real advantage of edge computing? Smaller B2B places don't really need it, larger ones can just spin up per-region clusters.... and then for 2C stuff you're mainly looking at static asset stuff which is just CDNs?
Who's out there using edge computing to good effect?
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.
If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.
You're making lots of assumptions. They can put like 1000 Raspberrypi's which don't need all that much cooling and relatively little energy requirements.
For your other concerns, the risks are worth it for customers because of the main reward: No laws or governments in space! Technically, the datacenter company could be found liable but not for traffic, only for take-down refusals. Physical security is the most important security. For a lot of potential clients, simply making sure human access to the device is difficult is worth data-loss,latency and reliability issues.
If you are out of the magnetosphere, wouldn't your data be subject to way more cosmic ray interference, to the point that its actually a consideration?
In LEO, there is a lot of testing and mitigation you can do with your design to help reduce the chance and impact of radiation single events. For example, redundancy for key components, ECC for RAM, supervisor hardware, RAID or other storage tooling, etc.
Geostationary orbiters operate there during the day but this concept would position systems 100x closer to earth and well inside the protective envelope.
Yes. And most server hardware is already at least ECC ram. You may still want some light radiation shielding to prevent the worst, maybe some heavier shielding for solar flares. But beyond that, simple error correction can be baked into the software - ecc the bootloader and filesystem and you are mostly good to go
I can't comment on AMD or Intel but Apple Silicon definitely uses ECC for at least the system level cache. On top of that it performs cache healing (swapping out bad lines for spares) on every cache level every time the system boots.
There is 0 reason to put a data center in space. For every single reason beyond "investor vibes" you can accomplish the same thing on earth for a significantly lower cost.
I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into many, small ones). At fixed areal power density, if the unit heat source is Q, the plate thickness d ∝ Q^{-3/2}. (This is intuitive: the asymptotic limit is a uniform, continuous heat source exactly matched to a uniform radiation heat sink; hence heat conduction is zero). So: could one contemplate an array of very tiny CPU sub-units, grided evenly over a thin Al foil—say at the milliwatt scale with millimeter-scale separation? It'd be mostly empty space (radiator area) and interconnect. It'd be thermally self-sufficient and weigh practically nothing.
Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute for the life span of the chips powered by the sun.
A lot of these is a supercomputing Dyson swarm.
Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?
I understand that the multi-layer insulation idea doesn't accomplish much unless you're trying to reach deep cryogenic temperatures passively (as infrared telescopes do!) It's a difficult structural design which would only cut your heat budget by a small constant factor. Remember that much of that heat on the solar side is making its way over to the cold side by way of electricity—the compute units are a heat "source" of similar magnitude as the solar input itself.
edit: I think the optimal packing could be a simple rolled-up scroll, that unfurls in space into a ribbon. A very lazy design where the ribbon has no orientation control, randomly furls and knots; and only half of it is (randomly) facing the sun at any given time. And the compute units are designed work under those conditions—as they are to be robust against peers randomly disappearing to micrometeorites, to space radiation, and so forth.
Because, you could make up for everything in quantity. A small 3x5 meter cylinder of rolled-up foil stores—at the mm-thickness scale, 10's of gigawatts of compute; at the micron scale, 10's of terawatts. Of course that end is far-future sci-fi stuff!
> Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?
Even in LEO they benefit tremendously from radiation shielding, even a couple millimeters of aluminum greatly reduces the total ionizing dose. Also LEO has the issue of monatomic oxygen in the thermosphere which tends to react aggressively with the surface of anything it touches. An aluminium spacecraft structure isn't really affected, but I don't think it'd be very good for a semiconductor wafer.
I recall some sci fi like The Expanse where it’s mentioned as an aside that big industrial processes happen on asteroids or moons because you can use a big cold rock as a heat sink.
Let's start by acknowledging that there is no Starship and it's likely that the current iteration of that system is not viable. It will need to be redesigned, and no one even knows if it's possible not to mention economically feasible.
That's... bold. Yeah, the development process is different from what we're used to seeing with government-led programs, but so far most stages of starship have proven viable (ie they've worked at least once) and each launch gets closer.
This claim also seems to ignore historical context - people said the same things about Falcon, then Falcon Heavy but those launch every few days now. You're basically saying that either you know more than the single most successful and experienced team of engineers in reusable space launch vehicle world, or they're busy burning their own cash by committing some sort of fraud.
There's fraud everywhere where Musk is, so there's that. When it comes to the engineering team Starship is not engineering by the same team as Falcon - some key people left the company. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that the Starship is flawed. SpaceX doesn't hide the fact that it currently can't do 100T as promised - only 50T is likely. Unfortunately they can even get it up when empty so there's that.
To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes, all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland or a cold place. Makes no sense
The track record here I think explains "moonshot" investments on wild promises by VCs looking to cash out mid-track. It's a financial grift, not a technical challenge to actually be overcome.
Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space as it stands is a nothing burger.
The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.
Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact cut costs because it allows you to design the space without consideration of humans needing to be able to access and insert/remove servers.
The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance, the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept failures and just disable failed equipment.
Hmm, so you could launch a 100 tonne bitcoin mining rack and basically mine it with free energy 24/7? Another crazy idea for Elon, need to calc how long will it take to payback the launch cost.
Normally yes, but the L1 Lagrange point always would have an unobstructed view of the sun. Granted, L1 is a lot further away than LEO (~3x the distance to the moon), so that makes it harder and more expensive to get to
I wonder what the implication on data protection / privacy laws and the like would be. Would it be as simple as there'd be no laws, or is the location of the users still relevant?
> Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty" and that States Party shall bear international responsibility for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.
My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same weight and launch cost.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).
This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I can't scroll or zoom to fit.
Always entertaining to read how some things are so obviously wrong as to be laughable, but this is somewhere between solar roadways being feasible and hyperloop being physically possible. It's a grab for money from idiot investors imo.
(fitting in with OpenAI's current strategy to dilute control I'll admit)
The launch costs in the article look quite off from the outset.
A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg range; Starship’s main purpose is to massively reduce launch costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full reusability is in place.
Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not that far.
The original “white paper” [1] also does acknowledge that a separate launch is needed for the solar panels and radiators at a 1:1 ratio to the server launches, which is ignored here. I think the author leaned in a bit too much on their deep research AI assistant output.
Space roboticist here.
As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.
As a first cut, this would require:
- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant
- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.
- regular launches containing replacement hardware
- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon.
Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect low failure rates for a long period and it's quite likely it'd be cheaper to not replace components and just ensure enough redundancy for key systems (power, cooling, networking) that you could just shut down and disable any dead servers, and then replace the whole unit when enough parts have failed.
Exactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and then simply replace faulty servers around once per year.
Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve crossed 9 points).
https://accendoreliability.com/the-bath-tub-curve-explained/ is an interesting breakdown of bath tub curve dynamics for those curious!
Wonder if you could game that in theory by burning in the components on the surface before launch or if the launch would cause a big enough spike from the vibration damage that it's not worth it.
I suspect you'd absolutely want to burn in before launch, maybe even including simulating some mechanical stress to "shake out" more issues, but it is a valid question how much burn in is worth doing before and after launch.
Vibration testing is a completely standard part of space payload pre-flight testing. You would absolutely want to vibe-test (no, not that kind) at both a component level and fully integrated before launch.
PSA: do not vibe-code the hardware controller for your vibration testing rig. This does not pass the vibe test.
Maybe they are different types of failure modes. Solar panel semiconductors hate vibration.
And then, there is of course radiation trouble.
So those two kinds of burn-in require a launch ti space anyway.
Ah, the good old BETA distribution.
Programming and CS people somehow rarely look at that.
The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.
Redundancy is a small issue on Earth, but completely changes the calculations for space because you need more of everything, which makes the already-unfavourable space and mass requirements even less plausible.
Without backup cooling and power one small failure could take the entire facility offline.
And active cooling - which is a given at these power densities - requires complex pumps and plumbing which have to survive a launch.
The whole idea is bonkers.
IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
I have no idea if that's any more economic, but at least it solves the most obvious redundancy and deployment issues.
> The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.
The analysis is a third party analysis that among other things presumes they'll launch unmodified Nvidia racks, which would make no sense. It might be this means Starcloud are bonkers, but it might also mean the analysis is based on flawed assumptions about what they're planning to do. Or a bit of both.
> IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
This would get you significantly less redundancy other than against physical strikes than having the same redundancy in a single unit and letting you control what feeds what, the same way we have smart, redundant power supplies and cooling in every data center (and in the racks they're talking about using as the basis).
If power and cooling die faster than the servers, you'd either need to overprovision or shut down servers to compensate, but it's certainly not all or nothing.
There is a neat solve for the thermal problem that York Space systems has been advocating (based on Russian tech)… put everything in an enclosure.
https://www.yorkspacesystems.com/
Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes, there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate, but dramatically simplifies things.
even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS, they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April and it happens about once a year.
the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.
Many small satellites also increases the surface area for cooling
Like a neo-fractal surface? There's no atmosphere to wear it down.
serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space?
on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...
Yes, an orbital launch probably resets the bathtub to some degree.
I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space.
Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
Connectors have to survive the extreme vibration of a rocket launch. Parts routinely shake off boards in testing even when using non-COTS space rated packaging designed for extreme environments. That amplifies the cost of everything.
The Russians are the only ones who package their unmanned platform electronics in pressure vessels. Everyone else operates in vacuum, so no fans.
The racks mentioned in the analysis are liquid-cooled.
>>immersed in a thermally conductive resin
sounds heavy
The original article even addresses this directly. Plus hardware returns over fast enough that you'll simply be replacing modules with a smattering of dead servers with entirely new generations anyways.
Really? Even radiation hardened hardware? Aren’t there way higher size floors on the transistors?
It would be interesting to see if the failure rate across time holds true after a rocket launch and time spent in space. My guess is that it wouldn’t, but that’s just a guess.
I think it's likely the overall rate would be higher, and you might find you need more aggressive burn-in, but even then you'd need an extremely high failure rate before it's more efficient to replace components than writing them off.
The bathtub curve isn’t the same for all components of a server though. Writing off the entire server because a single ram chip or ssd or network card failed would limit the entire server to the lifetime of the weakest part. I think you would want redundant hot spares of certain components with lower mean time between failures.
We do often write off an entire server because a single component fails because the lifetime of the shortest-lifetime components is usually long enough that even on-earth with easy access it's often not worth the cost to try to repair. In an easy-to-access data centre, the component most likely to get replaced would be hot-swappable drives or power supplies, but it's been about 2 decades since the last time I worked anywhere where anyone bothered to check for failed RAM or failed CPUs to salvage a server. And lot of servers don't have network devices you can replace without soldering, and haven't for a long time outside of really high end networking.
And at sufficient scale, once you plan for that it means you can massively simplify the servers. The amount of waste a sever case suitable for hot-swapping drives adds if you're not actually going to use the capability is massive.
I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.
Electronics can be extremely resilient to vibration and g forces. Self guided artillery shells such as the M982 Excalibur include fairly normal electronics for GPS guidance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
On the ground vibration testing is a standard part of pre-launch spacecraft testing. This would trigger most (not all) vibration/G-force related failures on the ground rather than at the actual launch.
The big question mark is how many failures you cause and catch on the first cycle and how much you're just putting extra wear on the components that pass the test the first time and don't get replaced.
Yes. I think I read a blogpost from Backblaze about running their Red Pod rack mounted chassis some 10 years ago.
They would just keep the failed drives in the chassi. Maybe swap out the entire chassi if enough drives died.
A new meaning to the term "space junk"
Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there).
> The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.
6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways) and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail.
That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.
Indeed, MS had it easier with a huge, readily available cooling reservoir and a layer of water that additionally protects (a little) against cosmic rays, plus the whole thing had to be heavy enough to sink. An orbital datacenter would be in a opposite situation: all cooling is radiative, many more high-energy particles, and the weight should be as light as possible.
> In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected
Underwater pods are the polar opposite of space in terms of failure risks. They don't require a rocket launch to get there, and they further insulate the servers from radiation compared to operating on the surface of the Earth, rather than increasing exposure.
(Also, much easier to cool.)
The biggest difference is radiation. Even in LEO, you will get radiation-caused Single Events that will affect the hardware. That could be a small error or a destructive error, depending on what gets hit.
Power!? Isnt that just PV and batteries? LEO has like 1.5h orbit.
It's a Datacenter... I guess solar is what they're planning to use, but the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity well
All mass has gravity
Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.
But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well".
> "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space."
- https://medium.com/intuition/what-are-gravity-wells-3c1fb6d6...
So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to get past some boundary below which things don't have gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough gravity to matter.
Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold reached after certain mass.
"Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas Adams put it best
> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
From an education site:
> Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more massive an object is, the more it bends
They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts far more influence
https://www.howitworksdaily.com/the-solar-system-what-is-a-g...
As mentioned in the article the Starcloud design requires solar arrays that are ~2x more efficient than those deployed on the ISS. Simply scaling them up introduces more drag and weight problems as do the batteries needed to suffice for the 45 minutes of darkness the satellite will receive.
Power is solar and cooling is radiators. They did the math on it, its feasible and mostly an engineering problem now.
Did Microsoft do any of that with their submersible tests?
My feeling is that, a bit like starlink, you would just deprecate failed hardware, rather than bother with all the moving parts to replace faulty ram.
Does mean your comms and OOB tools need to be better than the average american colo provider but I would hope that would be a given.
>The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
And once you remove all the moving parts, you just fill the whole thing with oil rather than air and let heat transfer more smoothly to the radiators.
Oil, like air, doesn't convent well in 0G, you'll need pretty hefty pumps and well designed layouts to ensure no hot spots form. Heat pipes are at least passive and don't depend on gravity.
Mineral oil density is around 900kg / cubic meter.
Not sure this is such a great idea.
First, oil is much heavier than air.
Second: you still need radiators to dissipate heat that is in oil somehow.
Does using oil solve the mass problem? Liquids aren't light.
I would wager that its lighter than:
Repair robots
Enough air between servers to allow robots to access and replace componentry.
Spare componentry.
An eject/return system.
Heatpipes from every server to the radiators.
I would wager it isn't.
A light oil has a density of 700kg per cubic meter. Most common oils are denser.
Then you'd need vanes, agitators, and pumps to keep the oil moving around without forming eddies. These would need to be fairly bulky compared to fans and fan motors.
I'd have to see what an engineering team came up with, but at first glance the liquid solution would be much heavier and likely more maintenance intensive.
Why does it need to be robots?
On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.
If you want to have people you need to add in a whole lot of life support and additional safety to keep people alive. Robots are easier, since they don't die so easily. If you can get them to work at all, that is.
Life support can be on the shuttle/transport. Or it can be its own hab… space office ? Space workshop ?
What about food, water and air filtration needs?
Presumably those needs are handled on the habitat where the orbital maintenance team lives when they aren’t visiting satellite data centers.
Treat each maintenance trip like an EVA (extra vehicular activity) and bring your life support with you.
Thats life support.
That isn't going to last for much longer with the way power density projections are looking.
Consider that we've been at the point where layers of monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite some time now.
You mean like every single kitchen?
You might be thinking of 100F, a toasty summer day. 100C on the other hand (about 212F) is fatal even in zero humidity.
Well, after a while. A decently hot Finnish sauna...
No, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans.
DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim hundreds of lives a year.
This sort of work is ideal for robots. We don't do it much on Earth because you can pay a tech $20/hr to swap hardware modules, not because it's hard for robots to do.
Bingo.
It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).
(Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)
It is really hard, and it is something you need to take into careful consideration when designing a satellite.
It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being generated that you somehow have to get rid of.
It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.
Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.
The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.
The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.
That's a lot.
Wait, so we need 40MW of electricity and have 40MW of thermal energy. Can't we reuse some of that?
Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!
And in the meantime, he has responsibly redistributed and recycled their mass. Avoiding any concern that Earth's mass could be negatively impacted.
How will he overtake all the other reusable rockets at this rate?
Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won’t ever happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn’t viable. But THAT’S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap about size of radiators.
(And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about 10 years ago in 2015).
Yeah, just attach a Haven module to the data center.
I suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the landing bit
I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for parted out supercomptuers)
Spreading heavy metals in the upper atmosphere. Fun.
seems to be an industry standard
Seems like a bit of pointless whataboutism when we're still using leaded fuel in planes and helicopters
At least that's relatively local pollution and isn't raining down on me given it's banned in the entire EU.
Have you looked at the number of exemptions issued after they sunset it? Virtually nothing has changed.
I used to build and operate data center infrastructure. There is very limited reason to do anything more than a warranty replacement on a GPU. With a high quality hardware vendor that properly engineers the physical machine, failure rates can be contained to less than .5% per year. Particularly if the network has redundancy to avoid critical mass failures.
In this case, I see no reason to perform any replacements of any kind. Proper networked serial port and power controls would allow maintenance for firmware/software issues.
Thanks for the thorough comment—yes, the heat pipes etc haven’t been accounted for. Might be a future addition but the idea was to look at some key large parts and see where that takes us in terms of launch. The pipes would definitely skew the business case further. Similarly, the analysis is missing trusses.
Don’t even get me started on the costs of maintenance. I am sweating bricks just thinking of the mission architecture for assembly and how the robotic system might actually look. Unless there’s a single 4 km long deployable array (of what width?), which would be ridiculous to imagine.
What if we just integrate the hardware so it fails softly?
That is, as hardware fails, the system looses capacity.
That seems easier than replacing things on orbit, especially if StarShip becomes the cheapest way to launch to orbit because StarShip launches huge payloads, not a few rack mounted servers.
Don’t you need to look at different failure scenarios or patterns in orbit due to exposure to cosmic rays as well?
It just seems funny, I recall when servers started getting more energy dense it was a revelation to many computer folks that safe operating temps in a datacenter should be quite high.
I’d imagine operating in space has lots of revelations in store. It’s a fascinating idea with big potential impact… but I wouldn’t expect this investment to pay out!
Not to mention radiation hardening. The soft error rate alone on these single digit nm chips would be massive.
Seems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.
If mass is going to be as cheap as is needed for this to work anyway, there's no reason you can't just use people like in a normal datacenter.
Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time.
Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation?
I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the materials later.
The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty. For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle.
This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
Then just provide spin gravity for the crew habitat.
“just”
It's theoretically possible for sure, but we've never done that in practice and it's far from trivial.
Good points. Spin “gravity” is also quite challenging to acclimatize to because it’s not uniform like planetary gravity. Lots of nausea and unintuitive gyroscopic effects when moving. It’s definitely not a “just”
Yeah, “just.”
Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well. It’s a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn’t decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a mystery.
Relevant Scott Manley video: https://youtu.be/nxeMoaxUpWk?si=QOO9KJCGS_Q8JeyR
Relevant tom Scott video: https://youtu.be/bJ_seXo-Enc?si=m_QjHpLaL8d8Cp8b
There is a lot of research, but it’s not as simple as operating under real gravity. Makes many movements harder and can result in getting sick.
1g of acceleration is enormous compared to a child in a merry go round actually.
> And Gemini tested it once as well.
From Wikipedia:
They were able to generate a small amount of artificial gravity, about 0.00015 g
So yes, you need an effect 60 000 times stronger than this.
And you want that to be relatively uniform over the size of an astronaut so you need a very big merry go round.
Nuclear fission is also a basic feature of physics, that doesn't mean engineering a nuclear power plant is straightforward.
It’s not, actually. I’ve swung my kids around at multiple gees.
Kids enjoy having their head and feet at different levels of gravity.
When was the last time you spun yourself around in a desk chair?
If it’s that straightforward, why haven’t you done it?
The economics don't work the same on earth.
What makes the economics better in space?
Are there any unique use-cases waiting to be unleashed?
Regular maintenance methods are cheap on earth and infeasible in space.
Keep in mind economics is all about allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses.
No, they don’t work the same. They are much more difficult in every way in space.
I think what you actually do is let it gradually degrade over time and then launch a new one.
What, why would you fly out and replace it? It'd be much cheaper just to launch more.
It sounds like building it on the moon would be better.
Depends what you want to use it for. Ping time to the moon and back is about 2.5 seconds best case.
you don't replace it, you just let it fail and over time the datacenter wears out.
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I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things:
1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things.
2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radiating surfaces need to be in harmony during the whole mission.
Preventing the vehicle from getting too hot is usually a much bigger problem than preventing it from getting too cold. This might be surprising because laypeople usually associate space with cold. In reality you can always heat if you have energy but cooling is hard if all you have is radiation and you are operating at a fixed and relatively low temperature level.
The bottom line is that running a datacenter in space makes not much sense from a thermal standpoint and there must be other compelling reasons for a decision to do so.
It's like a thermos flask where the spaceship is the contents and space is the insulating vacuum.
They address that issue in the link; The propose a 63m^2 radiator for heat dissipation.
Sure it is doable. My point is that at room temperature convection is a so much more efficient heat transfer mechanism that I wonder why someone would even think about doing without it.
The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399181 says the ISS radiator is 42m^2. Radiating so much more at just 63m^2 seems hype-based.
The caveat to this is that that this also dependent on where in the lifecycle of the satellite you are at. For example after launch, you might just have your survival heaters on, which will keep you within generally an industrial range (e.g. >-40c), and you might not reach higher temps until you hit nominal operations. But a lot of the hardware specs for temperature often are closer standard "industrial" specs rather than special mil or NASA specs.
What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?
Room temperature on earth. In physics room temperature is used as a technical term and actually pretty universally defined as 20°C (293.15 K).
Traditionally in European papers it used to be 18°C, so if Einstein and Schrödinger talk about room temperature it is that.
I've heard in chemistry and stamp collecting they use 25°C but that is heresy.
Maybe you did mean heresy, which would be funny (but a perfectly valid opinion to have)...
But I suspect that's a typo, and you meant 'heresay'? :D
Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif).
Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast...
People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of complaining about her sudden use of the force where previously she did not show any such talents.)
Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
But I think what people/movies don't understand is that there's almost no conductive thermal transfer going on, because there's not much matter to do it. It's all radiation, which is why heat is a much bigger problem, because you can only radiate heat away, you can't conduct it. And whatever you use to radiate heat away can also potentially receive radiation from things like the Sun, making your craft even hotter.
> Well empty space has a temperature of roughly -270c...so that's pretty cold.
What is this “empty space” you speak of? Genuinely empty space is empty and does not have a clearly defined temperature. If you are in space in our universe, very far from everything else, then the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is what matters, and that’s a few K. If you’re in our solar system in an orbit near Earth, the radiation field is wildly far from any sort of thermal equilibrium, and the steady state temperature of a passive black body will depend strongly on whether it’s in the Earth’s shadow, and it’s a lot hotter than a few K when exposed to sunlight.
You know exactly what the term "empty space" means and of course it does not mean empty in absolute terms.
Wouldn't a body essentially freeze dry as a wet being exposed to vacuum? I.e. the temperature of the space is still irrelevant and the cooling comes from vaporization.
Any exposed fluids (mostly saliva) technically boils but you can think of it as evaporation to avoid layperson associations with heat -- it's all about low pressure, not about heat in layperson terms.
Whether you freeze or not depends on whether you're in the sun or not. Spacesuits are white to reflect as much light as feasible mostly to keep the astronauts from cooking. For example, surface of the moon can heat to 120° C / 250° Fahrenheit / 400 K.
Over time I'm sure all the liquids will manage to escape. Here's what happens to blood not contained by blood vessels and skin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU3MOLqA3WA
I'm reading through the Expanse books and a passage that I read after seeing your comment jumped out at me. It's a quote from Havelock:
"As a boy living planetside, he had always thought of space as cold. And while that was technically true, mostly it was a vacuum. And so a ship, mostly, was a thermos. The heat from their bodies and systems would bleed into the void off over years and decades of it had the chance."
So at least the books got it right!
It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough fluids. I don’t know whether you freeze over or dry out first, but I’m sure someone at NASA has done the math.
2001 did it pretty close to right, but watch it with normies and they'll laugh at it because it doesn't meet their expectations.
Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place?
Free cooling?
Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive.
Access to solar energy?
Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place?
Physical isolation and security?
Against manipulation maybe, but not against denial of service. Willfully damaged satellite is something I expect to see in the news in the foreseeable future.
Low latency comms?
Latency is limited by distance and speed of light. Everyone with a satellite internet connections knows that low latency is not a particular strength of it.
Marketing and PR?
That, probably.
EDIT:
Thought of another one:
Environmental impact?
No land use, no thermal stress for rivers on one hand but the huge overhead of a space launch on the other.
I've talked to the founder of Starcloud about this, there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the future, and further and further out into space. He thinks now is the right time to learn how to compute up there because people will want to process, and maybe orchestrate processing between many devices, in space. He's fully aware of all of the objections in this hn comments section, he just doesn't believe they are insurmountable and he believes interoperable compute hubs in space will be required over the next 20/30 years. He's in his mid 20s, so it seems like a reasonable mission to be on to me.
Seems far more likely that the "data generative stuff" will get smaller and cheaper to run (like cell phones with on-device models) much faster than "run a giant supercomputer in orbit" will become easy.
My headlights aren't good enough so I'm unsure but generally that maps. To me the interoperability part is what is interesting, your data and my data in real time being consumed by some understanding agent doing automated research? I could imagine putting something like a Stoffel MPC layer in there, then nations states can more easily work together? I presume space data/research will be highly competitive, even friendly nations may want to combine data without knowing the underneath. We're so far out here that it's kinda silly, but I don't think we're out to lunch? Have a great weekend Chris! :)
There are certainly nation states that are looking for ways to 1) prevent their satellites colliding with one another (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/850.pdf) and 2) being able to do forms of computation that might be risky to do on earth for national security reasons.
> forms of computation that might be risky to do on earth for national security reasons
Such as...?
Earth is the closest spot for most of space. It makes most sense for satellites to send data back to Earth. They would have to find a use where with lots of compute but latency really matters.
For farther out, computer on ships, stations, or bases makes sense, but that is different than free floating satellites. They already have power, cooling, and maintenance.
It is like saying there should be compute in the air for all the airplanes flying around.
> there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the future
Why?
Because near all analysts have it on somewhere between a 5% and 7% CAGR.
That didn't answer the question but just repeat the original claim differently. Where are they getting those numbers?
The Forrester report I'm using to invest in this stuff, I've read some Gartner on it also.
My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment.
Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.
This might be true, but unrealistic.
If you run amiss of US (or EU) regulators, they will never say, "well, it's in space, out of our jurisdiction!".
They will make your life hell on Earth.
Space is terrible for that. There's only a handful of countries with launch vehicles and/or launch sites. You obviously need to be in their good graces for the launch to be approved.
If you want permissive regulatory environment, just spend the money buying a Mercedes for some politician in a corrupt country, you'll get a lot further...
I don't see it.
The US government does questionable things to people in places like Guantanamo Bay because the constitution gives those people rights if they set foot on US soil. Data doesn't have rights, and governments have the capability to waive their own laws for things like national security.
Corporations operating in space are bound to the laws of the country the spacecraft belongs to, so there's no difference between a data harbor in Whogivesastan vs. a data harbor on a spacecraft operated by Whogivesastan.
A bit like international waters. I wonder when we'll see the first space pirates.
> A bit like international waters.
Which is a good analogy; international waters are far from lawless.
You're still subject to the law of your flag state, just as if you were on their territory. In addition to that, you're subject to everyone's jurisdiction if you commit certain crimes - including piracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction
Quick, we need a new Cryptonomicon, in space!
Ability to raise money from gullible investors.
One of the answers in OP is
> A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which contributes to climate change—so migrating to space would alleviate the toll on Earth’s thermal budget. This seems like a compelling environmental argument. TDCs already consume about 1-1.5% of global electricity and it’s safe to assume that this will only grow in the pursuit of AGI.
The comparison here is between solar powered TDCs in Space vs TDCs on Earth.
- A TDC in space contributes to global warming due to mining+manufacturing emissions and spaceflight emissions.
- A comparable TDC on Earth would be solar+battery run. You will likely need a larger solar panel array than in space. Note a solar panel in operation does not really contribute to global warming. So the question is whether the additional Earth solar panel+battery manufacturing emissions are greater than launching the smaller array + TDC into space.
I would guess launching into space has much higher emissions.
Low Earth orbits are in the dark about 49% of time, but suffer no seasonal variability. Low Earth orbit is also very hot, and regular solar panels become less efficient the hotter they get.
The only sensible way to count pollution from solar+battery power manufacturing & disposal is do it on a per kWh basis.
The size of solar panels and radiators needed for an actual data center would be crazy in LEO. LEO still touches the atmosphere. ISS needs to be pushed higher regularly because of atmospheric drag.
Apparently the only way to make renewable energy cool is to put it in space
It’s actually very hot in low Earth orbit.
Speed of light is actually quite an advantage, in theory at least. Speed of light in optical fiber is quite a bit slower (takes 50% longer) than in vacuum.
Not really. Fiber is more 2/3 of free space propagation and that puts the break-even point of direct fiber connection vs LEO up- and downlink at a geodesic distance of about 12000 km. So, for most data centers you want to reach a fiber is the better option.
On the environmental front, when it comes to the of life the entire data center is incinerated in the Earth's upper atmosphere
> Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place?
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
Not every datacenter use case is latency sensitive. Backup storage or GPU compute, for example.
But then why bother with the added expense of launching into space? It's definitely not for environmental reasons.
I think you’re a little too dismissive of the 24/7 always available solar power, and the free cooling.
There’s no free cooling in space.
In space there’s no ambient environment to speak of, so you’re limited to radiative cooling, which is massively inferior to refrigeration.
There’s also no 24/7 solar in low Earth orbit, which is where you want to be for latency and serviceable.
That’s actually something I never considered. In a true vacuum since there are no particles, temperature is undefined.
With the added bonus of there being no ozone layer to absorb UV.
Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.
Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.
Coming from someone in this space, SpinLaunch has more legs to stand on than Starcloud.
There was a video from Scott Manley about this several years back. And he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit. And they haven't yet.
> he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit.
I am a big Manley fan, but I don't understand that. Fuel, oxidizers, and water can all likely withstand 10,000 G loads, and are quite useful in orbit. Also, IIRC correctly one big factor regarding SpinLaunch's G load is that it builds slowly.
Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.
Here is how to think about them: It doesn't matter how open your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea and working hard and never giving up developing strength and technique to jump higher.
Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping harder.
That's the parent's joke
SpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back to Earth.
The atmosphere and gravity are only some of the problems with spinlaunch. Spinlaunch rotates at 600 rpm. That means the projectile is tumbling at 600 rpm when let go.
Maybe for solid masses not in an atmosphere, meaning the payload can be a ball and doesn't have to have a pencil shape and doesn't need to point in any particular direction, maybe that can work to simply lob rocks or aluminum ingots into earth orbit.
Except just think about that for a second. Lobbing rocks from the moon towards earth...
And why would we want to do this anyway? What resources are so valuable on the moon that it's worth getting them that way?
The payload would actually have to have rockets, fuel, computers, heat shielding, and a means to reshape itself so that it can: stop it's own tumble after launch, deploy glide wings, and survive reentry to a controlled landing so that we don't have to use rockets from Earth to go collect the payload from orbit.
It's all surely physically doable but why?
Even if orbit was the final usage destination not Earth, like to build stations, that still seems like a stretch.
That's how you get another Theranos.
If I'm reading this correctly, the idea is
1. YOLO. Yeet big data into orbit!
2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
3. Profit!
It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module) docks and mirrors the data.
> 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
Just to make me understand the business plan better: why would people or companies to be willing to pay much more to have their data (or computations) done in space?
The only reason that I can imagine is that the satellite which contains the data center also has a lot of sensors mounted (think military spying devices), and either for security, capacity or latency reasons you prefer the sensor data to be processed in space instead of transferring it down to earth, process it there, and sending the results back to space.
In other words: the business model is getting big money defense contracts (somewhat ignoring whether the idea really makes military sense or not).
Except space hasn't been "more secure" for nation states against other nation states in decades. US, Russia, and China all have various capabilities to destroy or steal or manipulate or tamper with satellites. It mostly doesn't happen right now because nobody is at full blown war. Shooting down satellites was expected to be a part of any superpower war since the 80s. Those weapons will be plenty effective against even massive installations in space.
Meanwhile, space gets you zero protection from the infosec threats that plague national security installations.
While I think that you gave some valid considerations that I really have to think about, this makes me question a lot more what the plan for Starcloud then is to make money.
Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.
Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
Latency? Highly variable.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
Radiation shielding? Not free.
Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.
There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
Yes cooling is difficult. Half the "solar panels" on the ISS aren't solar panels but heat radiation panels. That's the only way you can get rid of it and it's very inefficient so you need a huge surface.
This isn’t true. The radiators on ISS are MUCH smaller than the solar panels. I know it’s every single armchair engineer’s idea that heat rejection is this impossible problem in space, but your own example of ISS proves this is untrue. Radiators are no more of a problem than solar panels.
The radiators are significantly smaller than the PV arrays, but not by a massive ratio; looks like about 1:3.6 based on the published area numbers that I could find.
It looks like the ISS active cooling system has a maximum cooling capacity that could handle the equivalent of a single-digit number of racks (down to 1 for an AI-focused rack).
if you were looking at a 10' tall spider and a 36' tall spider, yes they'd both be big but it'd be fair to say that the 10' one is much smaller....
The heat load of the ISS is a handful of astronauts and some equipment and whatever it absorbs from the sun. Not an entire data center or a nuclear rocket which is where the radiator discussion comes into play.
The heat load is equal to the load from the solar panels, to first order. So actually yeah, you CAN compare the size of solar panels to the size of the radiators.
seems oddly paradoxical. ISS interior at some roughly livable temperature. Exterior is ... freakin' space! Temperature gradient seems as if it should take of it ...
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
There's nothing paradoxical about it. There's no such thing as a temperature gradient in a vacuum, there's nothing to hold or measure temperature against. And thus a vacuum is a really good insulator. Which is why a vacuum flask, which ultimately became one of Thermos' most well known products, is used to control temperature both in and outside the lab.
Except a thermos has a really low emissivity, otherwise (if it had high emissivity), it’d be a poor insulator due to thermal radiation, the same reason why ISS’s radiators are much smaller than its solar panels.
there literally is nothing to absorb the heat. Conduction and convection are out, all you got is radiation.
new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children of a dead earth
I’d settle for at least a high school physics education. This idea seemed insane when I first heard about it a few weeks back. This analysis just makes it that much more crazy.
If YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I can think of some more enjoyable ways.
they got the sun synchronous orbit part right.
Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e. in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake, tbh.
Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law. The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an overblown gotcha, considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine.
The problem is not that radiators don't work. The problem is the need for liquid cooling. The heat prduced per area in the GPU/CPU is much bigger than the cooling capacity per area of your radiator.
Even here on earth, contemporary GPU racks for AI have had to move to liquid cooling because it is the only way to extract enough heat. At 120 kW for 18x 1U servers (GB200 NVL72), the power density is waaay beyond what you can do with air even.
The last time Starcloud was doing the rounds on HN, I estimated that they need to be pumping water at a flow rate of 60 000 liters per second, if you use the numbers in their whitepaper. That's a tenth of the Sacramento river, flowing in space through a network with a million junctions and hoping nothing leaks.
There's a difference between a couple humans (n150W) and say JUST one H200 DGX (8700W).
Shouldn't the radiators be directly proportional to the area of the solar panels? (Since there's no one munching on food on board.)
yes, exactly. they are going to be absolutely huge and add to launch and engineering costs.
Every part does by definition add to launch and engineering costs…
The point is that heat radiation is not the main deal-breaker regarding this project as some comments in this subthread insinuate.
The point is: the power consumption requirements (quote: considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine) for satellite X is not even close to racks of hyperscaler compute.
yes. in general as a rule of thumb your radiator size must scale proportionally to your solar panel size, as parent says:
> The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators.
A great interactive example of this is the game Oxygen Not Included. By the late game, you're biggest problem is your base getting too hot from the waste heat of all your industry.
If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.
The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.
For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.
Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.
I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.
1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
You can also drink from a shoe. It's absolutely possible.
And it enjoyed some popularity. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_boot
And there you've cut to the chase.
I was implying an unspoken obvious "but why would you?"
But of course the answer I missed was you don't, you make money from people who, for whatever reason, want to drink from shoes.
> For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand wavy “modular”. I have trained large models on thousands of GPUs, hardware failure happen all the time. Last example in date: an infiniband interface flapping which ultimately had to be physically replaced. What do you do if your DC is in space? Do you just jettison the entire multi million $ DGX pod that contains the faulty 300$ interface before sending a new one? Do you have an army of astronauts + Dragons to do this manually? Do we hope we have achieve super intelligence by then and have robots that can do this for us ?
Waving the “Modular” magic key word doesn’t really cut it for me.
> Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries.
Something tells me that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter - which will also need batteries - into space.
The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh. Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million. Realistically you'd need at least 16 hours worth of batteries to cover winter months when the night is longer, raising your battery costs to $65 million. You'd also need ≈5x more solar panels than in space, and these panels would be more expensive due to shielding from weather. 120MW of ground-based solar panels would cost around $100 million.
Assuming the $165M of panels and batteries last for a decade, and there are no maintenance costs, they'll provide 3,504,000MWh over that time for an energy cost of 4.7 cents per kWh. This is competitive with grid power in some places. It also has the advantage of not needing backup generators. But maintenance costs do exist, and it makes more financial sense to buy power as you use it rather than pay upfront.
https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
> Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million.
A 40MW data center doesn't run constantly at 40MW. That's its load rating. Like any industrial facility, actual peak loads are probably around 80% and average loads are lower.
Also, why do you assume that the data center has to be off-grid? That's a constraint of a space-based datacenter, not a ground based datacenter.
Datacenters with storage can complement grid power.
> The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh.
If we are comparing ground based data centers to hypothetical space based ones, then consider that grid scale iron air batteries are coming soon at $20/kWh.
https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
You quoted me saying, "There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries." and suggested, "...that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter." So I replied with some napkin calculations estimating the cost of powering a datacenter 24/7 with current solar + batteries. You could assume those solar panels and batteries are on the grid, allowing excess capacity to be sold to others, but then you need another $20 million for backup generators.
I assumed the battery + solar setup would need to provide 40MW because while datacenters usually do run below capacity, you'd also want some extra capacity to account for cooling systems, battery/panel degradation, and the fact that for some tasks (such as AI training), you actually do get close to 100% capacity for long periods of time. Feel free to cut my numbers by 20%, but I don't think that would change the bottom line: off-grid datacenters could be cost competitive in some regions, but the upfront costs don't make them worthwhile right now. If battery costs go down (as I hope they will), that will likely change.
An orbital datacenter would not need significant batteries because it would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. The panels would only be occluded during solar eclipses, which in low earth orbit last a few seconds. Starcloud is betting that launch costs will plummet but battery costs will not, and that they'll be able to cheaply solve space-specific issues related to cooling, maintenance, and reliability.
If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see I predict they will fail. A lot of people are coming to the same conclusion, but for mistaken reasons (eg: thinking that space-based datacenters would need as many batteries as ones on the ground). I'm just trying to correct that.
> If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see I predict they will fail.
Yep, we agree on that.
> off-grid datacenters could be cost competitive in some regions, but the upfront costs don't make them worthwhile right now.
I still don't understand why the alternative to space based datacenters being proposed is off-grid datacenters.
Why not compare it to grid-connected datacenters with enough behind the meter generation and storage to avoid peak grid prices? After all the ultimate comparison metric is cost (and ideally C02 emissions)
Same with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, inventing a detour because it sounds cool and ultimately don't work out because Occam's Razor.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are a little different because there are safety, economic, and physical constraints that mean they will always be worse than battery electric or gas cars. I and many others correctly predicted this.[1] For hydrogen to succeed, batteries would have to get more expensive and/or have worse energy density than they did in 2015.
Satellite data centers seem unlikely to me, but at least their feasibility doesn't require that existing stuff get more expensive/worse. Starcloud is a bet that three things will happen in the next decade:
- SpaceX Starship will succeed and drastically reduce launch costs.
- Batteries will not get 10x cheaper.
- There will be valuable applications for high latency, high performance compute (eg: AI training).
If any one of these things does not happen, Starcloud is doomed (or will have to pivot). If they all happen, Starcloud has a chance at success.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875749
It does not make sense, you can do the same thing on Earth without launching it into space.
The entire launch thing is completely not necessary and is entirely detrimental to the product.
Let me alert all the NIMBY folks, let them know that data centers will be blocking their view of the moon and casting shadows on their backyards.
Just give all those astronomers mockup telescopes with little screens creating the fancy images they want inside them.
They will calm down.
Just another good proof of paper being an ideal medium for fiction
Any purported advantages have to contend with the fact that sending the modules costs millions of dollars. Tens to hundred millions
Of course, they're soft targets in space war too, they could generate lots of debris.
Man I read “AI training in a high latency self sufficient satellite orbiting earth” as the start of a Sci-Fi novel…
Attach that satellite to all the imaging satellites, what's it going to be learning about?
Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal warrant etc.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...
They don't need to do that if they go after your ground station operators.
To escape the law you need to hide or protect something on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother putting the computers in space?
Because you need an enormous amount of energy to run the servers. You may hide the downlinks but you still need power.
I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.
> I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.
Who said that Starcloud's business model is about commercial services? At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I rather speculate that Starcloud's business model is about getting big money defense contracts.
Yeah exactly. We’re riffing on how implausible that is, right?
ASAT missiles have existed since the 80s and multiple countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy something in space.
Meanwhile, you, the actual human being the government wants to coerce, are still on the earth, where someone can grab you and beat you with a wrench
Maybe not so much... they'll just grab you. Obligatory XKCD.
https://xkcd.com/538/
Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's still a lifetime supply...
What if you’re a stateless person? (Not an easy status to acquire these days, but any US citizen can just renounce their citizenship without getting a new one, for example.)
Being stateless has an end result of "literally anyone can fuck with you" more than "no one can fuck with you".
What if you just launch it in secret and don't tell anybody?
Unless you invent some new launch method, a dozen or so countries will immediately know.
Shortly afterwards, amateur astronomers will spot it. https://gizmodo.com/amateur-astronomer-catches-fleeting-glim...
Oh drat, I thought I'd found the answer.
nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them.
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
Those kinds of countries don't tend to be the kinds of countries with active space programs.
And more critically - they have successor states.
The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
Generally though, countries don’t disappear: they have a predecessor and a successor.
A successor may take possession of the land, but that doesn't mean it will also take responsibility for the previous government's liabilities.
That is why international treaties come with implicit or explicit enforcement options
That is not how international law works, you don't get to say "we are a new country and therefore not bound by treaties that earlier forms did."
This principle was established when Nazis were convicted for war crimes at Nuremburg for violating treaties that their predecessor state the Weimar Republic signed, even after the Nazi's repudiated those treaties and claimed they were signed by an illegitimate state, and that they were a new Reich, not like the Wiemar Republic.
Basically if territory changes hand to an existing state that state will obviously still have obligations, and if a new state is formed, then generally it is assumed to still carry the obligations of the previous state. There is no "one weird trick" to avoid international law. I assure you that the diplomats and lawyers 80 years ago thought of these possibilities. They saw what resulted from the Soviet and Nazi mutual POW slaughters, and set up international law so no one could ignore it.
The 'Principality of Sealand', anywhere else on the high seas or Antarctica have their issues with practicality too, but considerably less likelihood of background radiation flipping bits...
:-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them.
Unless the company blasts its HQ and all its employees into space, no, they are very much subject to the jurisdiction of the countries they operate in. The physical location of the data center is irrelevant.
Exactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not subject to their jurisdiction.
[Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]
> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
I know there's the fantasy of orbital CSAM storage able to beam obscenity to any point on the ground with zero accountability, but that is not going to survive real world politics.
Given that most of the major powers have satellite shootdown ability this isn't worth all that much if you're causing enough trouble.
Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
>Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.
This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.
At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.
If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
By that logic, politicians around the world would make it illegal for themselves to trade stock on their insider knowledge. I'm not holding my breath.
See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
huh?..
I'm sorry but what logic is it you're referring to here? Is it the idea that there are fashions in corruption? If so by that logic we are probably in an era of high corruption.
Is it the idea that if I were a corrupt politician and I had equally corrupt enemies I would use my knowledge of their corruption to dirty trick them? Because ... dirty tricking them and getting them to lose all their finance at one time is not quite the same as passing a law making it difficult for everyone to get more finance from hereon out.
I'm not following exactly what logic of mine you think you've defeated with observing that there are a lot of corrupt politicians nowadays?
Who would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind of value?
Dozens upon dozens of illicit shady bulletproof hosting providers.
2026, we will get ransomware from space!
The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in theory they actually could get something like that setup if they wanted.
> 2026, we will get ransomware from space!
Ahem, cloud ransomware.
Anyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter satellite.
Would be cheaper to do in international waters, even if you needed security to protect it.
Pretty worthless unless the execs live in space too.
Why? Its not like we put execs in jail for allowing their companies to do terrible things under their watch.
Not often enough, but it does happen.
The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...
Yes, and also just because a space data center isn’t useful today doesn’t mean it won’t be required tomorrow. When all the computing is between the ground and some nearby satellites, of course the tradeoffs won’t be worth it.
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
We'd build it then? The problems of a space data center are extremely generic and only worth solving when you actually need one. Which would never be in low earth orbit.
> what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
How would this work? Planets orbit at different speeds, so you can't build a chain of relays to another planet. I can imagine these things orbiting planets, but is that worth it compared to ground-based systems?
You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all far more predictable.
Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating. Space radiators use a high emissivity coating. Literally every satellite manages to deal with heat rejection just fine, and with radiators (if needed) much smaller than the solar arrays.
Latency is potentially an issue if in a high orbit, but in LEO can be very small.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance is impossible? Literally, what is ISS, where this is done all the time?
Radiation shielding isn't free, but it's not necessarily that expensive either.
Orbital maintainence is not a serious problem with low cost launch.
The upside is effectively unlimited energy. No other place can give you terawatts of power. At that scale, this can be cheaper than terrestrially.
> The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays.
Modern solar panels are way more efficient than the ancient ones in ISS, at least 10x. The cooling radiators are smaller than solar panels because they are stacked and therefore effectively 5x efficient.
Unless there are at least 2x performance improvements on the cooling system, the cooling system would have to be larger than solar panels in a modern deployment.
This is false. It’s pretty straightforward to prove using Stefan-Boltzmann. Radiating from both sides at 300K, a square radiator that’s 1 meter on a side emits 920W.
Additionally, you wouldn’t use cutting edge 35% triple junction cells for a space datacenter, you’d use silicon cells like Starlink and ISS use. 22% efficient with 90% full factor, given 1350W/m^2 and thus 270W/m^2, to provide enough power for that radiator you’d need a solar panel 3.4 times as big, and that’s if you were in 24/7 sunshine. If you’re in a low orbit that’s obscured almost half the time, it’s 6-7 times as big.
Why do people keep making these obviously wrong claims when a paragraph of arithmetic shows they’re wrong? Do the math.
I think the upside is that it’s VC fodder. I imagine their thinking went about as far as “wow, what if we like….did AI…but in space?!”
We’re probably thinking of it the wrong way. Instead of a single datacenter it’s more likely we build constellations and then change the way we write software.
There will probably be a lot more edge computing in the future. 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal. Space infrastructure will probably have some parallels.
That sounds like the Guoxing Aerospace / ADA Space “Three-Body Computing Constellation”, currently at 12 satellites (out of a planned 2,800).
The Chinese project involves a larger number of less powerful inference-only nodes for edge computing, compared to Starcloud's training-capable hyperscale data centers.
[1] Andrew Jones. "China launches first of 2,800 satellites for AI space computing constellation". Spacenews, May 14, 2025. https://spacenews.com/china-launches-first-of-2800-satellite... [2] Ling Xin. "China launches satellites to start building the world’s first supercomputer in orbit". South China Morning Post, May 15, 2025. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3310506/chin... [3] Ben Turner. "China is building a constellation of AI supercomputers in space — and just launched the first pieces". June 2, 2025. https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-is-bu...
> 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal.
Are there many startups actually taking real advantage of edge computing? Smaller B2B places don't really need it, larger ones can just spin up per-region clusters.... and then for 2C stuff you're mainly looking at static asset stuff which is just CDNs?
Who's out there using edge computing to good effect?
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.
That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.
Maybe.
If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.
You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely
Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
Sounds like a great investment for SoftBank
> Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
I can see it now - orbiting crypto mines power on at dawn, die off at dusk, Oscar-7 style
Why do you need a lot of batteries with the right orbit can’t you have solar energy 24/7?
You're making lots of assumptions. They can put like 1000 Raspberrypi's which don't need all that much cooling and relatively little energy requirements.
For your other concerns, the risks are worth it for customers because of the main reward: No laws or governments in space! Technically, the datacenter company could be found liable but not for traffic, only for take-down refusals. Physical security is the most important security. For a lot of potential clients, simply making sure human access to the device is difficult is worth data-loss,latency and reliability issues.
Bandwidth - negligible
reliable energy is the only (maybe valid) reason. you can get yourself into a sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit and avoid shading by the earth.
> There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
It's outside of any jurisdiction, this is a dream come true for a libertarian oligarch.
It's not, all objects in space fall under the jurisdiction of the country that launched the rocket.
If you are out of the magnetosphere, wouldn't your data be subject to way more cosmic ray interference, to the point that its actually a consideration?
In LEO, there is a lot of testing and mitigation you can do with your design to help reduce the chance and impact of radiation single events. For example, redundancy for key components, ECC for RAM, supervisor hardware, RAID or other storage tooling, etc.
Geostationary orbiters operate there during the day but this concept would position systems 100x closer to earth and well inside the protective envelope.
ECC everything?
Yes. And most server hardware is already at least ECC ram. You may still want some light radiation shielding to prevent the worst, maybe some heavier shielding for solar flares. But beyond that, simple error correction can be baked into the software - ecc the bootloader and filesystem and you are mostly good to go
Isn't ECC only applied to RAM? Do any current gen CPUs have ECC cache?
I can't comment on AMD or Intel but Apple Silicon definitely uses ECC for at least the system level cache. On top of that it performs cache healing (swapping out bad lines for spares) on every cache level every time the system boots.
There is 0 reason to put a data center in space. For every single reason beyond "investor vibes" you can accomplish the same thing on earth for a significantly lower cost.
Cooling things in space is insanely difficult, as there’s no conduction or convection.
Cooling is one of the main challenges in designing data centers.
> Starcloud’s target is to achieve a 5 GW cluster with solar arrays spanning 4 km by 4 km
Doesn't this massively surface area also mean a proportionately large risk of getting damaged by orbital debris?
Yes. You'd have to design them to be able to take a certain level of hits.
This is already a thing on the ISS, Shuttle, Voyager probes, etc.
A random thought, having server units spring loaded, when a unit fails eject it and use the stored energy as an orbital boost. Ablative servers!
My facile policies would fix this
> Data centres require tremendous amounts of energy
Set up a pollution tax on losers like coal, oil, methane, and let the market pick winners like solar, wind, nuclear
> A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which contributes to climate change
Pollution tax would fix this
> Real estate for data centres is a massive bottleneck and this land could be used for other purposes
Not really. They're super high density. A land value tax would fix this.
People will really put computers in space before reading Henry George. What has this country come to?
I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into many, small ones). At fixed areal power density, if the unit heat source is Q, the plate thickness d ∝ Q^{-3/2}. (This is intuitive: the asymptotic limit is a uniform, continuous heat source exactly matched to a uniform radiation heat sink; hence heat conduction is zero). So: could one contemplate an array of very tiny CPU sub-units, grided evenly over a thin Al foil—say at the milliwatt scale with millimeter-scale separation? It'd be mostly empty space (radiator area) and interconnect. It'd be thermally self-sufficient and weigh practically nothing.
Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute for the life span of the chips powered by the sun.
A lot of these is a supercomputing Dyson swarm.
Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?
I understand that the multi-layer insulation idea doesn't accomplish much unless you're trying to reach deep cryogenic temperatures passively (as infrared telescopes do!) It's a difficult structural design which would only cut your heat budget by a small constant factor. Remember that much of that heat on the solar side is making its way over to the cold side by way of electricity—the compute units are a heat "source" of similar magnitude as the solar input itself.
edit: I think the optimal packing could be a simple rolled-up scroll, that unfurls in space into a ribbon. A very lazy design where the ribbon has no orientation control, randomly furls and knots; and only half of it is (randomly) facing the sun at any given time. And the compute units are designed work under those conditions—as they are to be robust against peers randomly disappearing to micrometeorites, to space radiation, and so forth.
Because, you could make up for everything in quantity. A small 3x5 meter cylinder of rolled-up foil stores—at the mm-thickness scale, 10's of gigawatts of compute; at the micron scale, 10's of terawatts. Of course that end is far-future sci-fi stuff!
> Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?
Even in LEO they benefit tremendously from radiation shielding, even a couple millimeters of aluminum greatly reduces the total ionizing dose. Also LEO has the issue of monatomic oxygen in the thermosphere which tends to react aggressively with the surface of anything it touches. An aluminium spacecraft structure isn't really affected, but I don't think it'd be very good for a semiconductor wafer.
Radiation at desirable operating temperatures is a relatively weak means of heat transport, hence spreaders.
Only a big power-efficient chip like M2 Ultra could survive if it could _only_ radiate from one side of the wafer into CMB.
The rest of the silicon will become molten at 100% TDP: H100, Xeon, Core, EPYC, Ryzen.
Most would be over 400C at 1% TDP.
Conduction and convection are linear or close and are effective at desirable temperatures, whereas thermal radiation is quartic and highly convex.
Makes space based data centers sound impractical.
I recall some sci fi like The Expanse where it’s mentioned as an aside that big industrial processes happen on asteroids or moons because you can use a big cold rock as a heat sink.
Let's start by acknowledging that there is no Starship and it's likely that the current iteration of that system is not viable. It will need to be redesigned, and no one even knows if it's possible not to mention economically feasible.
That's... bold. Yeah, the development process is different from what we're used to seeing with government-led programs, but so far most stages of starship have proven viable (ie they've worked at least once) and each launch gets closer.
This claim also seems to ignore historical context - people said the same things about Falcon, then Falcon Heavy but those launch every few days now. You're basically saying that either you know more than the single most successful and experienced team of engineers in reusable space launch vehicle world, or they're busy burning their own cash by committing some sort of fraud.
There's fraud everywhere where Musk is, so there's that. When it comes to the engineering team Starship is not engineering by the same team as Falcon - some key people left the company. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that the Starship is flawed. SpaceX doesn't hide the fact that it currently can't do 100T as promised - only 50T is likely. Unfortunately they can even get it up when empty so there's that.
To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes, all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland or a cold place. Makes no sense
This is putting the cart before the horse in the most literal sense, SpaceX can’t even get a Starship into space without it breaking apart.
I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I’ve seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible
> I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding.
The track record here I think explains "moonshot" investments on wild promises by VCs looking to cash out mid-track. It's a financial grift, not a technical challenge to actually be overcome.
But but but they release a "whitepaper"! Surely that's worth at least ten million dollars!
BRB, buying a copy of Microsoft Word so I can retire.
"Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time."
This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in constant use.
There are definitely failures but they're very low unless something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad batch of hardware.
So, hardware lasts for years except in the cases where it doesn't?
> unless something is wrong like ... vibration
so you might have problems if you were to do something that causes a lot of vibration, like launch the entire data center into space?
Backblaze is a perfect example of parts failing.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space as it stands is a nothing burger.
The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.
Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact cut costs because it allows you to design the space without consideration of humans needing to be able to access and insert/remove servers.
The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance, the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept failures and just disable failed equipment.
This is way sillier than putting data centers under water.
https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-cente...
Hmm, so you could launch a 100 tonne bitcoin mining rack and basically mine it with free energy 24/7? Another crazy idea for Elon, need to calc how long will it take to payback the launch cost.
> There, 24/7 solar power is unhindered by day/night cycles, weather, and atmospheric losses (attenuation).
Wouldn’t the earth still get in the way of the sun or it’s too far away?
Normally yes, but the L1 Lagrange point always would have an unobstructed view of the sun. Granted, L1 is a lot further away than LEO (~3x the distance to the moon), so that makes it harder and more expensive to get to
You don't need to go that far. That's what sun-synchronous orbits are for.
I wonder what the implication on data protection / privacy laws and the like would be. Would it be as simple as there'd be no laws, or is the location of the users still relevant?
Laws definitely still apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
> Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty" and that States Party shall bear international responsibility for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.
Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o
My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same weight and launch cost.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).
1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
$10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.
This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I can't scroll or zoom to fit.
Same for me.
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
should be fixed now.
They can get highly qualified space engineers to do a lot of pre-qualification work for free though! (Cunningham's law)
And all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night sky.
Always entertaining to read how some things are so obviously wrong as to be laughable, but this is somewhere between solar roadways being feasible and hyperloop being physically possible. It's a grab for money from idiot investors imo. (fitting in with OpenAI's current strategy to dilute control I'll admit)
This is such a gloriously stupid fucking idea.
Who's asking for datacenters in space?
> Who's asking for datacenters in space?
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
good use case for bitcoin mining?
- lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them fail as they go
No. Too much heat to dissipate. Plus there's no benefit to mining in space.
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"...dumbest possible idea.."
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
Solar roadways!
Recently had a conversation of space based solar power pros and cons screech to a halt when someone said "Well what about space based geothermal?"
What's the issue? If we can beam power down, we can beam it up!
More realistically, just drop a thermally conductive cable down to low solar orbit. Absolutely unlimited.
I guess from a certain perspective, all our sources of geothermal energy are already located in space
maybe on Io :)
The launch costs in the article look quite off from the outset.
A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg range; Starship’s main purpose is to massively reduce launch costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full reusability is in place.
Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not that far.
The original “white paper” [1] also does acknowledge that a separate launch is needed for the solar panels and radiators at a 1:1 ratio to the server launches, which is ignored here. I think the author leaned in a bit too much on their deep research AI assistant output.
[1] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
please read Table 1.
What about it? They estimate an unrealistic $5M launch cost, but the point is that it is likely to be ~$25M and not the $100M+ this article suggests.