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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
- fsh 1y ago[flagged]
- SirFatty 1y ago"...dumbest possible idea.." It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
- wlesieutre 1y agoSolar roadways!
- MarkusQ 1y agoRecently had a conversation of space based solar power pros and cons screech to a halt when someone said "Well what about space based geothermal?"
- Metacelsus 1y agomaybe on Io :)
- Nevermark 1y agoWhat'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.
- meepmorp 1y agoI guess from a certain perspective, all our sources of geothermal energy are already located in space
- Zigurd 1y agoData centers in space are just another example of wishful thinking about space commercialization. What are the odds that a data center in space would be the first successful commercialization of space? With decades of talk about and investment in supposedly viable space commercialization ventures, and no results, maybe that's sending us a message.
- quantified 1y agoAnd all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night sky.
- xnx 1y agoStarcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.
- wmf 1y agoThat's how you get another Theranos.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoMaybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoComing from someone in this space, SpinLaunch has more legs to stand on than Starcloud.
- world2vec 1y agoSpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back to Earth.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoThe 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.
- energywut 1y agoPutting 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.
- FridgeSeal 1y agoI 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?!”
- GolfPopper 1y agoServers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
- bobthepanda 1y agoGiven that most of the major powers have satellite shootdown ability this isn't worth all that much if you're causing enough trouble.
- FredPret 1y agoShooting 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.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago>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.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- ericyd 1y agoThis 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.
- kemotep 1y agoHere is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o
- trhway 1y agoMy napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 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.
- ggreer 1y agoIf 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 https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- __m 1y ago$10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIf 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.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> 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).
- mrguyorama 1y agoExcept 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.
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoWhile 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.
- GlenTheMachine 1y agoSpace 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.
- intended 1y agoIt sounds like building it on the moon would be better.
- spauldo 1y agoDepends what you want to use it for. Ping time to the moon and back is about 2.5 seconds best case.
- hamburglar 1y agoSeems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.
- 1y ago
- PaywallBuster 1y agogood use case for bitcoin mining? - lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them fail as they go
- tenuousemphasis 1y agoNo. Too much heat to dissipate. Plus there's no benefit to mining in space.
- BruSwain 1y agoIf 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?
- ddtaylor 1y agoECC everything?
- dgoldstein0 1y agoYes. 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
- josefx 1y agoIsn't ECC only applied to RAM? Do any current gen CPUs have ECC cache?
- axoltl 1y agoI 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.
- dumah 1y agoGeostationary orbiters operate there during the day but this concept would position systems 100x closer to earth and well inside the protective envelope.
- sheepybloke 1y agoIn 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.
- philosophty 1y ago"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.
- LambdaComplex 1y agoSo, hardware lasts for years except in the cases where it doesn't?
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- westpfelia 1y agoBackblaze is a perfect example of parts failing. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data 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.
- vidarh 1y agoThe 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.
- hughes 1y agoWho's asking for datacenters in space?
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> Who's asking for datacenters in space? At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
- weinzierl 1y agoI 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.
- littlecranky67 1y agoThey address that issue in the link; The propose a 63m^2 radiator for heat dissipation.
- weinzierl 1y agoSure 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.
- yencabulator 1y agoThe comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399181 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.
- teekert 1y agoLay 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.)
- weinzierl 1y agoWhy 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.
- rwmj 1y agoAbility to raise money from gullible investors.
- HPsquared 1y agoSpeed 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.
- weinzierl 1y agoNot 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.
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- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoNot every datacenter use case is latency sensitive. Backup storage or GPU compute, for example.
- fooker 1y agoCooling things in space is insanely difficult, as there’s no conduction or convection. Cooling is one of the main challenges in designing data centers.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoThis is such a gloriously stupid fucking idea.
- ricardobeat 1y agoThe 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 https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- angadh 1y agoplease read Table 1.
- ricardobeat 1y agoWhat 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.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y agoI 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?
- ceejayoz 1y agoLaws definitely still apply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty 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.
- throw10920 1y ago> 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?
- ceejayoz 1y agoYes. 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.
- perihelions 1y agoI 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.
- api 1y agoLook 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?
- perihelions 1y agoI 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!
- 6d6b73 1y agoLet'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.
- happyopossum 1y agoThat'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.
- 6d6b73 1y agoThere'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.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoThere 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.
- Havoc 1y agoI’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I’ve seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible
- mrguyorama 1y agoBut 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.
- rob_c 1y ago> 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.
- ZiiS 1y agoThey can get highly qualified space engineers to do a lot of pre-qualification work for free though! (Cunningham's law)
- hotpotatoe 1y agoThis 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.
- hartator 1y ago> 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?
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- diabeetusman 1y agoNormally 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
- qayxc 1y agoYou don't need to go that far. That's what sun-synchronous orbits are for.
- rob_c 1y agoAlways 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)
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- RajT88 1y agoThis is way sillier than putting data centers under water. https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-centers https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-cente...
- gloosx 1y agoHmm, 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.
- strangeloops85 1y agoTo 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
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoMy 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?
- sellmesoap 1y agoA random thought, having server units spring loaded, when a unit fails eject it and use the stored energy as an orbital boost. Ablative servers!