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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

(angadh.com)
199 points angadh | 1 comments | 26 Jun 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source
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energywut ◴[26 Jun 25 20:49 UTC] No.44391208[source]▶
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.

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wkat4242 ◴[26 Jun 25 21:33 UTC] No.44391698[source]▶
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.
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PaulDavisThe1st ◴[27 Jun 25 00:39 UTC] No.44392843[source]▶
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 ...

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throwawaymaths ◴[27 Jun 25 00:49 UTC] No.44392889[source]▶
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

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Robotbeat ◴[27 Jun 25 04:34 UTC] No.44393734[source]▶
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.

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1. semi-extrinsic ◴[27 Jun 25 05:12 UTC] No.44393866[source]▶
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.