3 ms·
That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done buil
by jacobgold 3mo ago
That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time.
I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware.
I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.
- nijave 3mo agoGPUs depreciate super fast. It might last 5-7 years but it's already outdated at 2-3 Also space has more radiation
- bakies 3mo agouhh no I dont think the road vehicle is harsher than a rocket launch
- jacobgold 3mo agoThe rocket's payload most likely has higher peak vibration but only for a few minutes, and just one time. The road vehicle's payload is shocked by every pot hole and speed bump, for years.
- asadotzler 3mo ago5 years is a Starlink's typical lifetime. Data center satellite lifetimes will probably be shorter. Demise sooner, replace more often. GPUs get more energy efficient every year and leaving the slower, hungrier chips up there much longer than 3 years seems wasteful given the cheap cost of launch. I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design goals, it'll beat Falcon 9 and we could see orbital servers being demised and replaced every 3 years, maybe even 2, for ones with abnormally high failure rates. Now, whether or not this will all make money in the end has a lot to do with what's going on down here on terra firma and how long it takes to get useful capacity into orbit. (It's taken 7 years to get Starlink capacity enough for serving 10M customers. Verizon FiOS did 10M in 5 years. AT&T Fiber took 4-5 years to deploy to 10M. So, space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial.)
- kibwen 3mo ago> space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial But it depreciates faster. That fiber run is lasting for 50 years, not 5. You need 10x the installation capacity just to keep up.
- croes 3mo agoStarlink rushed when they put the satellites in orbit, AT&T did the opposite. They did the bare minimum. So terrestrial was faster without really trying
- maxerickson 3mo agoThe efficiency of the chips only matters if the orbit is full. If the orbit isn't full, all they are is additional compute.