Comment by kimixa

14 hours ago

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same.

Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are doing today. And that's with direct cables - using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use and complexity for the communication in the first place.

Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric than in space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency, ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even things like communication network connectivity would be easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new trunk connections to every major hub.

There are advantages to being in space - normally around increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those benefits is nonsense.

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kimixa

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ineedasername  10 hours ago

Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-server communication with correlated work loads than we already have on earth for most needs.

Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good reason to actually do this unless there's a use for all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is happening with immense growth and demand expected for increased pharmaceutical research and various manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.

  • bigbuppo  10 hours ago

    Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred thousand watts of heat into space.

abalone  11 hours ago

> using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use

Space changes this. Laser based optical links offer bandwidth of 100 - 1000 Gbps with much lower power consumption than radio based links. They are more feasible in orbit due to the lack of interference and fogging.

> Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric

This is not true for the power generation aspect (which is the main motivation for orbital TPUs). Desert solar is a hard problem due to the need for a water supply to keep the panels clear of dust. Also the cooling problem is greatly exacerbated.

  • Retric  10 hours ago

    You don’t need to do anything to keep panels with a significant angle clear of dust in deserts. The Sahara is near the equator but you can stow panels at night and let the wind do its thing.

    The lack of launch costs more than offset the need for extra panels and batteries.

  • cmsj  10 hours ago

    Space doesn't really change it though because the effective bandwidth between nodes is reduced by the overall size of the network and how much data they need to relay between each other.

    • kimixa  9 hours ago

      Yup. We don't use fibre optics on earth rather than lasers because of some specific limitation of the earth's surface being in orbit would avoid.

      We use them because they're many orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler for anywhere near the same bandwidth for the distances required.

sandworm101  13 hours ago

Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full.

This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him.

  • kimixa  10 hours ago

    Yup - my example of the Sahara wasn't really a specific suggestion, so much as an example of "The Most Inconvenient Inhospitable part of the earth's surface is still much better than space for these use cases". This isn't star trek, the world doesn't match sci-fi.

    It's like his "Mars Colony" junk - and people lap it up, keeping him in the news (in a not explicitly negative light - unlike some recent stories....)

  • krisoft  12 hours ago

    > Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it will in space

    That is clearly not true. How do you power the data center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the shadow of earth for half a year.