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There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things. 1) ISS is about 30 ye

There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things. 1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions. 2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was. 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites. 4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore. 5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is. In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

adastra22 11mo ago
Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse. Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still. Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.) Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.
- fbu 11mo ago
  The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.
  - adastra22 11mo ago
    Unfortunately the powdery regolith of an asteroid is a thermal insulator.
KaiserPro 11mo ago
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. > 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites. Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton. You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre. That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related) > 5) Learning effects Great, but it gets us nothing.
- mr_toad 11mo ago
  > even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
  - shagie 11mo ago
    There is one. It is the sun synchronous dawn/dusk orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit > Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night. The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't. Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station. Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
  - KaiserPro 11mo ago
    yup, and that means that you only have low latency once a day.
khalic 11mo ago
Can you please tell me your credentials compared to someone who actually built material that went into space? Like the author of the article
calcifer 11mo ago
> In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves. Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.
wat10000 11mo ago
It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology. Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable. Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.
fbu 11mo ago
What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ? Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.

adastra22 11mo ago

Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse. Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still. Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.) Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.

fbu 11mo ago
The thermal budget is impossible to escape. Maybe in an asteroid it could be possible, the whole surface becomes a thermal radiator and the whole asteroid a thermal mass. But still no convection.
- adastra22 11mo ago
  Unfortunately the powdery regolith of an asteroid is a thermal insulator.

KaiserPro 11mo ago

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. > 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites. Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton. You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre. That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related) > 5) Learning effects Great, but it gets us nothing.

mr_toad 11mo ago
> even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.
- shagie 11mo ago
  There is one. It is the sun synchronous dawn/dusk orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit > Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night. The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't. Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station. Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
- KaiserPro 11mo ago
  yup, and that means that you only have low latency once a day.

khalic 11mo ago

Can you please tell me your credentials compared to someone who actually built material that went into space? Like the author of the article

calcifer 11mo ago

> In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves. Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.

wat10000 11mo ago

It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology. Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable. Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.

fbu 11mo ago

What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ? Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.