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But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtain

But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big. That doesn't mean you need a gigawatt of power before achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not for inference which scales horizontally. With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time, and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those, but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and just keep launching them on a cadence. I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).

cogman10 9mo ago
> I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe). You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized radiator tech because of things like the international space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper optimization. Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem easier. Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to help address this very problem.
- mike_hearn 9mo ago
  The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.
  - jeltz 9mo ago
    By the same token SpaceX has no reason to optimize Starship. That is also largely a government project.
    - b112 9mo ago
      It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point. Starship isn't largely a government project. It was planned a decade before the government was ever involved, they came along later and said "Hey, this even more incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?" Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any government.
      - habinero 9mo ago
        Haha no. SpaceX survives entirely on money from the US government. It's always been that way.
        thinkcontext 9mo ago
        A puzzling statement, could you explain? Most of their revenue now comes Starlink which is mostly private clients. Also it's trivial to look at their launch history and see they have plenty of private clients. For sure the USG is their most important client but "entirely" is flat out wrong.
        s-y 9mo ago
        Where are you getting this from?
        lightedman 9mo ago
        Entirely? lol not even close. Source: I am out of LEDs and LASERs and now handle aerospace solar for a private company. Guess who almost everyone in the private sector flies on?
      - oivey 9mo ago
- zero_bias 9mo ago
  ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    ISS cost $150B and a large factor driving that cost was the payload weight. Minimizing payload at any point was easily worth a billion dollars. And given how heavy and nessisary the radiators are (look them up), you can bet a decent bit of research was invested in making them lightweight. Heck, one bit of research that lasted the entire lifetime of the shuttle was improving the radiative heat system [1]. Multiple contractors and agencies invested a huge amount of money to make that system better. Removing heat is one of the most researched problems of all space programs. They all have to do it, and every gram of reduction means big savings. Simply saying "well a DC will need more of it, therefore there must be low hanging fruit" is naive. [1] https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116 https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116
leoedin 9mo ago
But why would you? Space has some huge downsides: * Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things need to be radiation hardened or shielded. * Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO. I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at least. * Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into space. * Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals * You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means writing off the entire system. * Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No electrolytic capacitors for you! So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact you have to blast it all into space? Why not just overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?
- Findeton 9mo ago
  Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?
  - thephyber 9mo ago
    Almost none of the parent’s bullet points are solved by building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit. The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit. Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers in. This whole things screams a solution in search of a problem. We have to solve the traditional data center issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience, etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical space data centers, but they are all already solved for terrestrial data centers.
thephyber 9mo ago
There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other. We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. Yes, space is big, but low Earth orbit is a very tiny subset of all space. The amount of propulsion satellites have before they become unable to maneuver is relatively small and the more satellite traffic there is, the faster each satellite will exhaust their propulsion gasses.
- turtlesdown11 9mo ago
  >There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other. This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications. Elon probably said "they could just run the machines faster! I'm brilliant".
- krisoft 9mo ago
  > We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. What do you mean we don’t have any plans to avoid that? It is a super well studied topic of satelite management. Full books have been written on the topic. Here is just one: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA_Handbook_CM%20Version%202-24-23.docx.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA... Did you think satelites are kept apart by good luck and providence?
  - thephyber 9mo ago
    I am very aware that the US Air Force / Space Force monitor’s trajectories and calls satellite owners when there is an anticipated collision but that method doesn’t scale, especially with orders of magnitude more satellites in the same LEO shells. And it still doesn’t solve the problem of a cascade causing shrapnel density to increase in an orbit shell which then causes satellites to use some of their scarce maneuver budget to avoid collision. But as soon as a satellite exhausts that budget, it becomes fodder for the shrapnel cascade.
skywhopper 9mo ago
All of those “huge overheads” you cite are nothing compared to the huge overhead of building and fueling rockets to launch the vibration- and radiation-hardened versions of the solar panels and GPUs and cooling equipment that you could use much cheaper versions of on Earth. How many permitted, regulated launches would it take to get around the one-time permitting and predictable regulation of a ground-based datacenter? Are Earth-based datacenters actually bound by some bottleneck that space-based datacenters would not be? Grid connections or on-site power plants take time to build, yes. How long does it take to build the rocket fleet required to launch a space “datacenter” in a reasonable time window? This is not a problem that needs to be solved. Certainly not worth investing billions in, and definitely not when run by the biggest scam artist of the 21st century.

cogman10 9mo ago

> I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe). You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized radiator tech because of things like the international space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper optimization. Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem easier. Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to help address this very problem.

mike_hearn 9mo ago
The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.
- jeltz 9mo ago
  By the same token SpaceX has no reason to optimize Starship. That is also largely a government project.
  - b112 9mo ago
    It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point. Starship isn't largely a government project. It was planned a decade before the government was ever involved, they came along later and said "Hey, this even more incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?" Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any government.
    - habinero 9mo ago
      Haha no. SpaceX survives entirely on money from the US government. It's always been that way.
      - thinkcontext 9mo ago
        A puzzling statement, could you explain? Most of their revenue now comes Starlink which is mostly private clients. Also it's trivial to look at their launch history and see they have plenty of private clients. For sure the USG is their most important client but "entirely" is flat out wrong.
      - s-y 9mo ago
        Where are you getting this from?
      - lightedman 9mo ago
        Entirely? lol not even close. Source: I am out of LEDs and LASERs and now handle aerospace solar for a private company. Guess who almost everyone in the private sector flies on?
    - oivey 9mo ago
zero_bias 9mo ago
ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling
- cogman10 9mo ago
  ISS cost $150B and a large factor driving that cost was the payload weight. Minimizing payload at any point was easily worth a billion dollars. And given how heavy and nessisary the radiators are (look them up), you can bet a decent bit of research was invested in making them lightweight. Heck, one bit of research that lasted the entire lifetime of the shuttle was improving the radiative heat system [1]. Multiple contractors and agencies invested a huge amount of money to make that system better. Removing heat is one of the most researched problems of all space programs. They all have to do it, and every gram of reduction means big savings. Simply saying "well a DC will need more of it, therefore there must be low hanging fruit" is naive. [1] https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116 https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116

leoedin 9mo ago

But why would you? Space has some huge downsides: * Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things need to be radiation hardened or shielded. * Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO. I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at least. * Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into space. * Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals * You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means writing off the entire system. * Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No electrolytic capacitors for you! So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact you have to blast it all into space? Why not just overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?

Findeton 9mo ago
Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?
- thephyber 9mo ago
  Almost none of the parent’s bullet points are solved by building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit. The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit. Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers in. This whole things screams a solution in search of a problem. We have to solve the traditional data center issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience, etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical space data centers, but they are all already solved for terrestrial data centers.

thephyber 9mo ago

There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other. We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. Yes, space is big, but low Earth orbit is a very tiny subset of all space. The amount of propulsion satellites have before they become unable to maneuver is relatively small and the more satellite traffic there is, the faster each satellite will exhaust their propulsion gasses.

turtlesdown11 9mo ago
>There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other. This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications. Elon probably said "they could just run the machines faster! I'm brilliant".
krisoft 9mo ago
> We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. What do you mean we don’t have any plans to avoid that? It is a super well studied topic of satelite management. Full books have been written on the topic. Here is just one: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA_Handbook_CM%20Version%202-24-23.docx.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA... Did you think satelites are kept apart by good luck and providence?
- thephyber 9mo ago
  I am very aware that the US Air Force / Space Force monitor’s trajectories and calls satellite owners when there is an anticipated collision but that method doesn’t scale, especially with orders of magnitude more satellites in the same LEO shells. And it still doesn’t solve the problem of a cascade causing shrapnel density to increase in an orbit shell which then causes satellites to use some of their scarce maneuver budget to avoid collision. But as soon as a satellite exhausts that budget, it becomes fodder for the shrapnel cascade.

skywhopper 9mo ago

All of those “huge overheads” you cite are nothing compared to the huge overhead of building and fueling rockets to launch the vibration- and radiation-hardened versions of the solar panels and GPUs and cooling equipment that you could use much cheaper versions of on Earth. How many permitted, regulated launches would it take to get around the one-time permitting and predictable regulation of a ground-based datacenter? Are Earth-based datacenters actually bound by some bottleneck that space-based datacenters would not be? Grid connections or on-site power plants take time to build, yes. How long does it take to build the rocket fleet required to launch a space “datacenter” in a reasonable time window? This is not a problem that needs to be solved. Certainly not worth investing billions in, and definitely not when run by the biggest scam artist of the 21st century.