Editor’s note: … In this article, we discuss the technical challenges of building an orbital data center constellation: launching all of it, dissipating heat in space, dealing with radiation, and addressing latency issues in orbit. Read part one here.
I find the napkin math interesting, especially putting into light that given expected longevity of such satellites, 5 to 7 years, they will have to do 10 to 42 launches per day. SpaceX will need $1.5 to $10 trillions to make it happen. All of that so the slop machine doesn’t have to run into obstacles like democracy ? So it can destroy communities and the environment freely? What are we doing?
answer: hard.
I see two issues here: get all that stuff into a stable orbit, which would be a way bigger job than building the ISS, which is one of the most expensive projects ever undertaken. Second, it would have to have massive radiators to get rid of the generated heat.
Space isn’t cold the way cold environments are here on earth. The cold we experience on Earth is because we are surrounded by cold gases. Cold wind and cold air will wick heat away from objects. Because space lacks any atmosphere, all thermal transfer in space is radiative. In comparison to convective thermal transfer via air / atmosphere, radiative thermal transfer is abysmally slow, requiring expansive delicate heat sinks which must be carefully aimed and coated to facilitate thermal egress while impeding solar thermal ingress. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the space station, much of what you may think are solar panels are in fact heat sinks. You can’t just stick a server container in orbit and call the job done.
Launch costs (yeah, Musk promised 100 tons to LEO Real Cheap, Real Soon, you better believe it) and energy requirements for launch kill this. If you could make DCs ISRU in space, well, good luck with that.
Boy, this superbubble is astronomic. Be sure to watch it when it blows.
Google and Microsoft already tried underwater data centers to better handle heat dissipation. It wasn’t worth it. Hardware can fail and you need somebody to go in and swap boards and faulty cables. Every complex system has multiple points of failure. The wrong board and the whole container stops working. It was so much pain trying to maintain it under water they all gave up after the Proof of Concept stage.
How are they going to deal with it cost effectively up in orbit? Little nanosat modules? Humanoid robots that barely work today?
Be a lot cheaper (and faster) sending a tech in a little cargo van and a toolbox out to the suburbs of Memphis, Phoenix, or Bakersfield.
Wouldn’t it still be cheaper to build megastructures on earth in remote and uninhabited places? Like I get you have to build your own power and run your own fiber if you say build a data center the size of Rhode Island in the Yukon or something, but that has to be more cost effective than orbital.
Taking it to orbit creates far more problems than it solves.
Yes, or course that would be cheaper and more practical. It would not, however, be as good at generating moronic hype that captivates foolish investors.
So you need SpaceX to increase its launch capacity to somewhere between 20 to 80 times its current rate, completely reimagine the economics of space-based radiators and solar panels, accept that all that shiny new power and cooling CapEx is just as disposable as the GPUs, and you have to adjust the expected use cases and SLAs to allow for nothing being repairable and latency making them unsuitable for many AI tasks.
Yes. “Possible.” I mean, I guess, but we’ve got some powerful Hyperloop energy here. I cannot imagine it ever being more economical than bullying and bribing rural areas with access to a power grid.
The thermal problems are the craziest part IMO. Why do you think they use so much water on earth. In low Earth orbit your entire data center would be mostly radiators, which are heavy and complex with enormous fluid flow rates.
Depends on what you arbitairally define as data center.
Try doing it while disqualifying the GPS constellation.
Really fucking hard. Because they demand high power, and any repairs are insanely expensive.
Fucking idiots.
There will be no repairs in space. Everything they launch is set and done and comes crashing back in the atmosphere 5 years later. They fully expect radiation and debris to render the space data center satellites unusable after 5 to 7 years (in the article). We all know that after 5 years those chips will be obsolete anyways.
This is a huge issue, the amount of mass being sent into orbit that is planned to just burn up in the atmosphere 5 years later.
There’s a difference between telecom satellites and other space stuff. Hubble launched in 1990 and it’s not only still in space, it’s still working.
Oh yeah ofc. The Hubble upgrades and repairs are a good example to show how good planning, good technology and will can ensure long standing missions delivering incredible science.
The planning for these mega constellation is different for sure and the goal is money, not science, which is sad. That’s why they will burn in the atmosphere no matter what.
This is a false front for laundering VC money. It’s not logistically feasible, and like AI, they will have made off with billions before they ever attempt to launch anything.
Typical “numba go up” scheme.
Though I am confident they are going to try really hard to make it work. They just want to time it so that VC doesn’t hold the short end of the stick when the music stops (lol I love mixing analogies like that). I am worried of the impact of launching so many vehicles into space. They will launch a lot of vehicles, there is no denying that, even if it doesn’t get to 1M satellite constellation. All the shit they send to LEO will have to fall back down eventually. It will burn up in the atmosphere. That’s a lot of extra stuff in the atmosphere. That’s also a lot of stuff up there that will interfere with astronomy. A lot of stuff that can lead to Kessler syndrome.
All those rare earth minerals and silicon will just burn up. What a waste. There needs to be legislation that if you put satellite in orbit you are responsible for recovering them at End of Life.
Burning up in the atmosphere is pollution that we don’t even understand how it affects the upper atmosphere.
Ooh, I’ve seen this one. The secret is just to build them out of paperclips.
“we?”
we are not billionaires. wtf are they doing?
We live in the same word as billionaires. They exist, they don’t exist in a vacuum though maybe, briefly, they should.
What are we doing?
We are allowing Psychopaths to get to the top in the perpetual Capitalist economic war - everybody against everybody else, no rules. Rich Psychopaths are now running Western societies as a private Fascist club, and they use their power to manage information/policies, so they are; not in any danger from ‘socialism/communism’ etc, able to create consent to attack their ‘Evil’ enemies (that just don’t want Epstein psychos to control their nations future or resources), keep alternatives down, and just be able to keep hoarding power/wealth from the backs of ordinary people all around the world…
That is what Psychopaths do, they create chaos and exploit the situation for their own benefit - most often harming everyone else. Capitalism is inherently a psychopath ideology where exploitation and absolute selfishness is both the goal and highest morality. No wonder the ideology is promoted by the most powerful psychopaths that benefit from that belief. We could easily add the 2 ‘missing’ prongs and just call ‘Capitalism’ a full Dark Triad belief-system (Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
The rich removed - The Dark Triad Epstein Class - won bc they control the narrative and can manufacture consent for what they want.
So to YOU, that still believe in the Capitalist ‘free market’ dystopia/fantasy: Stop believing in/supporting their Dark Triad Capitalist belief-system and things will calm down by it self…
Its easy: IF the rich removed recommend it, you DON’T !
rich removed recommend
How sad that ‘C u n t’ automatically gets ‘removed’ - suicide simplistic censorship - lame…
You can’t say cunt on your instance?
Everyone else can.
That’s a .ml problem, most instances don’t have anything blocking cunt or any other words.
I always wondered how we planned for dissipating heat in space to be comparable to dissipating heat on earth. Feels like whatever they’re using to handle that heat is going to have to be huge and heavy.
Has to be great for avoiding any legal obligations on how you might handle the data though. Can do whatever you want as long as it stays in space.
You know, I just had a great idea how to dissipate that heat in space. we can use tungsten rods and heat them up, and when they’re too hot and don’t cool down anymore, we just drop them down to earth and should they happen to hit something in China or Russia that’s just a bonus
/S obviously
The article goes somewhat in depth about it. Basically, heat dissipation in space is a solved physics problem. It is now in the engineering domain to try to make it more lightweight, efficient, scalable and ultimately cheap. Ars Technica does reference a great video by Scott Manley where he just does the math to figure out how large the heat sink panels need to be. His back of the envelope math leads him to believe that a starlink sized solar panel or something in that order of magnitude will be enough.
Just here to comment that I only pasted the title of the article as the title of the post. I find the content of the article interesting. I’m not actually asking that question, though answer it if you please.
