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There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to
by NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedicated to streaming media content. You can tolerate higher RTT for content that doesn't need to be real time.
- ssl-3 5mo agoIf I correctly understand what you're suggesting, then that could save on uplink bandwidth. Sending one copy into space, and then sending it back down over and over again sounds nice. But does it solve a problem that we actually have? Is uplink bandwidth a pressing limitation?
- evil-olive 5mo agono, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else. the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware. the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently made for terrestrial uses. radiation-hardening involves a lot of things, but in general the more tightly packed the transistors are, the more susceptible the chip is to damage. sending these SSDs to space would be an absurd waste of money because of how quickly they would degrade. and then there's the power consumption & heat dissipation. one of these drives draws 25W [2] and Dell is bragging about cramming 40 of them into one server. that's a full kilowatt of power - essentially a space heater in a 2U form factor. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 2: https://americas.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/en-us/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd/asset/KIOXIA_LC9_Product_Overview.pdf https://americas.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/en-us/busines...
- NitpickLawyer 5mo ago[flagged]
- dmurray 5mo agoIn the limit, packing transistors tighter should mean more radiation resistance, not less, because you can shield them with a smaller mass of water or lead or whatever.
- nine_k 5mo agoIt would be funny if lead-acid batteries end up being space-grade, should the lead be able to serve as a radiation shield.
- rbanffy 5mo agoIIRC, metals aren’t great shields because of secondary particles emitted after the first one hits the shield.
- randomtoast 5mo agoThe water cooling system then serves multiple functions, including acting as a radiation shield.
- fgfarben 5mo ago[flagged]
- hilariously 5mo agoIt certainly looks more correct than a response like this, normally you'd expect a counter point instead of just doing whatever it is you are doing.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 5mo ago
- KaiserPro 5mo agoOr you could use fibre, which has the advantage of not needing to use > 1kw of concentrated microwave to get ~2gig of throughput Or even better not yeeting it into an environment where its cooked/cooled every 90 minutes Or even better where its not absolutely pelted by cosmic rays enough to obliterate a good GB a day of data. Or space data centre.
- tesdinger 5mo agoFor the sake of the generations that come after us, we really should not dump valuable material into space. I somehow doubt the electronics in space would be recovered and recycled properly.
- 9dev 5mo agoNothing is recycled properly. Recycling was a story told to ease consumers minds so they keep on consuming. The stuff you throw away ends up on a landfill, in the sea, or on a ship to someplace else where it gets burned and then buried. Sending it to space makes absolutely no difference.
- UltraSane 5mo agoMost steel and aluminum and nearly all copper is recycled
- ekianjo 5mo agoHow do you know?
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoIt would be relatively obvious from the difference between production and mining output.
- ekianjo 5mo agoSo is there public data?
- Melatonic 5mo agoPlaces decent money for it
- beAbU 5mo agoAt some point a massive landfill will become more economically viable to mine for rare or useful elements than an actual mine. There is a good case for piling rubbish into to a well-managed landfill for future generations to mine with better technologies. Also, burning plastic waste in a power plant at least liberates the energy for use. One can argue it's just fossil fuels that spent time doing something useful before it became energy. Taking rare elements to space only for it to stay up there or burn up in the atmosphere removes it from this whole equation.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5mo ago/me turning in my sleep muttering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
- sharts 5mo agowhy pollute the skies?
- hakfoo 5mo agoWhat exactly is the selling point for an orbital data centre? Satellites for connectivity to ground-based data centres seems to make sense, but that seems like it's relatively light hardware compared to a rack full of compute and storage. If we're looking for apocalypse-scale redundancy, we already have all sorts of ground-based infrastructure and multi-continental designs on earth already. I wonder if it's some weird play in the seasteading style-- if they put the data in space, it's outside the reach of any government except ones willing to jam the airwaves or fire missiles capable of reaching orbit.