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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

by leoedin 8mo 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 8mo ago
Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?
- thephyber 8mo 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.
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?
    - notahacker 8mo ago
      That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon. That probably works out more expensive than launching the whole thing to LEO
    - mcny 8mo ago
      But none of those are usable, right? It will take decades of work at least to get a commercial grade mining operation going and even then the iron, titanium, aluminum would need to be fashioned... Ah, I see the idea now. It is to get people to talk about robotics and how robots will be able to do all this on the moon or wherever. Instantly pumps Tesla stock here now on earth!
- ahoka 8mo ago
  It has all these problems, plus more.
- kakacik 8mo ago
  Yeah, carrying stuff 380k km and still deploying in vacuum (and super dusty ground) doesn't solve anything but adds cost and overhead. One day maybe, but not these next decades nor probably this century.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There’s no wind of course, but surely material will be stirred up and resettle based on all the landing activity. And it’s still a vacuum with many of the same cooling issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon itself as a heat sink (maybe).
  - microtherion 8mo ago
    > Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to be used.
- sdenton4 8mo ago
  The 2.5s round trip communication latency isn't going to be great for chat. (Alongside all the other reasons.)
  - zbentley 8mo ago
    And 2.5s is best case. Signal strength issues, antenna alignment issues, and all sorts of unknown unknowns conspire to make high-integrity/high-throughput digital signal transmissions from a moon-based compute system have a latency much worse than that on average.
- AllegedAlec 8mo ago
  Still a vacuum so the same heat dissipation issues, adding to it that the lunar dust makes solar panels less usable, and the lunar surface on the solar side gets really hot.
wombatpm 8mo ago
It would make more sense to develop power beaming technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto the rooftops of data centers
- habinero 8mo ago
  Why? We have solar panels and fossil fuels at home.
- dsr_ 8mo ago
  Everybody wants a death ray.
- voidfunc 8mo ago
  Hello SimCity 2000 Microwave Power Plant.
  - iFred 8mo ago
    Looking forward to an CNN breaking chyron titled "Oops!"
- wookmaster 8mo ago
  Why does that make sense at all
  - JeremyNT 8mo ago
    > Why does that make sense at all Parent said it would make more sense. I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge reflectors in space than it is to try to build space datacenters, where the electricity can only power specific pieces of equipment that are virtually impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within a few years).
fpoling 8mo ago
If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things works for a year or more energy cost to put them into orbit becomes irrelevant. To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them could work. Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then calling would be much less problematic. But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that would require entirely different architecture/design.
inglor_cz 8mo ago
"But why would you?" Because the permitting process is much easier and there are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut you down. I think this is the entire difference. Space is very, very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all but a few authorities that would hold power over you down on Earth. No one will be able to complain that your data center is taking their water or making their electricity more expensive, for example.
- oivey 8mo ago
  The satellite is built on Earth, so I’m not sure how it dodges any of those regulations practically. Why not just build a fully autonomous, solar powered datacenter on Earth? I guess in space Elon might think that no one can ban Grok for distributing CSAM? There’s some truly magical thinking behind the idea that government regulations have somehow made it cheaper to launch a rocket than build a building. Rockets are fantastically expensive even with the major leaps SpaceX made and will be even with Starship. Everything about a space launch is expensive, dangerous, and highly regulated. Your datacenter on Earth can’t go boom.
  - inglor_cz 8mo ago
    "fantastically expensive" From individual POV yes, but already Falcons are not that expensive. In the sense that it is feasible for a relatively unimportant entity to buy their launch services. "The satellite is built on Earth, so I’m not sure how it dodges any of those regulations practically." It is easier to shop for jurisdiction when it comes to manufacturing, especially if your design is simple enough - which it has to be in order to run unattended for years. If you outsource the manufacturing to N chosen factories in different locations, you can always respond to local pressure by moving out of that particular country. In effect, you just rent time and services of a factory that can produce tons of other products. A data center is much more expensive to build and move around. Once you build it in some location, you are committed quite seriously to staying there.
  - mike_hearn 8mo ago
elihu 8mo ago
The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are. Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible. If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.
- leoedin 8mo ago
  Let's assume your space solar panel is always in sun - so 8760 kWh per year from 1kWp. In Spain, 1kWp of solar can expect to generate about 1800 kWh per year. There's a complication because seasonal difference is quite large - if we assume worst case generation (ie what happens in December), we get more like 65% of that, or 1170 kWh per year. That means we need to overbuild our solar generation by about 7.5x to get the same amount of generation per year. Or 7.5kWp. We then need some storage, because that generation shuts off at night. In December in Madrid the shortest day is about 9 hours, so we need 15 hours of storage. Assuming a 1kW load, that means 15kWh. European wholesale solar panels are about €0.1/W - €100/kW. So our 7.5kWp is €750. A conservative estimate for batteries is €100/kWh. So our 15kWh is €1500. There's obviously other costs - inverters etc. But perhaps the total hardware cost is €3k for 1kW of off-grid solar. A communications satellite like the Eurostar Neo satellite has a payload power of 22 kW and a launch mass of 4,500 kg. Assuming that's a reasonable assumption, that means about 204kg per kW. Current SpaceX launch costs are circa $1500 per kg - but they're targeting $100/kg or lower. That would give a launch cost of between $300k and $20k per kW of satellite power. That doesn't include the actual cost of the satellite itself - just the launch. I just don't see how it will make sense for a long time. Even if SpaceX manage to drastically lower launch costs. Battery and solar costs have also been plummeting. https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-airbus-eurostar-neo-satellite-hits-milestone https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-air... https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadmap-to-100-times-lower-cost-launch.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadma...
andyjohnson0 8mo ago
> So I guess the question is - why bother? This is a Musk escapade, so my guess would be extraterritoriality and absence of jurisdiction.
- UltraSane 8mo ago
  No. With Musk it is always about inflating his share prices.

by leoedin 8mo ago

Findeton 8mo ago

Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?

thephyber 8mo 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.
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?
  - notahacker 8mo ago
    That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon. That probably works out more expensive than launching the whole thing to LEO
  - mcny 8mo ago
    But none of those are usable, right? It will take decades of work at least to get a commercial grade mining operation going and even then the iron, titanium, aluminum would need to be fashioned... Ah, I see the idea now. It is to get people to talk about robotics and how robots will be able to do all this on the moon or wherever. Instantly pumps Tesla stock here now on earth!
ahoka 8mo ago
It has all these problems, plus more.
kakacik 8mo ago
Yeah, carrying stuff 380k km and still deploying in vacuum (and super dusty ground) doesn't solve anything but adds cost and overhead. One day maybe, but not these next decades nor probably this century.
nkrisc 8mo ago
Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There’s no wind of course, but surely material will be stirred up and resettle based on all the landing activity. And it’s still a vacuum with many of the same cooling issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon itself as a heat sink (maybe).
- microtherion 8mo ago
  > Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to be used.
sdenton4 8mo ago
The 2.5s round trip communication latency isn't going to be great for chat. (Alongside all the other reasons.)
- zbentley 8mo ago
  And 2.5s is best case. Signal strength issues, antenna alignment issues, and all sorts of unknown unknowns conspire to make high-integrity/high-throughput digital signal transmissions from a moon-based compute system have a latency much worse than that on average.
AllegedAlec 8mo ago
Still a vacuum so the same heat dissipation issues, adding to it that the lunar dust makes solar panels less usable, and the lunar surface on the solar side gets really hot.

wombatpm 8mo ago

It would make more sense to develop power beaming technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto the rooftops of data centers

habinero 8mo ago
Why? We have solar panels and fossil fuels at home.
dsr_ 8mo ago
Everybody wants a death ray.
voidfunc 8mo ago
Hello SimCity 2000 Microwave Power Plant.
- iFred 8mo ago
  Looking forward to an CNN breaking chyron titled "Oops!"
wookmaster 8mo ago
Why does that make sense at all
- JeremyNT 8mo ago
  > Why does that make sense at all Parent said it would make more sense. I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge reflectors in space than it is to try to build space datacenters, where the electricity can only power specific pieces of equipment that are virtually impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within a few years).

fpoling 8mo ago

If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things works for a year or more energy cost to put them into orbit becomes irrelevant. To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them could work. Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then calling would be much less problematic. But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that would require entirely different architecture/design.

inglor_cz 8mo ago

"But why would you?" Because the permitting process is much easier and there are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut you down. I think this is the entire difference. Space is very, very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all but a few authorities that would hold power over you down on Earth. No one will be able to complain that your data center is taking their water or making their electricity more expensive, for example.

oivey 8mo ago
The satellite is built on Earth, so I’m not sure how it dodges any of those regulations practically. Why not just build a fully autonomous, solar powered datacenter on Earth? I guess in space Elon might think that no one can ban Grok for distributing CSAM? There’s some truly magical thinking behind the idea that government regulations have somehow made it cheaper to launch a rocket than build a building. Rockets are fantastically expensive even with the major leaps SpaceX made and will be even with Starship. Everything about a space launch is expensive, dangerous, and highly regulated. Your datacenter on Earth can’t go boom.
- inglor_cz 8mo ago
  "fantastically expensive" From individual POV yes, but already Falcons are not that expensive. In the sense that it is feasible for a relatively unimportant entity to buy their launch services. "The satellite is built on Earth, so I’m not sure how it dodges any of those regulations practically." It is easier to shop for jurisdiction when it comes to manufacturing, especially if your design is simple enough - which it has to be in order to run unattended for years. If you outsource the manufacturing to N chosen factories in different locations, you can always respond to local pressure by moving out of that particular country. In effect, you just rent time and services of a factory that can produce tons of other products. A data center is much more expensive to build and move around. Once you build it in some location, you are committed quite seriously to staying there.
- mike_hearn 8mo ago

elihu 8mo ago

The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are. Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible. If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.

leoedin 8mo ago
Let's assume your space solar panel is always in sun - so 8760 kWh per year from 1kWp. In Spain, 1kWp of solar can expect to generate about 1800 kWh per year. There's a complication because seasonal difference is quite large - if we assume worst case generation (ie what happens in December), we get more like 65% of that, or 1170 kWh per year. That means we need to overbuild our solar generation by about 7.5x to get the same amount of generation per year. Or 7.5kWp. We then need some storage, because that generation shuts off at night. In December in Madrid the shortest day is about 9 hours, so we need 15 hours of storage. Assuming a 1kW load, that means 15kWh. European wholesale solar panels are about €0.1/W - €100/kW. So our 7.5kWp is €750. A conservative estimate for batteries is €100/kWh. So our 15kWh is €1500. There's obviously other costs - inverters etc. But perhaps the total hardware cost is €3k for 1kW of off-grid solar. A communications satellite like the Eurostar Neo satellite has a payload power of 22 kW and a launch mass of 4,500 kg. Assuming that's a reasonable assumption, that means about 204kg per kW. Current SpaceX launch costs are circa $1500 per kg - but they're targeting $100/kg or lower. That would give a launch cost of between $300k and $20k per kW of satellite power. That doesn't include the actual cost of the satellite itself - just the launch. I just don't see how it will make sense for a long time. Even if SpaceX manage to drastically lower launch costs. Battery and solar costs have also been plummeting. https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-airbus-eurostar-neo-satellite-hits-milestone https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-air... https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadmap-to-100-times-lower-cost-launch.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadma...

andyjohnson0 8mo ago

> So I guess the question is - why bother? This is a Musk escapade, so my guess would be extraterritoriality and absence of jurisdiction.

UltraSane 8mo ago
No. With Musk it is always about inflating his share prices.