8 ms·

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth. 1. The capital costs are higher, you hav

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth. 1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit 2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low 3. Refurbishment is next to impossible 4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)

murderfs 8mo ago
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
- sanex 8mo ago
  Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
  - falcor84 8mo ago
    This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
    - lambdaone 8mo ago
      It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.
  - 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
    I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.
    - mike_hearn 8mo ago
      Or cooling water/oil?
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > Or cooling water/oil? Oh. You surround it with propellant. In a propellant depot.
        mike_hearn 8mo ago
        Hah, kill three birds with one stone? The satellites double up as propellant depots for other space missions, that just happen to have GPUs inside? And maybe use droplet radiators to expel the low grade heat from the propellant. I wonder if that can be made safe at all. They use propellant to cool the engine skins so... maybe?
        shagie 8mo ago
        You're describing cryogenic fuels there and dumping heat into them. Dumping heat (sparks, electricity) into liquid oxygen would not necessarily be the best of ideas. Dumping heat into liquid hydrogen wouldn't be explosive, but rather exacerbate the problem of boil off that is already one of the "this isn't going to work well" problems that needs to be solved for space fuel depots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot > Large upper-stage rocket engines generally use a cryogenic fuel like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (LOX) as an oxidizer because of the large specific impulse possible, but must carefully consider a problem called "boil off", or the evaporation of the cryogenic propellant. The boil off from only a few days of delay may not allow sufficient fuel for higher orbit injection, potentially resulting in a mission abort. They've already got the problem of that the fuel is boiled off in a matter of days. This is not a long term solution for a place to dump waste heat. Furthermore, it needs to be at cryogenic temperatures for it to be used by the spacecraft that the fuel depot is going to refuel. > In a 2010 NASA study, an additional flight of an Ares V heavy launch vehicle was required to stage a US government Mars reference mission due to 70 tons of boiloff, assuming 0.1% boiloff/day for hydrolox propellant. The study identified the need to decrease the design boiloff rate by an order of magnitude or more. 0.1% boiloff/day is considered an order of magnitude to large now. That's not a place to shunt waste heat.
  - notahacker 8mo ago
    Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :) The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking
- XorNot 8mo ago
  And just like that you've added another not never done before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix. These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost. Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.
- zeofig 8mo ago
  "Planning" is a strong word..
- mlyle 8mo ago
  Another significant factor is that radiation makes things worse. Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time. High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.
  - Aerolfos 8mo ago
    If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two). Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
- deepGem 8mo ago
  This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
  - EdwardDiego 8mo ago
    So freedom from law and regulation?
    - deepGem 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - jeltz 8mo ago
        So why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
        deepGem 8mo ago
        I meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
        aforwardslash 8mo ago
trhway 8mo ago
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling. Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground. And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961 >2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
- viraptor 8mo ago
  > will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
  - trhway 8mo ago
    It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity. A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
    - javascriptfan69 8mo ago
      100 x 100 is 10,000.
    - sarchertech 8mo ago
WillPostForFood 8mo ago
What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for the items you listed, but it may not be true that everything is more difficult in space.
- edoceo 8mo ago
  I'm stretched to think of one thing that is easier in space. Anything I could imagine still requires getting there (in one piece)
  - blipvert 8mo ago
    Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?
  - esquivalience 8mo ago
    Death, and some science. That's it?
    - ljsprague 8mo ago
      Horseshoes.
  - DharmaPolice 8mo ago
    Noise insulation.
- pclmulqdq 8mo ago
  Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
  - duskwuff 8mo ago
    > Solar panels in space are more efficient... ... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.
smileeeee 8mo ago
The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing more money at it gets you more satellites. At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  It's just tax payer money, who cares right? :)

murderfs 8mo ago

> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...

sanex 8mo ago
Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
- falcor84 8mo ago
  This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
  - lambdaone 8mo ago
    It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.
  - mike_hearn 8mo ago
    Or cooling water/oil?
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Or cooling water/oil? Oh. You surround it with propellant. In a propellant depot.
      - mike_hearn 8mo ago
        Hah, kill three birds with one stone? The satellites double up as propellant depots for other space missions, that just happen to have GPUs inside? And maybe use droplet radiators to expel the low grade heat from the propellant. I wonder if that can be made safe at all. They use propellant to cool the engine skins so... maybe?
        shagie 8mo ago
        You're describing cryogenic fuels there and dumping heat into them. Dumping heat (sparks, electricity) into liquid oxygen would not necessarily be the best of ideas. Dumping heat into liquid hydrogen wouldn't be explosive, but rather exacerbate the problem of boil off that is already one of the "this isn't going to work well" problems that needs to be solved for space fuel depots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot > Large upper-stage rocket engines generally use a cryogenic fuel like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (LOX) as an oxidizer because of the large specific impulse possible, but must carefully consider a problem called "boil off", or the evaporation of the cryogenic propellant. The boil off from only a few days of delay may not allow sufficient fuel for higher orbit injection, potentially resulting in a mission abort. They've already got the problem of that the fuel is boiled off in a matter of days. This is not a long term solution for a place to dump waste heat. Furthermore, it needs to be at cryogenic temperatures for it to be used by the spacecraft that the fuel depot is going to refuel. > In a 2010 NASA study, an additional flight of an Ares V heavy launch vehicle was required to stage a US government Mars reference mission due to 70 tons of boiloff, assuming 0.1% boiloff/day for hydrolox propellant. The study identified the need to decrease the design boiloff rate by an order of magnitude or more. 0.1% boiloff/day is considered an order of magnitude to large now. That's not a place to shunt waste heat.
- notahacker 8mo ago
  Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :) The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking
XorNot 8mo ago
And just like that you've added another not never done before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix. These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost. Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.
zeofig 8mo ago
"Planning" is a strong word..
mlyle 8mo ago
Another significant factor is that radiation makes things worse. Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time. High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.
- Aerolfos 8mo ago
  If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two). Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago

> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.

deepGem 8mo ago
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
- EdwardDiego 8mo ago
  So freedom from law and regulation?
  - deepGem 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jeltz 8mo ago
      So why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
      - deepGem 8mo ago
        I meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
        aforwardslash 8mo ago

trhway 8mo ago

>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling. Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground. And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961 >2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.

viraptor 8mo ago
> will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
- trhway 8mo ago
  It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity. A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
  - javascriptfan69 8mo ago
    100 x 100 is 10,000.
  - sarchertech 8mo ago

WillPostForFood 8mo ago

What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for the items you listed, but it may not be true that everything is more difficult in space.

edoceo 8mo ago
I'm stretched to think of one thing that is easier in space. Anything I could imagine still requires getting there (in one piece)
- blipvert 8mo ago
  Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?
- esquivalience 8mo ago
  Death, and some science. That's it?
  - ljsprague 8mo ago
    Horseshoes.
- DharmaPolice 8mo ago
  Noise insulation.
pclmulqdq 8mo ago
Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
- duskwuff 8mo ago
  > Solar panels in space are more efficient... ... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.

smileeeee 8mo ago

The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing more money at it gets you more satellites. At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
It's just tax payer money, who cares right? :)