9 ms·

Starcloud

• wiz21c 1y ago
  I though that refrigerating things in space was using a lot of energy because heat cannot dissipate in the void of space. Moreover, why are the energy cost 10x lower when in space you have unlimited access to sun power? Is it the cost of building the energy production infrastructure ?
  • wiz21c 1y ago
    and what about solar storms...
  • spicybright 1y ago
    The whole thing is bogus, you could plop the hardware in the middle of a desert and have everything perform way better for cheaper. I'm surprised nvidia put their name on this.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    Lots of things limit the benefit of putting PV in space. UV damages the semiconductors faster, ditto micrometeoroids, it's just plain expensive to put stuff up there in the first place… It's not a slam-dunk "no", we are seeing developments on all metrics. It's just that right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the claim of x10 improvement was anywhere from correct to x100 over-optimistic.
• Reubend 1y ago
  Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power. More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188
  • petesergeant 1y ago
    Their website pitches it as 16 square km
    • GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
      Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field. Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.
      • stevage 1y ago
        It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length." So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.
        • GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
          I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.
          • notahacker 1y ago
            I can think of some parts of earth where passive cooling isn't a major problem, and some of them even have power sources...
            • spockz 1y ago
              Should we be adding massive sources of heat (datacenters) to regions that can easily passively cool them? It sounds like that would be somewhere around the Arctics. These are already seeing record high temperatures both in winter and summer. Maybe if we manage to radiate all the heat directly back into space by mimicking snow…?
• kilroy123 1y ago
  They really don't want to let this bubble pop, do they?
  • jiggawatts 1y ago
    This is a con artist smelling “idiots with too much money and nowhere else to spend it.” They’re the same sort as the cold fusion people coming out of the woodwork with “investment opportunities” during the peak of ZIRP.
• JanneVee 1y ago
  Uhm, isn't radiation a problem outside of the atmosphere? How fast are the data transfers going to be? so many questions...
• J07 1y ago
  Engineer call out for diskswap
  • sgt 1y ago
    Where we're going... we won't need disks! Memstores all the way
• qwertytyyuu 1y ago
  Thats a ridiculous amount of solar pannels to send up. I don't really think this is going to work/be viable
• gtsnexp 1y ago
  The prelude of a Dyson Sphere!
  • inflames123 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • einrealist 1y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM
• anonzzzies 1y ago
  Would this not only work if there are solar arrays always catching the sun while the gpus are never in the sun?
• temperceve 1y ago
  It really feels like I'm living in the future, lately.
• jiggawatts 1y ago
  This is absolute nonsense. The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary! Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly. Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!? If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…
  • non- 1y ago
    Nothing stopping the satellite data center from communicating back to homebase via Starlink network right? Would probably need to negotiate for a huge amount of dedicated priority bandwidth, but latency shouldn't actually be that bad.
    • ben_w 1y ago
      Round-trip to GEO will add 238.7 milliseconds to whatever other infra you have over the last 200 km vertically* and whatever along the ground. It's probably fine for some things, but not for everything. * while there could, in principle, be no extra infra in the last 200 km vertically, that means someone on the ground is talking directly to GEO. As per similar discussion about big PV space stations beaming power to the ground, your minimum ground spot size for a transmitter this big and this far away is still tens of km, which limits the other parts of your overall system design.
  • actionfromafar 1y ago
    It will soon come back from over the other horizon. :) Of all the things insane about this proposal, I'm not very bothered about this one. It could be high availability and distributed by default. Like having redundant datacenters with eventual consistency on all continents. Except the continents are spinning really fast above you... The animation is wild... 5GW concentrated up there at the top of a field of solar panels - it's not a Starcloud, it's an electric Starfurnace.
  • esafak 1y ago
    Why can't it be geostationary? Laser communication can get you gigabit speeds today. That would take a month to transmit GPT-5's estimated 280TB training corpus, which is acceptable. Latency does not matter.
• boesboes 1y ago
  What a scam
• blourvim 1y ago
  So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits. "10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run. What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug
  • torginus 1y ago
    Yeah, radiation is the enemy of integrated circuits, cosmic radiation is more damaging the smaller the features get. You pretty much have to have multiple redundancy and special space-rated HW, which I wouldn't be surprised is stuck at super old process nodes to mitigate this exact same issue.
    • notahacker 1y ago
      Tbf, leaving aside the claims about datacentres in space, working with Nvidia on radiation hardening its latest generation chips would be a good project...
  • perihelions 1y ago
    > "the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator" I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun). (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200) ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio ([year] 10) ;; guess at lifespan ([ton] 100)) ;; Starship payload (* ([ton] 1000) ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄ ;; => 126.226944
• exitb 1y ago
  So many questions to be asked, I don't know where to start. What's the upside of bunching up all the servers into a single megastructure rather than separate satellites?
• scottydelta 1y ago
  It’s more of a building the solution first and then look for the problem because why the heck not.
• stevage 1y ago
  > Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length. That is...very, very large.
  • BoppreH 1y ago
    For scale, that's twice as large (energy-wise) as AWS's us-east-1, which itself is a group of ~170 data centers.
• bearjaws 1y ago
  We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology. The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center. I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenarios, it's a good watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o
  • martindbp 1y ago
    So what you're saying is we should put them on the moon?
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • mr_toad 1y ago
    > The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day Depends on the orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_angle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_angle
  • cubefox 1y ago
    Yeah, I just wanted to link to the same video. By the way, the same channel also has a sobering video on commercial space stations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2G60Y3ydtqY https://youtube.com/watch?v=2G60Y3ydtqY
• non- 1y ago
  One of the selling points they mention is that they won't need to use any fresh water for cooling. My understanding was that water-demands on Earth were an overblown issue and minuscule when compared to other uses of fresh water such as watering one acre of farmland. Not to mention, "used" water is just "warm" water that can then be used again for other purposes. So are they perpetuating a myth here? Or is water use a bigger issue than I thought?
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • welferkj 1y ago
    It's not a real issue, but it's truthy enough to generate real opposition to datacenter buildout and catalyze AI hate. So definitionally avoiding it from the get-go might end up being worth it.
    • sanex 1y ago
      It really depends where they get the water. If they're pumping an aquifer fry and doing evaporative cooling they could be just boiling an entire areas water source. If they could figure out how to use salt water it'd be ideal.
      • Geee 1y ago
        Just run your closed loop cooling through a heat exchanger in sea water. They probably do something like this already.
        • itintheory 1y ago
          Yes, pouring more heat into the already warming oceans is surely a safe plan.
          • Geee 1y ago
            The added heat is so minuscule that it doesn't have any effect on the temperature of the ocean.
• xnx 1y ago
  Shameful to see this on Nvidia's site. They have real engineers and business prowess. This is really shaking my assumptions about the company.
  • rpmisms 1y ago
    Why is this shameful?
    • hiddencost 1y ago
      Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics. Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.
      • ryanisnan 1y ago
        I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps. In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think.
        • xnx 1y ago
          The Apollo passive radiators can dissipate ~2500 Watts into space. With most systems shut down, only ~500 Watts was coming from the remaining systems and the astronauts bodies.
          • ryanisnan 1y ago
            Cool, thank you. So I read this as fundamentally, the heat they dissipated far exceeded the heat they produced. Do you mind opining on what similar figures would be with modest passive radiators and a typical data centre rack heat output?
• blondie9x 1y ago
  “The only energy is the launch”, that’s false. Energy went into mining, extracting, refining, transporting all the raw materials needed to make these chips. This is typical tech industry green washing as the industry fails to accept its destructive influence on the planet. We need practical solutions that help reduce consumption and waste and actually address the issues. We don’t always need more we need to find a way to use less.
• bpicolo 1y ago
  > In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston predicts. Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence
  • danielbln 1y ago
    Yeah, who throws out these sort of timeframe in earnest? We haven't built anything in space since the ISS (which is in LEO mind you, not "outer space"), and we're building full data centers within a decade? Give me a break, that's an Elon level prediction.
  • Oras 1y ago
    I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally. Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"
    • righthand 1y ago
      This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?
      • philipwhiuk 1y ago
        I think now it's called 'the pitch deck'
      • preisschild 1y ago
        Musk has been doing it for more than a decade now and didnt really face any real problems doing it...
        • righthand 1y ago
          Didn’t face any problems doing it… you mean when was charged by the SEC for lying on Twitter? Or do you mean when he was forced to buy Twitter to avoid another case against him?
      • 1y ago
• Havoc 1y ago
  >Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink. The famously heat conductive vacuum... Someone fedex a vacuum flask full of hot coffee to nvidia HQ with an explanatory note.
  • nine_k 1y ago
    More seriously, space is pretty cold, and will consume large amounts of radiated heat. The problem, of course, it that the amount you can radiate thermally at, say, 150°C is pretty limited. According to the Stephan-Bolzmann equation, it's about 1800W for a perfect black body. For 5GW, that would take a square radiator 1.7km wide, always concealed from sunlight. Realistically, much larger as the temperature would drop as the coolant flows along.
• ppaattrriicckk 1y ago
  Apart from getting 16 sq. km of solar arrays and radiators into orbit - and without jumping to conclusions about whether this is a borderline scam - I can imagine 2 obvious showstoppers: 1) Space debris. This is proposal is several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest things in near-Earth orbits. Thus equally many orders more likely to be hit by, and create, space debris 2) Heat transport - this isn't my home turf, but I can't imagine building something lightweight enough to be launched, yet also capable of transferring enough heat away from the 5 GW core, without it melting/breaking It's been a while since I read their whitepaper, but I don't recall either of those points being addressed.
  • mercutio2 1y ago
    LEO is the last place you should worry about space debris. Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem. Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.
• einrealist 1y ago
  It's going to be fun constantly repairing all those solar arrays. We'll be destroying our planet with the rocket launches alone. But hey! The more ridiculous the idea, the greater the chance that Trump and his conspiracy-laden circle will embrace it. It works in science fiction movies and novels, why not in reality, duh. /s
• torginus 1y ago
  I have had people point out that building a Dyson sphere is pretty much a dumb idea, and there's no concievable reason why we would build one even if we could. Now we have one - venture capital.
• senectus1 1y ago
  pipe dream. this isnt going to happen before the AI bubble pops. Then when it does there wont be a drive for it.
• Ekaros 1y ago
  Actual engineering question. How large can you scale a cooling system in space? And I mean say from radial central point. Surely at some point it just doesn't work anymore. Or you spend more energy to get energy to point where you can radiate it away than you can radiate.
  • beAbU 1y ago
    I believe there is math for this very question. A similar principle applies with heatsinks. You cant just continue increasing the heatsink on a CPU, the outer edge of a large heatsink won't go above ambient and thus any heatsink bigger than that is wasting material. I would guess in a system where coolant is pumped and the added heat of that you'll have a similar problem. This is probably further exacerbated by the fact that you cant do clever things to increase surface area - your radiating surfaces must all "see" the black of space in order to function.
• 0xcb0 1y ago
  They state that in 10 years all data centers will be in outer space. I state that in 10 years we will look back and think this was a ridiculous idea. The meta and maintenance costs, the pollution of sending them to space, the space pollution itself, the outer space radiation, the extra redundant error correction needed*,* and much more all speak against this. Why not throw that trillion dollars into optical computing chip research? Why not create better sustainable methods here on earth*?* We could run a single data center down here, or pay a million times moreto do this in space. The argument that we are polluting Earth down here is very weak. Yes, we do, but why on earth do we then not invest more in research for solving these problems*?* There are startups out there that will one day solve these issues. And then space data centers will be something for the Star Trek age, which humanity will probably never achieve.
  • nine_k 1y ago
    I think the bigger thing about a space-based data center that it's not on anyone's land, and not easy to inspect or capture. Solar energy available around the clock allows it to be self-sufficient for a long time. I suppose there will be some demand for high-security, high-price setups like that.
    • notahacker 1y ago
      But read/write access to the datacentre is on someone's land, and spacefaring powers without access to that can still interfere with its effective operation...
      • nine_k 1y ago
        The access is the customer's concern, much like starlink.
        • notahacker 1y ago
          The customer is going to be extremely concerned when it turns out physically locating datacentres in space doesn't actually render the data inaccessible or uncensorable...
• westurner 1y ago
  Would it be more cost effective and more sustainable to heavily invest in graphene semiconductors than space-based datacenters? Is that a false dilemma? Aren't there advantages to fabricating GO Graphene Oxide and CNT Carbon Nanotubes in microgravity?
• robertclaus 1y ago
  You'll never be able to do maintenance or upgrade these things. The up front cost seems extremely high given the risk of hardware failure or obselecence at data center scales.
• robertclaus 1y ago
  If this math added up, wouldn't solar panels and radiators on earth solve the same problem?
  • thesuitonym 1y ago
    Solar panels on Earth only get sunlight half the day. The idea is still dumb, but not for that reason.
• fxtentacle 1y ago
  „plans to build“ So far, it’s just a dream that convinced some investors to part with their money.
• torginus 1y ago
  Altman: has stake in nuclear power and AI companies Also Altman: Let's build gigawatts of nuclear for AI Musk: has stake in space and AI companies Also Musk: Let's build AI datacenters in space
  • caminante 1y ago
    Starcloud is the concept I'll show my friends that datacenters have hit peak hype. Can't wait for an alien to NIMBY one of these.
    • yborg 1y ago
      This. We really have hit Internet bubble hype levels, this could be a Silicon Valley episode. "My pitch deck is one slide. 'It's AI... IN SPACE!'"
      • caminante 1y ago
        The banker slide with checkboxes will be compelling: [x] no permitting, cultural, wildlife [x] no local opposition. [x] site control Unfortunately, this is balance sheet financing so big boys only.
        • torginus 1y ago
          I can't wait for the inevitable epic humanity saving mission, where the AI datacenter gets stuck in a murder loop, and we have to send up the best and brightest in a spaceship to unplug the power cable and plug it in again.
          • caminante 1y ago
            The year is 2054... There are no offline, terrestrial porn backups. Humanity has lost connection with the only remaining porn footage on a space datacenter called "Old Family Cooking Recipes." A rag tag team, led by Ellen Degeneres (who still can't get hired), must perform a daring mission to press the power On/Off switch.
• black6 1y ago
  I still like Keith Lofstrom's Server Sky concept. http://server-sky.com/ServerSky http://server-sky.com/ServerSky
• ur-whale 1y ago
  Cooling will be a real bitch. Shielding also. And latency.
  • hackmiester 1y ago
    And don’t get me started on the remote hands fees. You thought DigitalRealty was bad!
  • Gazoche 1y ago
    And power, maintenance, cost...
• tmvphil 1y ago
  How is a multiple square-kilometer radiator not just an inevitable Kessler syndrome disaster? Edit: Some back of the envelope calculation suggests that the total cross-sectional area of all man-made orbiting satellites is around 55000 m^2. Just one 4km x 4km = 1600000m^2 starcloud would represent an increase by a factor of about 300. That's insane.
  • caminante 1y ago
    Sounds like a "slippery slope" fallacy without further explanation.
    • tmvphil 1y ago
      Not sure what the slippery slope is here. The linked page imagines a 4km x 4km radiator/solar array. The cross-sectional area of the array is going to be directly proportional to the probability of impacting high velocity space debris. In such an event the amount of debris that would be generated could also scale with the area of the array. This seems bad
      • caminante 1y ago
        > This seems bad e.g., Cianide seems bad, but it won't kill you if the relative volumes are small. tl;dr: You haven't characterized the denominator.
        • tmvphil 1y ago
          See my edit. Just one starcloud would represent an increase in a risk factor of over 300 c.f. status quo. Then multiply that by the number of starclouds you think would be deployed.
          • caminante 1y ago
            You still keep playing with the numerator. > increase in a risk factor of over 300 Even with a numerator-only view, I suspect it's not fair to characterize the "risk factor" as going up 300x. There's a lot more nuance about orbits in space.
• skywhopper 1y ago
  “The only cost on the environment will be on the launch, then there will be 10x carbon-dioxide savings over the life of the data center” And how long is that life exactly? There is zero chance this is a net positive for carbon emissions, much less a remotely economical way to build or operate datacenters.
• deviation 1y ago
  Replacing faulty nodes or equipment in space seems totally reasonable... It's not like getting faulty drives replaced in my datacenter racks don't already take weeks/months...
• igleria 1y ago
  This cannot possibly end well (flipped bits, maintenance, cooling). If they fulfill their promise within 10 years I'll change careers to kiwi farming. I promise.
• deleted 1y ago
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• outside1234 1y ago
  We have officially "jumped the shark." If this had been posted on April 1st I would have laughed at this and said "great joke guys."
• Gazoche 1y ago
  I've barely started reading the post, but > “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy” Low cost???????? Sending a solar array into space would probably rank among the most expensive forms of energy production. > Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink. Well, good luck getting the heat out first. I hope you planned for some big radiators to go along your 5GW solar array.
  • igor47 1y ago
    Yeah especially considering the next line is: > Constant exposure to the sun in orbit also means nearly infinite solar power Is it an infinite heat sink or an infinite power source?!
• storus 1y ago
  Basic datacenter technicians will be the new astronauts, swapping burnt CPUs and failed hard drives in space.
• dominicm 1y ago
  Wow, this is embarrassing. Hard to read.
• Geee 1y ago
  The rate of radiative cooling scales proportionally to (T^4-Tenv^4) which approximates to just T^4 in space (Tenv = 3K). The hotter they can run it, the smaller heatsinks they need; for every doubling of temperature, the heatsink area can be reduced by a factor of 16. Also, it might be possible to boost the output temperature, e.g. with a chemical heat pump for even smaller heat sinks.
• amelius 1y ago
  If they send billions of dollars of GPU cards into space, how are they going to secure it, physically?
• shpx 1y ago
  Everyone who puts up a persistent bright dot in the night sky should compensate everyone who has to see it with 1 cent for the sensory pollution.
• ge96 1y ago
  crazy how tiny the servers are compared to the panels
• burnte 1y ago
  I have yet to meet a hardware engineer who thinks this is a good idea. I'm REALLY struggling to see benefits.
  • baggachipz 1y ago
    Pumping your stock.
• Klemoniono 1y ago
  I want that type of money for playing out something which can be pre calculated and is just not a smart idea at the moment at all. I don't get it. I really don't. You can calculate the minimum cost, you can calculate heat, maintenance and probably also the expected failerrate for the hardware. But even if the failerrate is something you need to figure out, that would probably some R&D thing which you would test and verify in a very small and cheap setup. Same stupid shit with the mirror in space which will send sun back to some PV panels on earth. Cool stuff in a non capitalistic system but otherwise it just shows that plenty of people have too much money to invest in weird things without understanding it at all.
• Klemoniono 1y ago
  btw. this is dishonest regarding sustainability. Water consumption of a data center is not a real thing. You don't just consume water. You need it to move heat and you don't need it to remove heat by vaporization. You can easily use this heat if you actually wanted to do so by heating houses close by or for chemical processes. Its a legal issue. And its very resource heavy to put anything in space...
• bilekas 1y ago
  > “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,” Wouldn't you know, you COULD get the same energy here too.
• sketchysandwich 1y ago
  Even if the some how solved the cooling problem others mentioned. What happens when this data center becomes obsolete? we've just got a 4km wide piece of junk floating above earth now?
• charliebwrites 1y ago
  So when a storage device or a GPU burns out, how do you replace it? Fly an astronaut to space..?
• runlevel1 1y ago
  Their numbers strike me as very optimistic: *Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.* | Cost Item | Terrestrial | Space |:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:---------------- | Energy (10 years) | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh | $2m cost of solar array | Launch | None | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators) | Cooling (chiller energy cost) | $7m @ 5% of overall power usage | More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space | Water usage | 1.7m tons @ 0.5L/kWh | Not required | Enclosure (Sat. Bus/Building) | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost | Backup power supply | $20m | Not required | All other DC hardware | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost | Radiation shielding | Not required | $1.2m @ 1 kg of shielding per kW of compute and $30/kg launch cost | Cost Balance | $167m | $8.2m Source: Page 4 of their whitepaper https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
  • MrZander 1y ago
    > $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators) This seems absurdly low to me.
    • gs17 1y ago
      It is, unless you take Musk's hype about Starship as fact. With rockets that are actually potentially available the best price is $1500/kg to LEO, so either they're presuming the whole setup weighs in at 3-4 tons (which is less than the shielding alone) or that they can get it launched for a few orders of magnitude less than what's on the market now (and they do say they assume $30/kg).
• taikahessu 1y ago
  All these calculations (of feasibility and maintenance challenges) are fascinating, but really just silly. Of course we are going to use AI and robots, like AI robots, and stuff. It's going to be fully self-operating and the future! But more seriously, thanks for great learning experiences about space to HN commenters.
• drunx 1y ago
  I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question: - asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by? "About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface." I assume a good old "Prius" might have opinions about such construction of it flies through it. But I guess "space is big", risks are low? https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-facts/ https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
  • porphyra 1y ago
    The solar array is 4 km by 4 km. The whole Earth, with its 6400 km radius, only gets hit by a Prius-sized asteroid once per year. So the risks are much lower. I guess the array may be hit by many micro-asteroids though, but it should be possible to engineer some level of tolerance for that.
    • drunx 1y ago
      Yeah.. right after writing the comment I went on to get my frame of reference a bit adjusted about the sizes of everything...:) Risks are very small! So small that it's not even worth worrying about it too much. The whole cooling/heat transfer reality check is way more critical here than anything else indeed.
• t1234s 1y ago
  Strange their rendering is not exactly starship but its starship.
• wildylion 1y ago
  Oh, cool... I have only one question (that is not cool at all): how are they about to exhaust 5GW of waste heat?
• asimpleusecase 1y ago
  I could see gov imaging satellites with a direct encrypted laser communications to GPU’s in orbit being attractive. Images processing, movement pattern analysis, multi spectral, and as they mentioned radar.
• NoPicklez 1y ago
  This is a super basic question, how do they prevent the panels from being hit my space debris or rocks, floaties etc? Is it just that within its orbit there are next to no objects it could collide with, even small ones?
• deleted 1y ago
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