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The upside is it avoids the power, cooling, connectivity, location, environmental, staffing and physical security complexities of terrestrial data centers.
by benoau 5mo ago
The upside is it avoids the power, cooling, connectivity, location, environmental, staffing and physical security complexities of terrestrial data centers.
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoJust adds a bunch of new problems. ”We need a replacement cable. Guess we have to send a rocket and it’s gonna take a few months to plan”
- benoau 5mo agoSure, it's got a loooooot of complexities that undermine those upsides. But sometimes problems get solved, undersea cables faced (and still present) a lot of challenges too.
- victorbjorklund 4mo agoBut this is the harder choice. It’s like saying ”look undersea cables have problems so instead of putting them under the sea, why don’t we put cables above the sea instead and have helium balloons holding up the cable from Europe to North America. We solve the underwater problems…
- adampunk 5mo agoAnd replaces them with the famously environmentally friendly launch vehicle business.
- lovich 5mo agoIt doesn’t? > power It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed. > cooling Cooling off in a vacuum is hard. You’ll need radiators to emit the heat, you’ll need a lot of radiators for data center level heat. This is more mass you need to get into orbit > location The location is in space, it’s significantly more expensive to get mass into space than it is to move it someone else on the planet > environmental The day to day operations of a space based data center seem like they would be a benefit, but I haven’t seen the math on the environmental cost of the rocket launches vs the lifetime of a terrestrial data center > staffing Why would the location in space vs terrestrial change the staffing at all? Any technological change that could/would reduce staffing could be applied to terrestrial data centers as well > physical security You’re more secure from people, but now you’ve introduced the physical security risk of space debris where something with the mass of pocket lint could cause serious damage if it impacts your system. The whole space data center idea is just Musk trying to gin up more demand for his SpaceX IPO with no real benefit behind the idea. He’s been lying like this for years for money like with “Full Self Driving”(lol, don’t take your hands off the wheel because we’ll disengage right before a crash and it’s your problem) or his “robots”(actually remote controlled by humans). I don’t know why anyone listens to him anymore if he doesn’t show up with concrete results first. It’s like people want to be conned.
- loandbehold 5mo ago> It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed. SpaceX will be putting them in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning always sunlight.
- lovich 5mo agoHow would they handle eclipses?
- loandbehold 5mo agothe only "eclipse" in sun-synchronous orbit is when moon is between the satellite and the sun, which is very rare and lasts less than a minute.
- lovich 5mo agoYes, but it’s a guaranteed event, so it needs to be accounted for if you’re serious about engineering. The accounting could just be, we accept that downtime, it’s all calculated in advance and we’ll prepare the system for it, but it still needs to be considered.
- g023 5mo agoI wonder if "battelites" might be profitable. Like an pay-per-usage energy grid in space with battery backup that can beam power around to other satellites that might not have easy access to power, or have their power grids temporarily obstructed.