4 ms·

The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is 1. every gram you need to send to space is co

The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it. 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken. 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse. 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space. 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there. Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it? There is zero benefit, non nada.

adastra22 9mo ago
> sure space is cold Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
- hdgvhicv 9mo ago
  The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
  - adastra22 9mo ago
    In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.
    - Tepix 9mo ago
      I think stopping the heat conductivity is a solved problem - space telescopes manage to do this. But all in all, cooling in space remains a very big challenge.
      - adastra22 9mo ago
        No, it isn’t solved. The James Webb telescope was shipped with cryogenic coolant, and put in an orbit in the shadow of the moon far from the radiating earth. Once it runs out in a few years, it’s done.
        Tepix 9mo ago
        James Webb, being an infrared telescope, has to be extremely cold: It's Mid-Infrared Instrument is actively cooled to 7°K (-266°C). Most other instruments (NIRCam, NIRSpec, FGS/NIRISS) operate at about 40 Kelvin (-233°C) using only passive cooling (i.e. the sunshield). Clearly this would be cold enough for a data center. Clearly the sunshield can be very well thermally insulated from the rest of the telescopy. The sun-facing side is up to 300°C hot. The cold side is -233°C. I'm not saying radiating the heat from the GPUs is a solved problem. Just the thermal insulation between the solar panels and the rest of the spacecraft.
        shagie 9mo ago
        There's very little on JWST that makes it hot. Furthermore, the spacecraft bus where the non-scientific instruments exist) is on the other side of the sunshade so that the waste heat from the RAD750 (a single processor clocked at 118 MHz - PowerPC 750 architecture (Macintosh computers in '97) that uses 5 watts of power designed to operate -55°C to 125°C) doesn't interfere with the scientific instruments. Putting an AI rack there is a completely different scale of power and cooling than what JWST uses.
joelthelion 9mo ago
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
- graemep 9mo ago
  That sounds like what journalists usually do. They are reporters, and rarely have any real knowledge of what they report.
- bravetraveler 9mo ago
  I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"
  - joelthelion 9mo ago
    I'd argue this is not opinion but fact. Also, articles very often didn't say "Musk says" but just took his word for fact, not even quoting him. And in the era of Trump/Musk, their practices should evolve.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - titzer 9mo ago
    I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing out the fact that the moon is not made of blue cheese a kind of "rigorous" reporting? Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the press extra constitutional protections for.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9mo ago
vjk800 9mo ago
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve. > 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this. > 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it. I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat. > 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken. I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed. > 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse. Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility. > 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space. > 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there. These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
claaams 9mo ago
The benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets. It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15 years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything is more money and power.
MarceliusK 9mo ago
The cooling misconception is probably the biggest tell

adastra22 9mo ago

> sure space is cold Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.

hdgvhicv 9mo ago
The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
- adastra22 9mo ago
  In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.
  - Tepix 9mo ago
    I think stopping the heat conductivity is a solved problem - space telescopes manage to do this. But all in all, cooling in space remains a very big challenge.
    - adastra22 9mo ago
      No, it isn’t solved. The James Webb telescope was shipped with cryogenic coolant, and put in an orbit in the shadow of the moon far from the radiating earth. Once it runs out in a few years, it’s done.
      - Tepix 9mo ago
        James Webb, being an infrared telescope, has to be extremely cold: It's Mid-Infrared Instrument is actively cooled to 7°K (-266°C). Most other instruments (NIRCam, NIRSpec, FGS/NIRISS) operate at about 40 Kelvin (-233°C) using only passive cooling (i.e. the sunshield). Clearly this would be cold enough for a data center. Clearly the sunshield can be very well thermally insulated from the rest of the telescopy. The sun-facing side is up to 300°C hot. The cold side is -233°C. I'm not saying radiating the heat from the GPUs is a solved problem. Just the thermal insulation between the solar panels and the rest of the spacecraft.
        shagie 9mo ago
        There's very little on JWST that makes it hot. Furthermore, the spacecraft bus where the non-scientific instruments exist) is on the other side of the sunshade so that the waste heat from the RAD750 (a single processor clocked at 118 MHz - PowerPC 750 architecture (Macintosh computers in '97) that uses 5 watts of power designed to operate -55°C to 125°C) doesn't interfere with the scientific instruments. Putting an AI rack there is a completely different scale of power and cooling than what JWST uses.

joelthelion 9mo ago

> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").

graemep 9mo ago
That sounds like what journalists usually do. They are reporters, and rarely have any real knowledge of what they report.
bravetraveler 9mo ago
I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"
- joelthelion 9mo ago
  I'd argue this is not opinion but fact. Also, articles very often didn't say "Musk says" but just took his word for fact, not even quoting him. And in the era of Trump/Musk, their practices should evolve.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- titzer 9mo ago
  I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing out the fact that the moon is not made of blue cheese a kind of "rigorous" reporting? Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the press extra constitutional protections for.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9mo ago

vjk800 9mo ago

I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve. > 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this. > 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it. I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat. > 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken. I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed. > 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse. Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility. > 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space. > 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there. These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.

claaams 9mo ago

The benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets. It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15 years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything is more money and power.

MarceliusK 9mo ago

The cooling misconception is probably the biggest tell