Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
How can the solar panel itself radiate heat when it's being heated up generating supplying power? Looking at pictures of the ISS there's radiators that look like they're there specifically to cool the solar panels.
And even if viable, why would you just not cool using air down on earth? Water is used for cooling because it increases effectiveness significantly, but even a closed loop system with simple dry air heat exchangers is quite a lot more effective than radiative cooling
It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around
While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation stealing copyright content is not okay any more
DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room.
ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons.
You also need to collect that power so you need about the same amount of power coming from solar panels. ISS solar array wings are 35x12 m and can generate about 31 kW of power. So we’ll need at least 3 of them. BTW each weighs a ton, a literal metric ton.
It hardly seems feasible. Huge infrastructure costs for small AI server rooms in space.
The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
I’m not certain spacex is generating much cash right now ?
Starship development is consuming billions. F9 & Starlink are probably profitable ?
I’d say this is more shifting of the future burden of xAI to one of his companies he knows will be a hit stonk when it goes public, where enthusiasm is unlikely to be dampened by another massive cash drain on the books.
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.
It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.
Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides.
Heat pumps are magic. They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a value of $0 with the claim:
"More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space"
My bold claim: The cost of cooling will not be $0. The cost of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling in space will not be $0.
They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:
- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;
- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;
- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;
- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;
NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done, they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about dT not delta T
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?
A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).
There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.
> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic.
Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
They are more popular than ever, actually. Pretty much all those fancy cups and bottles (like Stanley, other brands available) sold to keep your coffee hot/drink cold on the go are vaccum ones. It's just updated and more robust design compared to the older thermos flasks.
"A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos."
A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively narrow band around room temperature.[1]
during all operational phases.
This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits around room temperature.
[1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning 20°C (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the rule).
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is much lower and it’s the temperature difference which determines the rate of cooling.
AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.
Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.
The only way I see this actually working given the resource requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of the solar panels at L1 or something.
This is widely believed (especially in the US, where, other than the Leaf, most early electric cars never launched), but honestly pretty dubious. The first real electric cars, with significant production:
2010 - Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan Leaf
2011 - Smart electric, Volvo C30 electric, Ford Focus electric, BYD e6.
2012 - Renault Zoe (Renault launched a couple of other vehicles on the same platform ~2010, but they never saw significant production), Tesla Model S (Tesla had a prior car, the Roadster, but it never saw significant production).
2013 - VW eUP, eGolf (VW occasionally put out an electric Golf historically, going back to 1992, but again those were never produced in large quantities).
The big change ~2010 was around the economics of lithium ion batteries; they finally got cheap enough that everyone started pulling their concept designs and small-scale demonstration models into full production.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.
But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.
Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.
Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)
Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in particular come to mind:
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.
His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
If any single country tried to create a whole production chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the economics would ever work out.
> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab.
It could also just be ignorance and talking out of his ass to look smart. Like when he took over Twitter and began publicly spewing wrong technical details as if he knew what he was talking about and being corrected by the people actually working on the product.
Jeffrey Epstein's friend Elon Musk is trying to stop a financial disaster in xAi that would expose how irresponsible he is. He's gonna put all that in a company that has real money coming from government and soon will get retail investors money.
I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.
They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.
I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.
The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.
For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.
I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.
Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.
Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.
Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
The other two methods of heat transfer apart from radiation are conduction (through “touch”, adjacent molecules, eg from the outside of a chicken on the BBQ to the inside) and convection (through movement, eg cold air or water flowing past).
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.
In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).
Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.
All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.
This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
> a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
Consider: If you genuinely believe that the only important goal is to make life multiplanetary,
(and note I'm not defending this position here, just asserting it as an explanation of behavior)
then anything that drives money towards your work on that goal is worth pursuing particularly if you think time is short.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into whether or not this idea makes sense.
That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point:
> Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things into space.
That is not the benchmark here.
It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could. It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than running them on earth.
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.
> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.
There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant regular x86 years ago, that's true.
I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up, and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.
When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.
The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
Sure, until you need to replace or upgrade it. How long does a server on earth last for, how often does it need maintenance / replacing? And how long is the expected or desired lifetime for a server in space? Then calculate weight and cost etc.
> Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
"Maybe" is hope, you can't build a business on hope / wishful thinking. And the running costs for data centers on earth can be reduced too if you build them the same way as a sattelite - solar panels + battery + radiative cooling gives you enough data to compare. But servers / data centers aren't built that way because of cost vs benefit.
> If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done.
See, it's possible for sure - we HAVE computers in space, powered, cooled, running 24/7. The questions are whether it makes economic sense, both launch costs and running / maintenance costs. That's straight math, and the math isn't mathing.
> I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
Sure, but the ISS itself cost ~100 billion to build and operate - probably more, this is based on a ten second search query. While I'm sure launches are cheaper than ever and will be even cheaper in the future, it's still tens of billions to build a data center in space, plus you'd need astronauts, supplies, hardware, etc - all a LOT more expensive than the equivalent processing power on earth.
> These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
True, so we as humanity should offer resistance to plans to launch thousands of objects into space unless they have a clear and definite benefit. I'm not worried about Starlink, it's a benefit to all the areas that don't have (open) access to the internet and they're in low-earth orbit so they'll fall back within 5 years. But I just don't see the benefit in putting datacenters in space, not when it's so much cheaper and more viable to put them on earth.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
Yup, likewise Starlink - while space internet is an interesting and viable concept (whether it'll earn itself back is another question, I'm not convinced), the real motivation behind it was to create demand for many SpaceX launches. There have been 352 Starlink launches [0] so far, out of 596 total [1]. If it wasn't for Starlink, SpaceX would only have been operating at 1/3 to 1/2 of what it does today, cutting into their "economics of scale". And they'll need demand to make Starship viable, the possible moon missions aren't enough to fund or justify the whole project. Hence also the ideas of colonising Mars, which - if someone is willing to pay for it - would create a large and steady demand for launches / flights.
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
> I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort.
The ISS is the single most expensive thing built by humankind ($100b+). What makes you think that building a "space casino" or "space resort" is commercially viable?
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
I'd say they're basically floating on the success of previous sci-fi ideas that they made a reality; reusable rockets at a fraction of the price of NASA or ESA launches for example, or self-driving electric cars (the electric part was a success, the self-driving, not so much).
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Heinlein's sci fi didn't age well, because it was written for juveniles and then later his social ideas overtook his sci fi ones.
He had the same blind spots that Ayn Rand did, but perhaps better informed of the fascist-adjacent US culture.
One of the good sci fi/social ideas he had was about what it meant to "grok" something. groklaw.net of happy memory was exactly what that verb was supposed to mean, dive into something until you understand it at a molecular level.
The fact that Musk et al have stolen terms like "grok" and even "cyberspace" as if they own them is something I loathe.
Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.
1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.
2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.
3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.
As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.
A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:
- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.
- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.
- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.
3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)
This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost.
Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, or grid collapses.
Servers in orbit are physically isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots, local warfare, or physical break-ins.
Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up land for housing or nature.
Space data centers do not deplete Earth’s freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers which consume billions of gallons annually.
Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.
Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments.
Data transmission can be faster in space because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does through fiber optic cables.
Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw data back to Earth
While it’s true that there are no floods or earthquakes in space it’s not exactly a safe place to be. Radiation and cosmic rays become a much greater threat. Shielding provided by the atmosphere would have to be replaced.
You also underestimate the cooling problem. The fact that space is cold doesn’t mean it’s easy to cool things off in space. On earth the main cooling strategy is to transfer heat through direct contact and move the hot stuff away. Be it air or water, as you mentioned. In space your only option is to radiate heat away. And that’s while half of you is under intense sunlight.
I think you also undersell the thread of warfare in space. Sure, a guy with Molotov can’t get you space data center but we’ve had satellite shot down. So maybe not every war is a threat but, say China or Russia (or other space-faring nation) could take care of a satellite if absolutely needed.
National seizures are also still a threat. If only being outside national borders was such a great defense we’d see some data centers in the sea by now.
So being in space is immune to some of the known problems but also comes with a whole lot of novel issues, not solved at scale yet. And so far I haven’t seen any sufficiently detailed proposed solutions to even consider the trade of known problems with readily available solutions for new issues with lots of unknowns.
Essentially all of your concerns concerns can be mitigated by building somewhere else.
Worried about natural disasters? Build some place less prone to natural disasters.
Worried about the strain on local communities? Build some place more remote.
Worried about energy availability? Build near a nuclear power plant or hydroelectric power station.
Worried about hostile governments? Don't build data centers within the territories of hostile governments. (If you consider every country a hostile government, that is a you-problem.)
For the cost of building a data center in space, you could instead build a second (or third, or fourth, ...) data center somewhere else.
> Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments.
You are aware physical persons exist on Earth and can be taken into custody? Additionally, space weapons exist, several governments could destroy any orbital satellite.
They may well avoid terrestrial threats by having them in space, but then they become subject to different threats such as solar storms, high energy cosmic rays, space debris collisions etc.
I think the main reason to host them in space is to escape Earth jurisdictions, but even that is dubious as there will be people involved that reside on the Earth.
By combining ai with space, in addition to any other plays that he might be playing around legal or financial areas, he's positioning (marketing) spaceX for the bandwagon that everyone else might jump into to deploy a space datacentre. He's providing the medium (spacex rockets) to realise this potentially unfeasible idea. He makes additional money that way - to then create a new type of money-making fuel after that. HN audience might be calculative - but the rest of the population is far less so.
This might also be a new vehicle to mask any space warfare technology deployments.
As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective.
- In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1]
- heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface area by the factor of 5-10
- data center in space could provide advantages for processing space data, instead of sending them all to earth.
- the Lonestar project proved that data storage and edge processing in space (moon, cislunar) is possible.
- A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget:
+ optical connections reduce heat
+ photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT)
+ processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,
> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.
This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.
The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete information on how these things are to be cooled, other than quotes like "space cooling is free".
If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.
The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.
Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this challenge.
Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.
This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.
The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.
There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.
I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about 20% of the mass budget.
The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.
Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).
Do those people actually _repair_ hardware, or do they swap bad hardware for good chips?
Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?
From what I understand it is in part swapping it, in part upgrading it. Some of it is preventative some of it is reactive. They could overbuild the hardware and slowly disable capacity I think that will not really work. Data centers are static in infrastructure but not in the systems running within them. Actually they are constantly changing to meet the needs.
Overbuilding also comes with a cost when talking about space, it is still very costly to get stuff up there and there is limited bandwidth downstream, you want to balance those two. So if you're overbuilding it costs a lot to get up there, if you disable what's up there you don't fully utilize the bandwidth.
For example AI data centers now use very different hardware compared to 5 or 10 years ago that upgrade path is just a lot harder when your data center is in space.
The self-driving car worked too well. Tesla is promising that for over a decade now, and still can't deliver. They came much closer to the goal, but are still very far away from it. Shareholders don't seem to care.
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
And Fortescue and others are working on BEV vehicles for those giant Tonka trucks that move the raw ore to the processing areas at the top of the opencut.
They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its batteries that would then take the empty train back to the mine.
Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries come online.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
I think what many people miss is that energy became far less location dependent if you put compute next to its generation.
The latency for token generation is not so important. So the ratios between energy consumed, bandwidth and latency would in theory favour building dark token factories in remote but optimal locations. But i guess construction and logistics are an issue.
My dark theory is that the goal is to run an AI overlord in space such that it is difficult to counter it from Earth.
If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then there is some reason why they want this workload running at great physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to protect the workload from us.
What is a workload that is something that people would probably want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.
It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to attack the platform.
It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen, there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions, and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it firsthand.
The whole premise somehow misses, that earth is somehow in the very same space too.
Adding a global UHVDC grid to even out dips in local PV performance due to cloud cover and the diurnal cycle on spaceship earth seems to be magnitudes cheaper and scaleable than this loony pitch.
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
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Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it’s financially viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on reentry.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
For AI training, latency is one of the limiting factors, which needs to be kept in the nanoseconds. And a light-nanosecond is famously almost exactly 1 foot.
That's why Lumen/Starcloud's designs all assume it'll be a space station with all containers connected to one central networking spine.
Space is cold but has little mass. Either heat can radiated or transfered. To transfer heat, mass which easily absorbs heat is required. The moon might be suitable for that.
I'm sorry I really don't understand this. I have a computer. I put it in a warehouse. You have a computer, you shoot it into space. What problem have you solved?
Is this all an effort to utilize more efficient solar panels? Are solar panels really the limiting factor for data centres?
There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations.
However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
When we really consider the challenges of deploying orders of magnitude more terrestrial solar, it really requires a more detailed and specific critique of the orbital vision. Positive includes near continuous solar exposure (in certain orbits) and no water requirements.
Much has been said of cooling but remember, there is a lot of literal space between the satellites for radiative cooling fins. It is envisioned they would network via optical links, and each mini satellite would be roughly on the order of a desktop GPU (not a whole data center rack). The vision is predicated on leveraging a ton of space for lots of mini satellites on the order of a Dell desktop tower. The terrestrial areas that are really cold are also not that great for solar exposure.
Personally I don't know how it will play out but the core concern I have about making these kinds of absolutist predictions is they make weak assumptions about the sustainable scalability of terrestrial power. And that is definitely the case here in that it only looks at the manufacturing cost of solar.
> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need.
Utility scale PV farms should be seen as literally harvesting solar power, not generating it, while still allowing other agriculture like sheep grazing to occur using the same fields.
You plant a PV panel and add its irrigation (power interconnect) and remote monitoring, then you harvest power for the next 25+ years.
Ethanol production excess is a specific US problem because of the misalignment of incentives and lobbying.
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
Musk said in his autobiography he announced the hyperloop plan without any intention of doing it to distract from the California high speed rail plans.
The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot, but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is. Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface, and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes, satellites move in certain orbits, not in random places, but space is large, and humans are bad with imagining large numbers and things. The illustrations with fat dots on tiny earth images are misleading too IMO.
Apart of that, I do agree that space data centers are probably just a marketing stunt at this point, although some things could obviously be done to increase their chances, like more lightweight designs on GPUs, something that was never a big topic before.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led
You to believe that itself.
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
Data centers in space make perfect sense, in exactly the same way as a jetpack made perfect sense. It is an excellent vehicle to ride out some juicy government contracts for as long as you can keep the grift going.
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
Thinking of power infra. Even solar. Doesn't that last 20 or 30 years at least? With some maintenance, but before full overhaul. So in space you would probably decommission it at same time right? Wouldn't that be additional cost?
The worst thing about this isn't that it makes no sense. It's that it doesn't even _try_ to make sense.
These companies wanted to merge for financial reasons and the invented reason is nonsensical. We shouldn't even give the nonsensical reason the benefit of trying to make sense of it.
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible. The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap and DIY-able.
I think it’s all farce and technically unsound, but I also think that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It’s really got him ready to rally investors behind “spreading the light of consciousness to the universe”. Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his machine girlfriend)’s machinations.
Reasonably sure this has less to do with putting data centres in space and more to do with getting them less auditable (see the other news about X getting raided about Grok)
AST Spacemobile is successfully deploying cell towers in space; to compete with Elons Starlink. Not to mention ASTS is collaborating with American Tower, Google, ATT, Verizon, Nokia, and other big dogs for this venture. Now a DC is magnitudes different then a cell tower/satellite but hey .. if the RoI is there, it can be done
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability.
While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than solve near-term compute constraints.
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
It is your money being spent. ~40B so far. Though half of that is for services.
But more abstractly, it's our resources that are being allocated. The planet as a unit is deciding where to put it's effort. Apparently we're not very good at this
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others.
Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
SpaceX made a request of the FCC to authorize a constellation of 1 million satellites. And these are going to be much larger, "data center" satellites. This many satellites, all in the same orbit (sun-synchronous is a specific orbit), vastly changes the math on Kessler syndrome.
Whatever it is it’s not driven by sense or even feasibility of data centers in space.
To me it looks like the next Musk’s grift. Remember Mars? Have you heard about it recently? He threw it to the Internet and everyone got excited for a minute. Then nerds did quick math and it didn’t make any sense. And so everyone forgot about Mars. This is the same. Hype everyone up for a week or two to inflate stock before the merger/purchase/IPO/whatever. That is all.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.
Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it can have dramatically different emissivity.
Data centers in space make sense because its nigh impossible to build things terrestrially. NIMBYism is so out of control the largest solar array in the US in the middle of the mojave got cancelled because it would interfere with the view.
"Just change the law" ok sure we'll get right on it.
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
It’s less about putting compute in space as occupying that space before anyone else does. For any reason: spying, space warfare, network and communication.
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000, so we're at $13.3(3)/Watt, that just power, let's assume that cooling will cost us same per kg, the same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping. We're already at $6.3 mil a pop for just hauling it up to orbit, with no cost of solar cells included
I'd imagine comparable hardware for just some solar + batteries on ground is around $200k. I dunno where the repeated 5x cost number comes from. I suspect whoever pushed it was just lying
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
Of course it makes sense. It's a cool story to pump up the valuation in the AI datacenter boom. This meme will keep on delivering until (if) the AI bubble bursts.
The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have to make sense. The less sense the better.
It's not a warrant, it is a summon for interview. That's actually very different: the way you phrased it suggests that there is a warrant for his arrest (mandat d'arrêt)...
What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back out to whatever it would have done anyway.
They need fresh water which is scarce unlike salt water, once they use it, it can't be used for anything else. They're competing with water supplies of municipalities these days. Not a big deal if you're near the great lakes or the missisipi, but a big deal in california, arizona, utah,etc.. and that's just the US. There are places that are becoming unlivable because of water supply issues, and datacenters are needing to be built near them.
You can debate this until you are blue in the face. If the costs are less they will do it. If they aren’t they won’t do it. That’s the only sense that needs to be made.
Ah, yes, the "efficient market hypothesis", it's well known that no company has ever gone bankrupt because every company only does things that are optimally efficient and profitable.
No company has ever made an investment in something that ended up being more expensive than calculated, or so expensive it bankrupted them.
You are assuming they will commit to the solution and ride it to their grave trying to make it work. They will experiment and figure out a way to make it cheaper, or they will give up. They have plenty of money to experiment with this.
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
1. Inference
2. Training
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...
Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)
BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.
People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to put a hard disk into orbit.
I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
"Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective"
The author forgot to add that this is only true from the perspective of their own bias.
To someone else it might make a lot of sense, e.g. someone who expects militant resistance to the "data centers" from the general public or some other actor that is highly unlikely to achieve space capabilities.
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o)
Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least).
TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
That does not have to sound reasonable to us ... only to Musk.
If someone had the tech to cool stuff in space, that is required for this to happen, they’d have tons of easier and more lucrative opportunities right now on Earth to become the new richest person.
no, no, no, the key enabler to space datacenter is complete out-of-world computer 3D printers. You print entire 130nm, hell, even 130 micrometer GPUs and DDR2 VRAMs to go with, entirely on the Moon solely from Moon dusts, and shoot the complete satellites out into Earth LEO using maglev sleds. PUEs, opex, nothing matter because the Moon factory is self contained and don't interact with Earthian economy at all. The ssh key into the factory will be the source to free money to whoever holding it.
Is that possible in our lifetime? I'd be optimistic about that. Can SpaceX pull that off? Space what? ...
Another thing that doesn't make sense about them is that DCs get a lot of out of physical locality. Caches become hot as different use case spin up and down during the day near their customers.
If the nodes are spinning around the earth at orbital velocities, then all the benefits of physical locality are thrown out the window.
But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO would mean that latency to a client via a ground station wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better coverage.
It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for a decade because it's dominated by other costs.
Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
The article kind of ended all of a sudden without much of a conclusion… but as most people by now have realised once they heard of the merging of Musk and Musk, it sounds more likely just a way of shifting money to pay himself rather than to actually build anything he says.
I’d even bet that when they do IPO, there will be ZERO mention of “space data centres” in the prospectus!
Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
What if they diverted a decent sized asteroid into earth orbit and put the data center onto that? Could it be put into a sun-synchronous orbit, cover one side with solar cells, and use the backside of the asteroid itself for cooling?
AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax purposes).
This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.
It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
When did I say no insulation? If it took only one moment for the satellite to fly by behind the whole earth, its speed is so great that it would be flung out of the solar system.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.
This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C when it's night and +120C when it's day there.
And the sun's radiation also flips bits.
Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.
It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.
It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
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> 10th (or worse) best AI company
You might only care about coding models, but text is dominating the market share right now and Grok is the #2 model for that in arena rankings.
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Sounds like Elon hurt someone’s feelings
Plus government backstop. The federal government (especially the current one) is not going to let SpaceX fail.
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Elon's always looking for another Brooklyn Bridge to sell to the rubes...
xAI includes twitter? I thought twitter was just X?
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People did the calculation: radiative cooling requires smaller surface area than solar panels. So, basically, a solar panel itself can radiate heat.
Have you done a calculation yourself?
How can the solar panel itself radiate heat when it's being heated up generating supplying power? Looking at pictures of the ISS there's radiators that look like they're there specifically to cool the solar panels.
And even if viable, why would you just not cool using air down on earth? Water is used for cooling because it increases effectiveness significantly, but even a closed loop system with simple dry air heat exchangers is quite a lot more effective than radiative cooling
It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around
While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation stealing copyright content is not okay any more
DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room.
ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons.
You also need to collect that power so you need about the same amount of power coming from solar panels. ISS solar array wings are 35x12 m and can generate about 31 kW of power. So we’ll need at least 3 of them. BTW each weighs a ton, a literal metric ton.
It hardly seems feasible. Huge infrastructure costs for small AI server rooms in space.
Maybe you can't copyright infringe in space, but it's still infringement when the result gets back to earth.
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The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution
Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs?
Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.
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> win the AI race
I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean?
Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.
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I’m not certain spacex is generating much cash right now ?
Starship development is consuming billions. F9 & Starlink are probably profitable ?
I’d say this is more shifting of the future burden of xAI to one of his companies he knows will be a hit stonk when it goes public, where enthusiasm is unlikely to be dampened by another massive cash drain on the books.
> xAI needs money to win the AI race
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
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That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
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(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.
It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.
Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides.
Heat pumps are magic. They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
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What in particular is wrong/misleading in the Starcloud whitepaper, then?
https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a value of $0 with the claim:
"More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space"
My bold claim: The cost of cooling will not be $0. The cost of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling in space will not be $0.
They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
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Previous discussions on HN: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188
I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:
- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;
- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;
- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;
- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;
NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
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They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done, they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about dT not delta T
Probably this bit on page 4, which parent comment addresses: “More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space.”
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?
A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).
There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.
> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic.
Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.
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I think he has rocket company that needs more work.
Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company.
The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project.
I really think it's that simple.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
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It’s funny how quickly the general public forgot about the “vacuum thermos”. (Perhaps more popular before StarBucks overran society).
Those flasks don’t have any space age insulating material - mainly just a vacuum…
Technology from 1892…
They are more popular than ever, actually. Pretty much all those fancy cups and bottles (like Stanley, other brands available) sold to keep your coffee hot/drink cold on the go are vaccum ones. It's just updated and more robust design compared to the older thermos flasks.
"A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos."
A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively narrow band around room temperature.[1] during all operational phases.
This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits around room temperature.
[1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning 20°C (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the rule).
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is much lower and it’s the temperature difference which determines the rate of cooling.
"Radiate" is exactly what you have to do, and that is extremely slow. You need a huge area to dissipate the amount of power you are talking about.
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I have a vacuum thermos. I've been unimpressed with its ability to keep coffee hot.
You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.
Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out the back.
Where will they go, nobody knows!
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AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.
Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.
I think it's possibly more informative to look at what happened with SolarCity and Tesla and contemplate if there's not a similar dynamic here.
The only way I see this actually working given the resource requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of the solar panels at L1 or something.
https://share.google/uXWQyAp7a8nE03qoi
I used to really enjoy musk's talks when he was spooling up tesla. He was an engineer and obviously the world is missing what engineers see clearly.
But now looking back and accounting for the claims he made there's a pattern.
I saw this article:
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-...
that said... he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.
> he did jumpstart the EV industry.
This is widely believed (especially in the US, where, other than the Leaf, most early electric cars never launched), but honestly pretty dubious. The first real electric cars, with significant production:
2010 - Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan Leaf
2011 - Smart electric, Volvo C30 electric, Ford Focus electric, BYD e6.
2012 - Renault Zoe (Renault launched a couple of other vehicles on the same platform ~2010, but they never saw significant production), Tesla Model S (Tesla had a prior car, the Roadster, but it never saw significant production).
2013 - VW eUP, eGolf (VW occasionally put out an electric Golf historically, going back to 1992, but again those were never produced in large quantities).
The big change ~2010 was around the economics of lithium ion batteries; they finally got cheap enough that everyone started pulling their concept designs and small-scale demonstration models into full production.
> he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.
Talk to any former SpaceX or Tesla employee. They will clue you in that both were successful in spite of Elon, not because of him.
The Cybertruck was really the first product he saw to completion from his own design. And well...
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> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Unfortunately no. The arctic region is too cold and humid. You need way more energy to manage the cooling of a datacenter there than somewhere hotter.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
There might be a lot of induced demand from starship. I’m sure defense is a big one.
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>Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense.
Starship can replace Falcon 9 and probably be cheaper, if fully reusable, so more profitable. So at least some economic sense is there already.
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Can’t you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and dissipates.
This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
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Good intuition, that is generally how radiators work in space.
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
Sure but if it was a good idea we could do it on earth too and datacenters could stop gurgling a city worth of water
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
>>This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
On the similar lines, why can't one run a refrigerator in space?
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yeah if you want a heat thruster
You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.
https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...
But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.
Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
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or perhaps as simple as saving xAI for himself as he prepares to offload rest of Twitter?
Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal networking, its power management (what happens when its in darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration (https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-vibration...)
What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.
Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)
Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.
Its just complete and total bollocks.
utter utter bollocks.
You can't exchange heat with vacuum
If you put a pipe with hot gas inside, in space, it will get colder by convection.
Blow air through the pipe.
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
That's wise.
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.
His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
If any single country tried to create a whole production chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the economics would ever work out.
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> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab.
It could also just be ignorance and talking out of his ass to look smart. Like when he took over Twitter and began publicly spewing wrong technical details as if he knew what he was talking about and being corrected by the people actually working on the product.
Jeffrey Epstein's friend Elon Musk is trying to stop a financial disaster in xAi that would expose how irresponsible he is. He's gonna put all that in a company that has real money coming from government and soon will get retail investors money.
I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.
They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.
I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.
apocalyptic space twitter with satellites shaped like whales that drop from the sky would have been cooler.
The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.
All of this and more.
For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.
I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.
Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.
Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.
Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.
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Does that emit more than Elon's terrestrial data centers powered by natural gas, per unit of compute?
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
> And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
So your hot thing is radiating directly onto the next hot thing over, the one that also needs to cool down?
> aka fancy air conditioning pumps
Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more radiators.
Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's not plainly not viable.
> getting quite good here with nanotechnology
Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.
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Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
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Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
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This makes zero sense.
> Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does yours?
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> You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
I don’t remember the difference from my science classes, isn’t This the same thing essentially?
The other two methods of heat transfer apart from radiation are conduction (through “touch”, adjacent molecules, eg from the outside of a chicken on the BBQ to the inside) and convection (through movement, eg cold air or water flowing past).
quantum computers on the sun!
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
and then talks about some of those other issues.
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
[0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
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Let me google that for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has MASSIVE radiators. Most of its volume is radiator. 900 cubic meters of space 2500 square meters of radiator.
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The TL;DR is they radiate it into space via large, high surface area arms that stick out of the station.
It will be the communications, not the compute part.
One man able to put a data center worth of mass in orbit is one man able to crash a datacenter worth of mass into Earth anywhere he wants.
Not a given. Re enter the atmosphere. Sure. Avoid vaporization? Much harder problem.
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A glaring lack of oceans to boil
I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.
In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).
Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.
All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.
This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.
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> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Please, no!
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
> a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
Not necessarily. There are many modern thermos "cups" that are just a regular cup, except with two layers of glass and a vacuum. Even the top is open all the time. (e.g. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/passerad-double-wall-glass-8054... )
It's still good enough to keep your coffee hot for an entire day.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
musk is always up to something but remarkably people still eat this stuff up - remarkable to watch!
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There are several companies working on this, and the first generation tech is already proven, working in space on the ISS. Even Paul G is on board. https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779?s=20
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> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
Consider: If you genuinely believe that the only important goal is to make life multiplanetary, (and note I'm not defending this position here, just asserting it as an explanation of behavior)
then anything that drives money towards your work on that goal is worth pursuing particularly if you think time is short.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.
1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
Well, it's a physics problem. The engineering solution is possibly not cost efficient. I'd put a lot of money that it isn't.
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I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into whether or not this idea makes sense.
That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point:
> Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things into space.
That is not the benchmark here.
It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could. It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than running them on earth.
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> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
Make sense now?
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
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Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
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Oh no! He promised my car would be self driving in 2018 but it took until 2026 before that was true.
How dare he not have accurately predicted when one of the hardest technical problems in history is solved?
>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.
> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.
There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant regular x86 years ago, that's true.
I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up, and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.
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Where did you hear this?
When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.
They are not. xAI/SpaceX is talking about millions of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit.
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The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
There is zero benefit, non nada.
> sure space is cold
Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
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> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"
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That sounds like what journalists usually do. They are reporters, and rarely have any real knowledge of what they report.
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
> This is a one time cost
> which would get regular traffic back-and-forth
I hope it's not a mystery why this commemt has been downvoted
> This is a one time cost.
Sure, until you need to replace or upgrade it. How long does a server on earth last for, how often does it need maintenance / replacing? And how long is the expected or desired lifetime for a server in space? Then calculate weight and cost etc.
> Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
"Maybe" is hope, you can't build a business on hope / wishful thinking. And the running costs for data centers on earth can be reduced too if you build them the same way as a sattelite - solar panels + battery + radiative cooling gives you enough data to compare. But servers / data centers aren't built that way because of cost vs benefit.
> If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done.
See, it's possible for sure - we HAVE computers in space, powered, cooled, running 24/7. The questions are whether it makes economic sense, both launch costs and running / maintenance costs. That's straight math, and the math isn't mathing.
> I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
Sure, but the ISS itself cost ~100 billion to build and operate - probably more, this is based on a ten second search query. While I'm sure launches are cheaper than ever and will be even cheaper in the future, it's still tens of billions to build a data center in space, plus you'd need astronauts, supplies, hardware, etc - all a LOT more expensive than the equivalent processing power on earth.
> These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
True, so we as humanity should offer resistance to plans to launch thousands of objects into space unless they have a clear and definite benefit. I'm not worried about Starlink, it's a benefit to all the areas that don't have (open) access to the internet and they're in low-earth orbit so they'll fall back within 5 years. But I just don't see the benefit in putting datacenters in space, not when it's so much cheaper and more viable to put them on earth.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?
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It also gave us Mechanical Turk and microdrones!
This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.
Yup, likewise Starlink - while space internet is an interesting and viable concept (whether it'll earn itself back is another question, I'm not convinced), the real motivation behind it was to create demand for many SpaceX launches. There have been 352 Starlink launches [0] so far, out of 596 total [1]. If it wasn't for Starlink, SpaceX would only have been operating at 1/3 to 1/2 of what it does today, cutting into their "economics of scale". And they'll need demand to make Starship viable, the possible moon missions aren't enough to fund or justify the whole project. Hence also the ideas of colonising Mars, which - if someone is willing to pay for it - would create a large and steady demand for launches / flights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Yeah, if he gets more SpaceX shares in exchange for the xAI garbage shares then he wins, because the SpaceX shares will sell well.
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I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this.
It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
Can you smoke ketamine?
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I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
> I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort.
The ISS is the single most expensive thing built by humankind ($100b+). What makes you think that building a "space casino" or "space resort" is commercially viable?
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
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I'd say they're basically floating on the success of previous sci-fi ideas that they made a reality; reusable rockets at a fraction of the price of NASA or ESA launches for example, or self-driving electric cars (the electric part was a success, the self-driving, not so much).
Your dad can’t tell the difference.
If they get 3/10 things right, and 60 Minutes highlights those in the next interview, they’re set!
> above any earthly government
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...
https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...
https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
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well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a datahaven for less-reputable banks!
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.
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Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.
More likely, stole grok from nerds who learned grok from Heinlein.
Heinlein's sci fi didn't age well, because it was written for juveniles and then later his social ideas overtook his sci fi ones.
He had the same blind spots that Ayn Rand did, but perhaps better informed of the fascist-adjacent US culture.
One of the good sci fi/social ideas he had was about what it meant to "grok" something. groklaw.net of happy memory was exactly what that verb was supposed to mean, dive into something until you understand it at a molecular level.
The fact that Musk et al have stolen terms like "grok" and even "cyberspace" as if they own them is something I loathe.
Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.
1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.
2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.
3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.
As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.
A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:
- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.
- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.
- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/31/spacex-seeks-federal-appro...
2. https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
3. https://www.netizen.page/2025/05/cost-per-kilogram-to-low-ea...
Edit: added item 3
Elon has open sourced them, or the people at SpaceX who actually know or understand something did?
3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)
This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost.
Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, or grid collapses. Servers in orbit are physically isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots, local warfare, or physical break-ins.
Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up land for housing or nature. Space data centers do not deplete Earth’s freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers which consume billions of gallons annually.
Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.
Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments. Data transmission can be faster in space because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does through fiber optic cables.
Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw data back to Earth
While it’s true that there are no floods or earthquakes in space it’s not exactly a safe place to be. Radiation and cosmic rays become a much greater threat. Shielding provided by the atmosphere would have to be replaced.
You also underestimate the cooling problem. The fact that space is cold doesn’t mean it’s easy to cool things off in space. On earth the main cooling strategy is to transfer heat through direct contact and move the hot stuff away. Be it air or water, as you mentioned. In space your only option is to radiate heat away. And that’s while half of you is under intense sunlight.
I think you also undersell the thread of warfare in space. Sure, a guy with Molotov can’t get you space data center but we’ve had satellite shot down. So maybe not every war is a threat but, say China or Russia (or other space-faring nation) could take care of a satellite if absolutely needed.
National seizures are also still a threat. If only being outside national borders was such a great defense we’d see some data centers in the sea by now.
So being in space is immune to some of the known problems but also comes with a whole lot of novel issues, not solved at scale yet. And so far I haven’t seen any sufficiently detailed proposed solutions to even consider the trade of known problems with readily available solutions for new issues with lots of unknowns.
Essentially all of your concerns concerns can be mitigated by building somewhere else.
Worried about natural disasters? Build some place less prone to natural disasters.
Worried about the strain on local communities? Build some place more remote.
Worried about energy availability? Build near a nuclear power plant or hydroelectric power station.
Worried about hostile governments? Don't build data centers within the territories of hostile governments. (If you consider every country a hostile government, that is a you-problem.)
For the cost of building a data center in space, you could instead build a second (or third, or fourth, ...) data center somewhere else.
> Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments.
You are aware physical persons exist on Earth and can be taken into custody? Additionally, space weapons exist, several governments could destroy any orbital satellite.
This whole pipe dream is nonsense.
They may well avoid terrestrial threats by having them in space, but then they become subject to different threats such as solar storms, high energy cosmic rays, space debris collisions etc.
I think the main reason to host them in space is to escape Earth jurisdictions, but even that is dubious as there will be people involved that reside on the Earth.
One of the bigger threats to life on earth right now is called Elon Musk.
Heat energy shedding is often talked about as an Achilles Heal of orbital computation.
But heat radiation rates are proportional to temperature to the 4th power!!!!
That is a magical law. The quality of heat pumps used to concentrate heat, will drive the economics and structure of heat dissipation.
Seldom do we get constraints that favorable to work with.
Feels like this is about as unserious as flamethrowers, the Boring Company, and Hyperloop.
We're living in the Age of Distraction… amusing ourselves to death (as usual).
By combining ai with space, in addition to any other plays that he might be playing around legal or financial areas, he's positioning (marketing) spaceX for the bandwagon that everyone else might jump into to deploy a space datacentre. He's providing the medium (spacex rockets) to realise this potentially unfeasible idea. He makes additional money that way - to then create a new type of money-making fuel after that. HN audience might be calculative - but the rest of the population is far less so.
This might also be a new vehicle to mask any space warfare technology deployments.
As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective.
- In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1]
- heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface area by the factor of 5-10
- data center in space could provide advantages for processing space data, instead of sending them all to earth. - the Lonestar project proved that data storage and edge processing in space (moon, cislunar) is possible.
- A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,
[1] https://ascend-horizon.eu/
> micro droplet technology
Intentionally causing Kessler Syndrome?
> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.
Kessler syndrome is only a problem if the satellites are in LEO. They don't have to be.
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> reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.
The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete information on how these things are to be cooled, other than quotes like "space cooling is free".
If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.
The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.
Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
yes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any day now
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That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
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Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
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Very confused by this plan.
How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
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You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this challenge.
Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.
This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.
The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.
There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.
I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
Nobody is saying that building a data center in space is impossible. It's merely expensive.
Who is going to pay the money to rent capacity in space when they could rent the same capacity on Earth for a fraction of the cost?
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.
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but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
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I'm not a scientist but i am also sure it will be fucking hard to dissipate heat in a vacuum
ViT (Vision Transformer) fine-tuned on a Starcloud satellite in space (using the Flower framework) -- to the best of our knowledge, this is a world first: https://flower.ai/blog/2026-02-02-flower-labs-and-starcloud-...
Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about 20% of the mass budget.
The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
As others point out this is a bad idea.
Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.
Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).
Do those people actually _repair_ hardware, or do they swap bad hardware for good chips?
Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?
From what I understand it is in part swapping it, in part upgrading it. Some of it is preventative some of it is reactive. They could overbuild the hardware and slowly disable capacity I think that will not really work. Data centers are static in infrastructure but not in the systems running within them. Actually they are constantly changing to meet the needs.
Overbuilding also comes with a cost when talking about space, it is still very costly to get stuff up there and there is limited bandwidth downstream, you want to balance those two. So if you're overbuilding it costs a lot to get up there, if you disable what's up there you don't fully utilize the bandwidth.
For example AI data centers now use very different hardware compared to 5 or 10 years ago that upgrade path is just a lot harder when your data center is in space.
It's a scam for investors.
The self-driving car worked too well. Tesla is promising that for over a decade now, and still can't deliver. They came much closer to the goal, but are still very far away from it. Shareholders don't seem to care.
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal
take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel
at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space
seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space
perhaps I'm missing something?
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
If you believe that, you’re Musks target investor group.
I was skeptical until you mentioned this. Now I'm onboard
This is your brain on Factorio
They’re going to have to deal with the moon nazis first. Oh no wait a minute.
Makes sense. I hope their plasma coolant supplies last long enough to get self sustained.
They'll just mine up Hemium-3 for that.
I can't even tell what's sarcasm anymore lol.
The comment you are replying to is definitely sarcasm… I hope?
Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?
Mars which is literally covered in poisonous perchlorate soil
I would, it would be an adventure.
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
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We can't keep our already perfect planet livable, but we're going to terraform a totally new one. Yeah right buddy.
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As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
The Moon also has 14 day long nights, while space has permanent sunlight for your solar panels.
I suspect this is really the fundamental idea behind this whole plan.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
> every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power
So it's dark 50% of the time on the moon... just like here on Earth.
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Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
> But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
And Fortescue and others are working on BEV vehicles for those giant Tonka trucks that move the raw ore to the processing areas at the top of the opencut.
They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its batteries that would then take the empty train back to the mine.
Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries come online.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
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I think what many people miss is that energy became far less location dependent if you put compute next to its generation. The latency for token generation is not so important. So the ratios between energy consumed, bandwidth and latency would in theory favour building dark token factories in remote but optimal locations. But i guess construction and logistics are an issue.
My dark theory is that the goal is to run an AI overlord in space such that it is difficult to counter it from Earth.
If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then there is some reason why they want this workload running at great physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to protect the workload from us.
What is a workload that is something that people would probably want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.
It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to attack the platform.
It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen, there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions, and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it firsthand.
The whole premise somehow misses, that earth is somehow in the very same space too.
Adding a global UHVDC grid to even out dips in local PV performance due to cloud cover and the diurnal cycle on spaceship earth seems to be magnitudes cheaper and scaleable than this loony pitch.
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
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Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
This is the correct analysis.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it’s financially viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on reentry.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
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You might want some compute in space that you know is very hard to physically interfere with.
But general purpose compute no
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
This is the thing I don’t get. Everyone talking about the “how” but nobody talking about the “why”? It makes literally no sense.
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
Snake oil, like bitcoin.
A lot of people will invest in this because "it's the future" and a few will make a lot of money on that.
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la... (and this is two years ago!) [2] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
For AI training, latency is one of the limiting factors, which needs to be kept in the nanoseconds. And a light-nanosecond is famously almost exactly 1 foot.
That's why Lumen/Starcloud's designs all assume it'll be a space station with all containers connected to one central networking spine.
Space - no. Moon - yes
Space is cold but has little mass. Either heat can radiated or transfered. To transfer heat, mass which easily absorbs heat is required. The moon might be suitable for that.
I'm sorry I really don't understand this. I have a computer. I put it in a warehouse. You have a computer, you shoot it into space. What problem have you solved?
Is this all an effort to utilize more efficient solar panels? Are solar panels really the limiting factor for data centres?
There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations.
However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
When we really consider the challenges of deploying orders of magnitude more terrestrial solar, it really requires a more detailed and specific critique of the orbital vision. Positive includes near continuous solar exposure (in certain orbits) and no water requirements.
Much has been said of cooling but remember, there is a lot of literal space between the satellites for radiative cooling fins. It is envisioned they would network via optical links, and each mini satellite would be roughly on the order of a desktop GPU (not a whole data center rack). The vision is predicated on leveraging a ton of space for lots of mini satellites on the order of a Dell desktop tower. The terrestrial areas that are really cold are also not that great for solar exposure.
Personally I don't know how it will play out but the core concern I have about making these kinds of absolutist predictions is they make weak assumptions about the sustainable scalability of terrestrial power. And that is definitely the case here in that it only looks at the manufacturing cost of solar.
> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need.
More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Utility scale PV farms should be seen as literally harvesting solar power, not generating it, while still allowing other agriculture like sheep grazing to occur using the same fields.
You plant a PV panel and add its irrigation (power interconnect) and remote monitoring, then you harvest power for the next 25+ years.
Ethanol production excess is a specific US problem because of the misalignment of incentives and lobbying.
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
Musk said in his autobiography he announced the hyperloop plan without any intention of doing it to distract from the California high speed rail plans.
The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot, but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is. Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface, and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes, satellites move in certain orbits, not in random places, but space is large, and humans are bad with imagining large numbers and things. The illustrations with fat dots on tiny earth images are misleading too IMO.
Apart of that, I do agree that space data centers are probably just a marketing stunt at this point, although some things could obviously be done to increase their chances, like more lightweight designs on GPUs, something that was never a big topic before.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
> Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.
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The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
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The whole point of the space stuff is not accepting all life dying out on any timescale.
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A data center in space is probably toast after some years of space radiation.
High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere. Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you don't need on earth.
It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are trying to find any justification.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
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If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
(Yes, I know what steel manning is)
Couldn’t deliver on anything?
Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space
Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here on earth
Data centers in space make perfect sense, in exactly the same way as a jetpack made perfect sense. It is an excellent vehicle to ride out some juicy government contracts for as long as you can keep the grift going.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-ma...
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
Well said.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more practical. Several companies working on it: https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
I don't quite believe this.
Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a heat pump?
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This looks like it depends on the outside air to cool the coolant. "Radiative" can mean that too, not just IR radiation.
We had one. It was that sulphur used in shipping fuel.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
> harder to hit
press x to doubt
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
But it never had an orbital launch capability.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
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Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
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Isn't the eventual plan to park these data centers out by the Lagrange points?
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
Thinking of power infra. Even solar. Doesn't that last 20 or 30 years at least? With some maintenance, but before full overhaul. So in space you would probably decommission it at same time right? Wouldn't that be additional cost?
The worst thing about this isn't that it makes no sense. It's that it doesn't even _try_ to make sense.
These companies wanted to merge for financial reasons and the invented reason is nonsensical. We shouldn't even give the nonsensical reason the benefit of trying to make sense of it.
Surprised nobody here linked https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters.
No, but protecting x/xAI from bankruptcy by linking it to the most promising company in Musk's portfolio does. You just need a justification.
This is while they try to find a solution to earn money with it.
A month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286645
Related, around the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
This only makes sense if it somehow helps to evade some kind of regulation. I'm not quite sure which though.
I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible. The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap and DIY-able.
I think it’s all farce and technically unsound, but I also think that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It’s really got him ready to rally investors behind “spreading the light of consciousness to the universe”. Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his machine girlfriend)’s machinations.
Reasonably sure this has less to do with putting data centres in space and more to do with getting them less auditable (see the other news about X getting raided about Grok)
AST Spacemobile is successfully deploying cell towers in space; to compete with Elons Starlink. Not to mention ASTS is collaborating with American Tower, Google, ATT, Verizon, Nokia, and other big dogs for this venture. Now a DC is magnitudes different then a cell tower/satellite but hey .. if the RoI is there, it can be done
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
This is when you know we reached peak AI. Data centers in space talk.
Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability.
While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than solve near-term compute constraints.
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
It is your money being spent. ~40B so far. Though half of that is for services.
But more abstractly, it's our resources that are being allocated. The planet as a unit is deciding where to put it's effort. Apparently we're not very good at this
I can’t take any of it seriously.
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.
You do not solve a problem that is many orders of magnitude more difficult with a mere 5x to 6x efficiency gain.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.
And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not going to be fast.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others. Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
SpaceX made a request of the FCC to authorize a constellation of 1 million satellites. And these are going to be much larger, "data center" satellites. This many satellites, all in the same orbit (sun-synchronous is a specific orbit), vastly changes the math on Kessler syndrome.
> Particularly at high altitudes.
Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.
The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less time it will last.
There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way lower than things like GEO.
Whatever it is it’s not driven by sense or even feasibility of data centers in space.
To me it looks like the next Musk’s grift. Remember Mars? Have you heard about it recently? He threw it to the Internet and everyone got excited for a minute. Then nerds did quick math and it didn’t make any sense. And so everyone forgot about Mars. This is the same. Hype everyone up for a week or two to inflate stock before the merger/purchase/IPO/whatever. That is all.
Exactly, Musk is just playing pump and dump with industrial projects.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
The ideal shape would be a shaded, flat panel perpendicular to the sun right?
That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.
Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it can have dramatically different emissivity.
About 120 degC.
I agree with the author and the bit about xAI and investors makes sense. But why does a company like Google invest in this ridiculous idea?
What data centers in space enable is protection for the compute of near-superintelligent AIs from the interference of humans.
As an alleged human, I'd like to preserve my option to interfere.
No, no, no - Villa Starlight was the prison the Tessier-Ashpool AI needed help to escape from!
Elon announced this so he could troll the comments on HN and get all of this incredibly valuable armchair expertise in solving his problems.
How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and seize or block?
They make no sense otherwise.
The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a scheme to get investment and they’re never going to actually go through with it.
At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.
Data centers in space make sense because its nigh impossible to build things terrestrially. NIMBYism is so out of control the largest solar array in the US in the middle of the mojave got cancelled because it would interfere with the view.
"Just change the law" ok sure we'll get right on it.
Isn't Starlink already basically a distributed datacenter in space? they have like ~9k+ satellites up there already at least according to: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html.
what am I missing here?
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
That's the point. Nonsensical ideas (like humans on mars) drive valuations higher. There is not even a point to argue about practical matters.
Keep talking like that and people will colonize space
I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they made up an interesting story to give it some context
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
It’s less about putting compute in space as occupying that space before anyone else does. For any reason: spying, space warfare, network and communication.
First mover advantage, and all.
Bingo. I elaborated on this idea more in my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand). Autonomous warfare could get real dark, real fast.
Let's do some napkin math on it
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000, so we're at $13.3(3)/Watt, that just power, let's assume that cooling will cost us same per kg, the same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping. We're already at $6.3 mil a pop for just hauling it up to orbit, with no cost of solar cells included
I'd imagine comparable hardware for just some solar + batteries on ground is around $200k. I dunno where the repeated 5x cost number comes from. I suspect whoever pushed it was just lying
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
I don't get the point at all of these. You:
- have very non-deterministic latency
- are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China could disrupt your space data center)
- have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
You’re also located outside of any country that could regulate
A country will definitely still be able to regulate you. Also under what regulations they'd be afraid of other than local building laws
and : kessler syndrome
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
What jurisdiction does a data center in space fall under, anyway? The one of the nation that launched it?
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Abolish_The_First_Lady - arguing that the FLOTUS role shouldn't exist
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Upward_Mobility,_Downward_So... - perhaps a less original idea that economic mobility leads to poorly performing lower-paying services.
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis - an example of one way that factoids get upgraded to facts
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Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more compute.
And 1 ML rack uses the power of like 10 regular racks
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
Aluminum is 8% of the earth's crust and silicon is 28%; I think we're good
I thought chips need to be radiation-hardened to work in space.
Electric cars make no sense.
Reusable rockets make no sense.
Autonomous cars make no sense.
Data centers in space make no sense. <--- You are here.
Humanoid robots make no sense.
Hyperloop: makes no sense
Solar roof tiles: makes no sense
Lot's of tiny tunnels under cities: makes no sense
Performance of the new roadster: makes no sense
All four of the above were likely scams. Musk is not beyond running a scam.
Of course it makes sense. It's a cool story to pump up the valuation in the AI datacenter boom. This meme will keep on delivering until (if) the AI bubble bursts.
you know you're looking at some hard analysis when they use the number "gazillion". can I get that one in scientific notation?
I’m surprised everyone is worried about heat dissipation.
Datacenters in space is ambiguous enough to mean on lunar soil which provides plenty of heat dissipation using geothermal heat pumps.
Similarly mass to orbit is also less problematic if silicon factories (including the refineries) are built on lunar soil as well.
They have filed actual plans with the FCC for their satellite constellation. They are not talking about lunar data centers.
The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have to make sense. The less sense the better.
It's not a warrant, it is a summon for interview. That's actually very different: the way you phrased it suggests that there is a warrant for his arrest (mandat d'arrêt)...
Three counterpoints:
1) Kessler syndrome is a contingency.
2) This is a logistics issue, not a physical impossibility.
3) Those are different tradeoffs (solar in space). There is not really an argument there.
All in all this is extremely weak reasoning, which is quite the contrast with the definitive title.
I throw this to the "nerds need to feel smarter than Elon" pile of articles. :)
where do you put things, so that no one will be able to warrant thier way into access?
entirely out of jurisdiction, where it is prohibitively expensive to travel, and impractical for any physical seizure.
you dont need to compute, just store it and P2P amongst satellites.
essentially an orbital NAS.
Two reasons why it makes sense (really really good reasons):
1) Water scarcity and energy scarcity here on earth
2) It will drive down launch costs and promotes investment in orbital facilities and launch capabilities.
those two reasons alone are enough.
What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back out to whatever it would have done anyway.
They need fresh water which is scarce unlike salt water, once they use it, it can't be used for anything else. They're competing with water supplies of municipalities these days. Not a big deal if you're near the great lakes or the missisipi, but a big deal in california, arizona, utah,etc.. and that's just the US. There are places that are becoming unlivable because of water supply issues, and datacenters are needing to be built near them.
This makes the same amount of sense as colonising Mars.
You can debate this until you are blue in the face. If the costs are less they will do it. If they aren’t they won’t do it. That’s the only sense that needs to be made.
Ah, yes, the "efficient market hypothesis", it's well known that no company has ever gone bankrupt because every company only does things that are optimally efficient and profitable.
No company has ever made an investment in something that ended up being more expensive than calculated, or so expensive it bankrupted them.
You are assuming they will commit to the solution and ride it to their grave trying to make it work. They will experiment and figure out a way to make it cheaper, or they will give up. They have plenty of money to experiment with this.
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...
Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
Like there isn’t enough stuff floating up there already.
I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)
BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.
People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to put a hard disk into orbit.
I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
It seems quite telling we are even discussing this.
Don't let common sense stop you from a good time.
"Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective"
The author forgot to add that this is only true from the perspective of their own bias.
To someone else it might make a lot of sense, e.g. someone who expects militant resistance to the "data centers" from the general public or some other actor that is highly unlikely to achieve space capabilities.
Data centers on earth alone don't make sense if we want to expand further into the galaxy.
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
It's lala land nonsense.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
> - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I bet you can sell this service to the DoD!
Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the highest bidder.
Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o) Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least). TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.
"Let him cook" makes so much sense here.
If we won't stop what he is doing with grok and ai-generated CSAM, he will be completely free from oversight up there.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
That does not have to sound reasonable to us ... only to Musk.
Dealing with rogue AI also seems easier when you can walk up to its data center and unplug it.
If someone had the tech to cool stuff in space, that is required for this to happen, they’d have tons of easier and more lucrative opportunities right now on Earth to become the new richest person.
Where is the tech?
no, no, no, the key enabler to space datacenter is complete out-of-world computer 3D printers. You print entire 130nm, hell, even 130 micrometer GPUs and DDR2 VRAMs to go with, entirely on the Moon solely from Moon dusts, and shoot the complete satellites out into Earth LEO using maglev sleds. PUEs, opex, nothing matter because the Moon factory is self contained and don't interact with Earthian economy at all. The ssh key into the factory will be the source to free money to whoever holding it.
Is that possible in our lifetime? I'd be optimistic about that. Can SpaceX pull that off? Space what? ...
Another thing that doesn't make sense about them is that DCs get a lot of out of physical locality. Caches become hot as different use case spin up and down during the day near their customers.
If the nodes are spinning around the earth at orbital velocities, then all the benefits of physical locality are thrown out the window.
But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO would mean that latency to a client via a ground station wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better coverage.
It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for a decade because it's dominated by other costs.
Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
Admiral Grace Hopper is famous for using a length of wire to explain to others what a nanosecond was.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-embraces-musks-g...
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
The article kind of ended all of a sudden without much of a conclusion… but as most people by now have realised once they heard of the merging of Musk and Musk, it sounds more likely just a way of shifting money to pay himself rather than to actually build anything he says.
I’d even bet that when they do IPO, there will be ZERO mention of “space data centres” in the prospectus!
Of course it makes sense.
The regulatory framework is getting more and more difficult for data centers.
The options are move to countries with less of an uphill regulatory burden (UAE?), but this comes with other issues.
Space it is.
A pie in the sky
Comments full of EDS. Everyone is a rocket scientist in here also.
how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?
With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.
Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for underground datacenters, is now valued at $500B.
Nah. They get contract for mining on Mars, valued north of $1T.
there was an article recently about a company wanting to put nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km deep).
I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical, because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.
not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl
Interesting idea. 2km deep could work. I'm not sure how cooling or maintenance would work.
Depth below surface | Typical temperature (°C) | Indicative cost to drill 1.2 m diameter hole
500 m | 15–25 | $5–10 million
1 km | 25–40 | $10–20 million
2 km | 50–70 | $25–45 million
3 km | 75–100 | $50–80 million
4 km | 100–130 | $90–140 million
5 km | 130–160 | $150–250 million
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Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
A more reasonable project would be repurposing portions of the ISS for a data center and using that as a POC for larger scale stations.
What if you just took some ketamine and tried again? Does it make sense?
I just purchased a sandwich I made from myself in a deal that values me a $1tn. I plan to make toasties in space.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
What is this website?
The website insists that you let it record your voice in order to show you the dangers of AI. Is it trolling the visitor? https://civai.org/talk
But it's absolutely amazing hype and memevestors love it.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
Facts.
Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
We were supposed to be on Mars right now, but I guess data centers in space are nice too. Kinda disappointed they aren't on the moon.
What? A pump and dump scheme? I am shocked I tell you, shocked
What if they diverted a decent sized asteroid into earth orbit and put the data center onto that? Could it be put into a sun-synchronous orbit, cover one side with solar cells, and use the backside of the asteroid itself for cooling?
How else would you secure skynet against Sarah Connor?
AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax purposes).
This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.
It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
Like I’ve always said love him or hate him Elon Musk is a SPACE OIL SALESMAN!
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
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Truth doesn't matter.
What matters is that investors and shareholders love to hear about future space data centers.
Obligatory /s.
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Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
You mean physical reality
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
Why is it hard requirement?
You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won’t decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay faster.
If you put stuff underground it is much harder to communicate.
And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused temporary amnesia.
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In that case wouldn't space also get wiped by EMP? Seems like disabling satellites would be good move if you have a few nukes to spare.
After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.
Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816
(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
When did I say no insulation? If it took only one moment for the satellite to fly by behind the whole earth, its speed is so great that it would be flung out of the solar system.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
> No cooling necessary.
This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
3 are ways to cool things (lose energy):
In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.
> In space, only radiation works
it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.
This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C when it's night and +120C when it's day there.
And the sun's radiation also flips bits.
Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
Superconductors.
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Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
The computer hardware only needs to run enough AI compute to be smart enough to convince Musk that it's working. It should be fine.
Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
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Why is there no cooling necessary?
Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
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Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?
Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.