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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
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)
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
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…
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 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...
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?
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.
> 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.)
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
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
Any purported advantages have to contend with the fact that sending the modules costs millions of dollars. Tens to hundred millions
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.
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.
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.
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 YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I can think of some more enjoyable ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
- lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them fail as they go
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
Second: you still need radiators to dissipate heat that is in oil somehow.
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).
It's outside of any jurisdiction, this is a dream come true for a libertarian oligarch.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Doesn't this massively surface area also mean a proportionately large risk of getting damaged by orbital debris?
Are there any unique use-cases waiting to be unleashed?
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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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...
Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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.
It's theoretically possible for sure, but we've never done that in practice and it's far from trivial.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
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.
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.
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).
Treat each maintenance trip like an EVA (extra vehicular activity) and bring your life support with you.
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
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.
And then, there is of course radiation trouble.
So those two kinds of burn-in require a launch ti space anyway.
Programming and CS people somehow rarely look at that.
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.
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.
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 ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators.
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.
Meanwhile, space gets you zero protection from the infosec threats that plague national security installations.
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
BRB, buying a copy of Microsoft Word so I can retire.
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?
> 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.
https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-cente...
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 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.
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.
Shortly afterwards, amateur astronomers will spot it. https://gizmodo.com/amateur-astronomer-catches-fleeting-glim...
"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...
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 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.
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.
I can see it now - orbiting crypto mines power on at dawn, die off at dusk, Oscar-7 style
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
The Russians are the only ones who package their unmanned platform electronics in pressure vessels. Everyone else operates in vacuum, so no fans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
"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!
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)
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.
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.
The only sensible way to count pollution from solar+battery power manufacturing & disposal is do it on a per kWh basis.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.