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Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
by general1465 9mo ago
Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
- reactordev 9mo agoIt’s a vacuum
- floren 9mo agoVacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we use it to keep our coffee hot
- reactordev 9mo agowhich is why the whole idea of data centers in space is ridiculous.
- floren 9mo agoI'm glad to realize we're in violent agreement, I thought you were implying cooling would be easy due to the vacuum!
- reactordev 9mo agoIt can be solved with radiator fins and cold plates but yeah, it’s not an easy task.
- avmich 9mo agoWhat kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
- nilamo 9mo agoAre there many of those current satellites running gpus and actually generating lots of heat?
- avmich 9mo agoPrincipally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.
- vel0city 9mo ago> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs. And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
- jasonwatkinspdx 9mo agoEven the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack. So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.
- idontwantthis 9mo agoThe ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data centers in space in the GW range. Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200 metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.