Comment by NitpickLawyer
2 months ago
> will put data centers in orbit. A pipe dream.
Cheap access to space was once a pipe dream.
Reusable boosters were once a pipe dream.
A new player beating Boeing to the ISS was once a pipe dream.
LEO constellations were once a pipe dream.
Launching thousands of satellites was once a pipe dream.
You should know that a) they are already running "AI" chips on their current sats. and b) they are already producing kW of power on orbit and have ~10k sats on orbit. You can watch Scott Manley's video on it, where he does some rough calculations and explains the overall architecture. There is nothing stopping them to do this, from an engineering perspective. If it makes commercial sense, that's another question, but 5-10-20 years in the future things might change there as well.
Microsoft tried to put datacenters into ocean [1] and then shelved the idea, because even that you have lower amount of failures, you still have failures and somebody has to go there and fix them. Which turns out to be problem.
And in ocean you don't have to solve for radiation nor cooling.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
I don't think people's argument is that it's impossible to put data centers into space. The argument is that the downsides (radiation, cooling, maintenance, power) are so severe that it is pointless to do it at scale.
Go back to the megathreads when this came up. Even here on HN. Plenty of people used the argument that it can't be done, for various reasons.
And my point was that at one point or the other there were many "downsides" for all the tech that SpaceX already has. Reusable boosters were seen as "uneconomical" and "pointless unless they can fly 10 times" by industry experts. They're now flying 30+times a booster.
LEO constellations were similarly "full of downsides" plus "all the companies that tried it went bankrupt in the 90s", so "it's pointless". And so on.
Reusable boosters have clear upsides, though.
Pretty much everything about data centers in space is worse than having them on Earth. Apart from niche use cases, the only reason you'd talk about data centers in space is if you had a company with rocket ships and needed a story to tie your rocket ships to the current AI craze.
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These guys aren't aware of all the "impossible" problems Elon already solved. They're too invested in the propaganda about him being a big dumb idiot who accidentally fell backwards into a pile of 1 trillion dollars.
Yet spacex is losing money … only StarLink is profitable.
Sure, you can do it. I bet humans could fly to Mars if we invested a massive amount of resources into it. Why, though? That’s the “easy” if you throw sufficient amounts of money at problems over sufficient periods of time you can solve them.
If you don’t care about making any more from it. How exactly would datacenters in space would be more profitable than those on earth?
If just Elon was taking about data centers in space, you could take it with a grain of salt. But there are other serious players talking about it like Google and blue origin that it should be pretty clear it can't just be dismissed with "you didn't think about cooling!"
Google also wanted to deliver internet from balloons and put everyone's real name on their YouTube comments. Not all their ideas are winners.
Yeah, and there's already been tech demonstrators for this. Starcloud-1 launched in '25 (on a F9) and demoed a CotS H100 in a ~60kg bus w/ 1kW of power. They ran inference on a "gemini" model (probably something small) and trained a GPT2 version LLM as a tech demonstrator.
> You can watch Scott Manley's video on it, where he does some rough calculations and explains the overall architecture.
I'm currently writing a blog post, and there's one big thing everyone, including Scott Manley, missed.
Once I realised it, I wondered what took me so long to spot this issue.
care to share the one glaring obstacle ?
slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
Not an expert, feel free to weigh in.
> care to share the one glaring obstacle ?
I'm still working on the blog, but as a quickie: it's the lesson of the Datasaurus dozen, that sometimes you need to look at the actual distribution rather than statistics.
Here's what the safety exclusion zone around a million of them in orbit looks like, if arranged something like the current plan: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
There's no (safe) gaps. Plenty of physical space, but the safety margin eats it all up. Nothing else is allowed to use those orbital shells or anything between them.
Also, this is what happens if you put them all in a single orbit at the same altitude:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
> slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
500ms means ~150,000 km travel distance; for that distance as round-trip time from origin to destination and back again means the one-way distance is 75,000 km, so if it's via a single satellite bounce then the average distance to the satellite would be 37,500 km: [You]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[Them]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[You].
I think they must be assuming all comms are via geostationary satellites. In some talks, this is what the speaker actually meant, though they may not have been clear about it; other times, there's talks from people who copied the former but perhaps didn't understand.
For DCs in space, even in GEO, it would be half the distance because you're communicating with the satellite itself not with someone else somewhere else on the ground.
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