Comment by observationist
12 hours ago
If you ramp up the economies of scale to make those things - radiation protection and cost per pound - the calculus changes. It's supposed to synergize with Starship, and immediately take advantage of the reduced cost per pound.
If the cost per pound, power, regulatory burden, networking, and radiation shielding can be gamed out, as well as the thousand other technically difficult and probably expensive problems that can crop up, they have to sum to less than the effective cost of running that same datacenter here on earth. It's interesting that it doesn't play into Jevon's paradox the way it might otherwise - there's a reduction in power consumption planetside, if compute gets moved to space, but no equivalent expansion since the resource isn't transferable.
I think some sort of space junk recycling would be necessary, especially at the terawatt scale being proposed - at some point vaporizing a bunch of arbitrary high temperature chemistry in the upper atmosphere isn't likely to be conducive to human well-being. Copper and aluminum and gold and so on are also probably worth recovering over allowing to be vaporized. With that much infrastructure in space, you start looking at recycling, manufacturing, collection in order to do cost reductions, so maybe part of the intent is to push into off-planet manufacturing and resource logistics?
The whole thing's fascinating - if it works, that's a lot of compute. If it doesn't work, that's a lot of very expensive compute and shooting stars.
some people really gotta stop huffing VC fumes
Or, just saying, be critical of ideas and think them through, and take in what experts say about it, and determine for yourself what's up. If a bunch of people who usually seem to know what they're talking about think there's a legitimate shot at something you, as a fellow armchair analyst, think is completely impractical, it makes sense to go and see if maybe they know something you don't.
In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable.
If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.
Or, just saying, we should eat babies because they are abundant and full of healthy nutrition for adult humans. [1]
Just because an idea has some factors in its favor (Space-based datacenter: 100% uptime solar, no permitting problems [2]) doesn't mean it isn't ridiculous on its face. We're in an AI bubble, with silly money flowing like crazy and looking for something, anything to invest it. That, and circular investments to keep the bubble going. Unfortunately this gives validation to stupid ideas, it's one of the hallmarks of bubbles. We've seen this before.
The only things that space-based anything have advantages on are long-distance communication and observation, neither of which datacenters benefit from.
The simple fact is that anything that can be done in a space-based datacenter can be done cheaper on Earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal for the obtuse
[2] until people start having qualms about the atmospheric impact of all those extra launches and orbital debris
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