Comment by PufPufPuf
2 months ago
As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
2 months ago
As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue:
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
Heat management is not a technical issue but a reliability issue.
These satellites will be in orbits where they are always illuminated. That means constant temperatures, which means no thermal cycling and no reliability concerns.
When people say 'running it hot is bad for reliability', they mean 'running it hot and then brining it back to room temp from time to time will eventually kill it'.
1 reply →
Anyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat.
That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.
I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.
3 replies →
It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.
15 replies →
"Space datacenter" -> overpriced starlink with some shitty edge compute -> "look guys, we built a space datacenter; earnings results to follow" -> number go up.
I don’t think Sun synchronous orbit is possible except in LEO.
LEO is high risk and star link satellites deorbit or burn up all the time. Not good from a capex POV on graphics cards.
How much power could we get out of the fuel required to launch a 20-100kW rack in to space, if we were to burn it on the ground?
The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker.
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
Solar on earth was dumb because of logistics, right?
Things get cheaper.
2 replies →
Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol
SpaceX have presented on this and it's fairly straightforward and they already do it with starlink satellites, just at a larger scale. Sound like you are the uniformed one (or an EDS victim)
Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground.
6 replies →
I've heard this before and these are not comparable at all. Starlink is missing a few digits in it's power usage and heat dissipation needs compared to a datacenter.
Why did we start saying EDS this week, just in time for the IPO?
EDS? Like still believing Elon's claims are truthful?
what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.
9 replies →
Space radiators are not very efficient due to lack of airflow in space.
1 reply →
Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.
And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).
FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.
It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.
There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.
2 replies →
“YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source
2 replies →