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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? V
by energywut 1y ago
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.
- 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.
- FredPret 1y agoBy 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 https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agohuh?.. 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?
- notahacker 1y agoThe '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...
- psds2 1y agoWho would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind of value?
- edm0nd 1y agoDozens 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.
- ronsor 1y ago> 2026, we will get ransomware from space! Ahem, cloud ransomware.
- ronsor 1y agoAnyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter satellite.
- mandevil 1y agoInternational 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.
- reaperducer 1y agonations 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.
- christina97 1y agoGenerally though, countries don’t disappear: they have a predecessor and a successor.
- reaperducer 1y agoA successor may take possession of the land, but that doesn't mean it will also take responsibility for the previous government's liabilities.
- afiori 1y agoThat is why international treaties come with implicit or explicit enforcement options
- 1y ago
- paxys 1y agoUnless 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.
- peterbonney 1y agoExactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not subject to their jurisdiction.
- _carbyau_ 1y ago:-) 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.
- runako 1y ago[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.)
- nkrisc 1y agoPretty worthless unless the execs live in space too.
- dismalpedigree 1y agoWhy? Its not like we put execs in jail for allowing their companies to do terrible things under their watch.
- nkrisc 1y agoNot often enough, but it does happen.
- pjc50 1y agoI 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.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoWould be cheaper to do in international waters, even if you needed security to protect it.
- notahacker 1y agoThe 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...
- chatmasta 1y agoYes, 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…
- XorNot 1y agoWe'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.
- robertlagrant 1y ago> 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?
- kolbe 1y agoRe: 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.
- energywut 1y agoDepends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
- notahacker 1y agoIt'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
- paxys 1y agoBandwidth - negligible
- wkat4242 1y agoYes 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoseems 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 ...
- throwawaymaths 1y agothere 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
- dismalpedigree 1y agoI’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.
- throwawaymaths 1y agothey got the sun synchronous orbit part right.
- Robotbeat 1y agoRadiation 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.
- ggreer 1y agoIf 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 https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- quantified 1y agoOf course, they're soft targets in space war too, they could generate lots of debris.
- hellisothers 1y agoMan I read “AI training in a high latency self sufficient satellite orbiting earth” as the start of a Sci-Fi novel…
- quantified 1y ago
- throwawaymaths 1y agoreliable energy is the only (maybe valid) reason. you can get yourself into a sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit and avoid shading by the earth.
- notepad0x90 1y agoYou'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.
- ugh123 1y agoSounds like a great investment for SoftBank
- oceanplexian 1y agoWe’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.
- rtpg 1y ago> 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?
- rambl3r 1y agoThat 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-satellites-for-ai-space-computing-constellation/ 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/china-launches-satellites-start-building-worlds-first-supercomputer-orbit?utm_source=chatgpt.com 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-building-a-constellation-of-ai-supercomputers-in-space-and-just-launched-the-first-pieces https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-is-bu...
- Robotbeat 1y agoYou 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.
- friendzis 1y ago> 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.
- Robotbeat 1y agoThis 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.
- littlestymaar 1y ago> 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.
- mschuster91 1y agoIt's not, all objects in space fall under the jurisdiction of the country that launched the rocket.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago> 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
- dyauspitr 1y agoWhy do you need a lot of batteries with the right orbit can’t you have solar energy 24/7?