Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
Similarly to Starlink , which was hyped as a low codt alternative for marginalised people/areas and sucked in enormous subsidies to that end.
While being more or less a proof of concept for a military command and control network , thats the same way this should be looked at.Especially with data centers being vulnerable on ground, coupled with the ability to reposition the space based units to be 'closer to the action' as it were.
So bottom line a proof of concept for DARPA funds and eventual inegration into the military command and control nodes.
Starlink didn't get any subsidies. There were reports in summer about them potentially getting 600 Mio (btw the broadband program is 40 billion heavy) and I can't find sources that SpaceX got any program founding yet.
You're correct that "we'll pay you to launch this satellite" isn't a subsidy. But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
Things like the EV tax credit also apply, considering Musk has leveraged his Tesla holdings to help SpaceX at times.
And to be clear: this was a very good use of public funds, whatever I think of Musk these days.
Exactly, in retrospect it's easy to confuse with a regular commercial transaction that happens to be with the government. But only because SpaceX was ultimately wildly successful with the Falcon 9/Dragon/Crew Dragon.
If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.
> But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
> By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk.
That is correct.
> Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized.
Yes.
> Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
"Boeing is subsidized" is not a controversial statement.
> On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload
Yes, this is why we do subsidies - they (potentially) pay off. We subsidize healthcare for poor people because it saves us money in the long run. We subsidize infrastructure because it helps the economy. We subsidize critical manufacturers for national security reasons.
How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
"A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
> How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world:
>the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it.
No, I'm saying that when the Post puts out an article shouting about "$38 billion" going to Musk, many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers". What was your purpose in insta-citing that article, as opposed to pointing to the one NASA program for funding promising booster designs, complete with strict standards at various milestones, that helped fund (in addition to $100 million, essentially every cent of Musk's PayPal fortune) resulted in the Falcon 1 two decades ago?
I'll answer my own rhetorical question. Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago. If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote
>> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.
>If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
> many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers"
Maybe you're projecting your own beliefs about government subsidizing things a little on other people. The government made a risky bet; that's one of the important things governments exist for. Sometimes they pay off (SpaceX), sometimes they don't (Starliner).
Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
> What was your purpose in insta-citing that article…
It was the first reputable source that came up in Google? It gives several specifics that directly match the Wikipedia definition of a subsidy?
> because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago
Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
> If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
I can be a big SpaceX fan and still wish the man running it hadn't gotten brainworms.
> And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote…
Why would I deny that? I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
>Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
mfw
>I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
And here you were questioning my need to speak to the mentally reddited.
Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield. (And before you say it, Starlink was turned down for the FCC rural subsidy.)
>Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
As I said,
>Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
> Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield.
"Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
Tesla received low-interest loans (and tax credits for their customers). SpaceX was given funds (that'll be "direct government expenditures") to develop the Falcon 9, Cargo Dragon, and Crew Dragon (and now the lunar lander). Those funds were not conditional on completion of the program (as we've seen with Starliner); they were R&D funding in milestones in hopes of a functional spacecraft at the end.
> with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course
Again with the strawmen.
"You got subsidies" and "you had nothing to do with the success" are wildly different statements. You can be both an extremely hard worker and supergenius and still need government support for your very expensive good idea.
> Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
No, the opposite. Falcon 1 is the single least subsidized part of it. It was the one big bit Musk completely self-funded.
They demonstrated an ability to get to orbit (after almost going bankrupt), which gave NASA the confidence to subsidize them in a larger project.
Starlink was granted $880m from the FCC, but later defaulted on conditions, so didn't get most of the money.
Starshield, on the other hand, has been directly funded by the US government to the tune of ~$9b in reported funding (much of it NRO or Space Force classified). It has ~250 satellites up as of now.
> A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services.
SpaceX benefited from the italicized items in this definition.
icbms and hypersonics exist, theres no defense against the top end anywhere atm.
if you're in a war where people are shooting your satellites out of the sky you're past the point where defenses matter. theres no grey war in space like russia hiring people to blow up stuff in europe and very few states could take out multiple satellites in space.
beyond that if we ever did get to that point, you could develop anti missile tech in space, you effectively have the high ground sitting at the top of the gravity well.
I'm reasonably sure there are more states that could destroy a satellite than hit infrastructure on US soil. And if you try to use an ICBM to hit the US then you risk getting nuked.
> people are shooting your satellites out of the sky
If space powers have any sense at all they'll develop a fleet of satellites that deploy small limpet craft that attach to the enemies' satellites and drag them toward earth.
Literal shooting sounds like mutually assured satellite destruction.
This. Orbital debris are an area denial attack, and since there's only one shared planetary orbit (in aggregate), debris-creating weapons are more like biological weapons, poison gas, and tactical nuclear weapons. Even if you win, you've impeded yourself.
The internationally hoped for outcome should be that China continues scaling their orbital use, to the point where it becomes mutually advantageous to sign a treaty with the US banning orbital debris-creating weapons (and ideally imposing mutually-supported consequences on non-signatories who breach the agreement).
Then everyone would be left with more sane options of disabling-only (microwave, laser, targeted EMP, etc).
It's really about bandwidth and availability - US satcom systems were really struggling, and the only truly global (Iridium) was quite low bandwidth. Starlink is essentially "Iridium with newer tech and mass production" and IIRC DoD through various fronts put quite a lot of early financing to make it a thing, even if later the networks were supposedly disaggregated (would make sense to start building separate one once PoC was proven)
DoD financing for Starlink was a long term game to create pLEO sensing capabilities: initially GMTI, then AMTI.
Both of which give the US military more persistent (revisit delay near zero because number of assets) and survivable (number of assets + LEO debris characteristics + cattle vs pets) ISTAR.
And an advantage in persistent ISTAR is a key enabler of the way the US military is aiming to fight a peer state adversary.
I'd be fascinated to dig into the contracts, but at 10,000' it's DoD offloading the bulk of the development cost onto NASA and the public (which in both cases, still gets good value for money).
Department of defense. Persistent low earth orbit. Ground moving target indicator. Air moving target indicator. Low earth orbit. Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. National aeronautics and space administration
Looked back on this and correction: proliferated Low Earth Orbit
Newer acronym, but apparently en vogue with the "How do we maintain a critical military space capability against someone who can shoot down exquisite satellites?" crowd.
Yeah similar to the AWS data cneter getting trashed in UAE by cheap drones and short range missiles. I think only 3 states have the capabilities necessary to knock out satellites , and one or two others with latent potential.
For the rest of the planet its basically untouchable unless theres more wisespread proliferation in missile tech.
Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.
If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.
India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...
Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.
just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
It actually abuts Hebei which puts it in striking distance of Beijing. I wonder about water though, it’s just grassland so there can’t be much to spare. It would be like building a data center in eastern Oregon.
They would need closed loop cooling for the months that weren’t cold enough, well, they would probably need it anyways just that it would be more efficient in the long bitter winter. The extra clean energy from wind and solar might make that reasonable though.
The enormous water usage values are generally about powerplants providing the power, and even the better reports on that include water use by hydroelectric plants - which makes sense in context of the report, but that context nor sense isn't understood by journalists and hype-men quoting just "trillions of gallons a year, more than X cities"
Honestly, India might be more democratic than China, but the current govt is known for it's authoritarian bent [1] and crony capitalism [2] in particular.
While governments of all types rushed to embrace AI data centers, perhaps driven by fears of being left out, the pushback against data centers seems to be universal. The difference is, countries with less authoritarian govenrments are seeing those pushbacks be generally more successful.
[1] The Chief Election Commissioner was recently caught manipulating voter rolls over the written objections of the other two election commissioners. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgw68yjg29o
[2] The transport minister came under flak after pushing a rushed transition to higher ethanol fuel blends. It transpired that his sons just happened to have set up ethanol factories just before the policy was announced and their net worth went up by 5000%. https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/originals/news/whye20-fuel-put...
> You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.
Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.
The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...
This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
When I looked it up earlier, it seemed to me that to scale this up we would require larger rockets than Starship if we cannot launch hundreds of times per day.
Cost is one thing, the other is whether it will be permitted at all.
Then there's the power grid problem.
I understand expanding the grid takes a long time, thus the gas turbines. Which I understand are also supply-constrained, and environmentalists are not happy either.
I'm no scientist or financial analyst, but I could imagine that the space thing would be viable especially in a scenario where AI capabilities continue to grow.
If AI really does replace not only most knowledge work but also other labor via robotics, and this requires enormous compute, we are going to want to scale this up at a much faster rate.
Preferably without covering a tenth of the planet with gas generators.
Are we, though? Going to want to scale this up, I mean.
Unless economic systems around the world change significantly very soon, this AI replacement you so cavalierly mention would cause significant portion of human population to reach poverty, causing much unrest and mass deaths.
I don't buy into demonizing the rich, including Altman, Amodei, Musk and co.
I am not concerned that this will be the outcome of the productivity surge.
We will have enough for everyone, and ensuring comfortable living standards for the general population is going to be in the interest of those in power, even if you assume very selfish motivations.
I'd also like to point out that both Anthropic and OpenAI created frameworks to monitor labor market impact and propose responses.
There are significant differences in feasibility and cost between putting something in low Earth orbit (or even very low orbit like Starlink) and putting it in any other orbit around anything else - like easily 2-5x depending on where you're going to put it. I'll leave it to the Kerbal Space Program veterans to explain the mechanics that also make it much more difficult to actually launch and deploy successfully unless you're happy with just having the DC arbitrarily orbit around the sun (and drift year-by-year).
Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.
Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.
Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.
But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.
TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.
You based all your objections on a faulty premise. Orbital data centers are all designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites, not one monolithic satellite.
I was responding to the suggestion to put them further away than low Earth orbit. Using "hundreds or thousands of satellites" would literally only make every problem I described worse, not easier, so I assume you missed that part and want to argue the merits of running what's essentially a botnet in low Earth orbit and calling that a "data center". Fine by me although I'm not sure why you decided to respond to me in particular.
You can run compute in low Earth orbit but compute runs hot. We're not talking 500 GPUs a pop but even for an 8 GPU node you need some 40 m^2 surface just for thermal dissipation. I assume by "distributed" you also imply that they're not going to be in sunlight 24/7 and operate more like Starlink so they'll need batteries to keep running for a third or so of their lifetime.
Low Earth orbit also means you don't have to worry about radiation frying your off-the-shelf hardware without the heavy shielding but you'll still have lots of random bit flipping to deal with and storage is largely going to be unreliable for anything but short-term, especially on SSDs.
Distributed also means you replace local speeds with network speeds - Google was only able to achieve feasible "data center" data rates by having satellites fly within less than a kilometer of each other (i.e. densely packed in space terms, no longer really "distributed" in terms of proximity) and even that had orders of magnitudes worse latency (obviously) than you'd have in a data center pod (though not quite as bad as the multi-millisecond latency you'd have at current Starlink level distances).
"Orbital data centers", even if operated as fleets of disposable low-performance pods instead of singular "out of reach" disposable mini DCs, are worse than real data centers on every single metric: they're slower, more expensive, unrepairable, degrade more rapidly and require more redundancy to compensate for random errors.
There are pretty much just three use cases:
- Providing space-based processing for space-based data collection to reduce the amount of data that needs be sent to ground (realistically speaking in the current climate this pretty much only describes surveillance).
- Avoiding regulatory oversight, permit processes and most risks (e.g. earthquakes, missile strikes, protests, sabotage) associated with building and operating a real data center.
- Avoiding energy price increases that might make operating a real data center more expensive compared to the fixed cost of continuing to operate an already launched satellite.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have pointed this out but one of the biggest factors in the premises that would make this entire idea somewhat economically viable (assuming energy prices increase in ways that affect data centers without also massovely affecting the supply chain for launching things into space) is Musk's claim that they not only can make the upper stages reusable and recover them but also that inspecting, refurbishing and reusing them will be considerably cheaper than replacing them. If they can't make launches significantly cheaper still (not that they aren't already ridiculously cheap all things considered), using a fleet "designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites" would be economically unviable compared to just stuffing a single satellite to the brim (especially if you can avoid the battery).
But then the single advantage becomes "it's in space" and that is really only interesting for compute running on data already collected in space - and if that is a problem big enough to be able to sustain an entire business model justifying SpaceX's valuation... well, let's just say that would be the kind of world where if it were a movie the major plot point would be the destruction of that company or defeating the regime that enables it.
> b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
This so much. Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force. On the other hand, destroying a rocket on its launchpad just take one FPV drone.
> Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force.
Leaving aside the DCs already destroyed in the Iran totally not a War by an enemy that can be easily crushed at any moment ...
DCs in mainland US aren't well defended - a pattern of shrapnel heads landed by a mobile mortar or two with a 2 km radius would render most in need of some upkeep.
Sure, but in my view any organized actor with military hardware in their hands count as a “very strong force” when compared to the average Joe with a Molotov cocktail. And Iran, as a state actor with ballistic capabilities is obviously one as well.
A couple of rednecks in a pickup with a mortar is far from "a very strong force"; consider how you would upgrade their description if they additionally had three helicopters, now describe them if additionally their numbers doubled, now throw in a couple of tanks.
When you start describing rabble level opposition that high you run out of ceiling very quickly.
The US is filled with ex service personal who can whip together a mortar, as "military hardware" goes it's on par with what civilian firework techs have access to and can build in a garden shed, it's home grown resistance level guerilla tech.
If there's growing ground swell opposition to US data centres then the same Y'All-Qaeda militia plotting against dams and power substations will feel empowered to have a shot at a DC or too.
If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting, you're very far from “one angry dude throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's DC” that was the original point.
I don't think the US have the social fabric needed for an insurgency to develop on though.
> If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting
Who said anything about civil war?
The US has many splinter loon groups who blow up buildings and like to attack infrastructure (see: US news). This has happened over the past decades with no civil war.
Data centres are soft targets - softer than banks. Do you remember when armed bank robberies were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s? Not a time of civil war, just a time when a couple of people took control of buildings while heavily armed. Such a small group with fragmentation grenades can easily render a data centre unfit for use for several months with relative ease and fast ingress and egress.
Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Politically motivated armed attacks are a totally different thing.
Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center. If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
> Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Really? Maybe read up some more, OC scale mafia groups weren't doing many of the bank raids of the US 1970s / 1980s - in any case these are still well below my bar on what constitutes a "very strong force".
> Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center.
You think wrong.
> If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
Exactly right, or rather several drums of farm grade fertiliser, diesel, ball bearings, a stolen truck, and somebody (or two) prepared to do a ram raid. Groomed idealogues or addicts with debt have all been used for such things.
Or, as already mentioned, drive parallel and mortar the centre from one end to the other, achievable by small discontent militia types (who abound in the US).
Serious question time: Are you honestly unaware of Timothy McVeigh? Would you describe him as "a very strong force"?
Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
"But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
"We know how to vent heat" and "we know how to vent enough heat that this becomes economical" are two different things. Can we deploy computers in space? Absolutely. Can we deploy a shitload of computers in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
That's the "is it economical?" question, and to spoil the answer, "with the way launch prices have been dropping in last few years, yes".
(Also the larger question of "relative to datacenters on the ground" is answered by "yes, if you want clean power for it" - turns out moving compute up is more economical than beaming power from space, and costs down here are becoming dominated by land price anyway.)
> in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
"Extremely compute intensive tasks" is just elaborate and overspecific way of saying "requires N KW of power".
There is nothing magical about compute here, power is power - it doesn't matter whether you spend it on ML, or collecting photons and radioing them back to Earth, or broadcasting a high-precision clock. You need some N KW to run = you need to collect that much, and you need to reject that much of it as heat[0].
--
[0] - That + whatever extra heat you absorb from the Sun.
The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.
I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.
That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.
Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.
But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol
There are lots of motivations other than "this could be a profitable project". Something can be completely insane in a monetary way while not being insane in other ways. A pilot project being built is pretty weak evidence of larger practicality.
Easy enough to do with a long tall stalactite shaped satelite.
Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally
No it's also all the minor problems: lubricants don't flow the same, grease dries out on bearings, rocket launches shake the hell out of their payloads, the thermal differentials across a structure are enormous, vibration doesn't damp into the earth it just rings through the structure till it's lost as heat.
All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.
And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).
> It's much easier for Russia to destroy data centers in orbit.
Nope. Depending on the number of satellites in the constellation, it could be very hard or impossible. Russia has only so many orbital-class interceptors.
You may want to read up on Kessler syndrome more if you think a few anti satellite hits would start it, or that it would be quick. (Hint: the original paper postulates decades.)
Access to unlimited almost free energy is the main point.
Other than that you don't need to deal with local politics.
Other than that it can actually be a faster round trip (if the satellite combines both connectivity to/from Earth and compute) if you don't have a local datacenter.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.
People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.
The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.
It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.
EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.
Container ships on popular routes. But they can be sent out to the middle of nowhere and they would be pretty safe I assume. Also, you may be able to just sink the datacenter's core part and only tether a few solar panels to it (or go nuclear). That way the target is minuscule, you get free cooling and even state-level attacks will have a hard time finding/damaging your data center.
There's a lot of sci-fi about the wealthy bringing on an apocalypse so they can rule the world that comes out of it. Two examples on TV now are Fallout (from the video games, obviously) and Silo.
One thing that gives me some small level of comfort is that the billionaires who have the means to make that sort of thing happen don't want to live in bunkers or a radioactive wasteland afterwards. They have it pretty good on Earth as it is now. So there's only so bad things can get (I hope).
To your point, it does feel like we are bouldering towards major disruption, even the unravelling of the fabric of society, thanks to worsening inequality as well as the impacts of AI. In the coming decades we may well have a billion climate refugees. We may have large swathes of the population who have no productive outlet in a world that still requires you to have a job to live. And that could go south very, very quickly.
So I guess my point is that if things get so bad you need to put your AI DC in space to avoid the unwashed masses burning it down, I suspect we'll have far bigger problems long before that becomes an issue.
You assume billionaires and politicians are all-powerful and that they congregate in a secret cabal voting on where to take civilization next. No they live in fear of what other powerful people might do and their reactions to what is perceived risk can really f up everything. Even the most powerful autocrats in the world have to deal with other countries.
Framing it as some Illumianti-like dark room cabal is the wrong way to think about it.
Look at our present woes in the Middle East. We have two nuclear powers who are dragging the world towards economic collapse. I believe that before we reach that economic doomsday scenario or anyone seriously considers deploying nuclear weapons, the money behind those powers will oust those who try to push us past the brink.
To this point, I believe there's a very real possibility that Trump gets 25A'ed next year, meaning the 25th Amendment is invoked to remove him from office.
Putting data centers in Antarctica or extreme north Canadian islands would also put you out of the way of molotov-throwing joe public. Even in space your not safe from the voting public as long as your companies directors are sitting on earth somewhere.
i already countered that argument, but to spell it out: sun synchronous orbits which see the sun all the time are a 1d manifold (approximately) and quite busy already, so they won't come to the rescue.
My point is that SSO isn't "coming to the rescue", it's literally the entire premise of the idea (greater availability of solar power there vs anywhere on earth). I don't buy "there's no more room" as an argument when we're talking about space, even in a relatively crowded set of orbits like SSO.
Russia has (likely) done that already in Poland. But with a constellation using laser interlinks and having multiple ground stations across the world, it becomes a difficult logistical problem.
They're also not controlled by pesky local regulators who are worried about losing elections. By putting them in space it becomes a federal/national defense project, and those regulators are either out of work or compromised or complicit.
I'm going to be fascinated to see how the regulatory arbitrage shakes out long term. What legal provinance applies to infra in space? Does GDPR apply? Can you even enforce GDPR? And you have line of site to users who could connect to it directly, bypassing government-regulated backbones.
GDPR applies regardless of where the data center is located because it applies based on where the user currently resides. Similarly, US laws (including those enabling warrantless surveillance) apply regardless of where the data center is located as long as the owner/customer/controller lives or is based or registered in (or is a subsidiary of an entity that is based or registered in) the US - or if the US decides it has jurisdiction until proven otherwise (cf. Maduro).
You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.
You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.
But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.
I dunno, considering how various insurgent groups manage to make some reasonably impressive rocketry, I have to believe that in a few years with AI assistance (abliterate all the things) knocking a LEO satellite out of orbit won't be that much harder than sabotaging an electrical substation.
We're talking about an exceptionally vulnerable target with a perfectly predictable path of travel here. And it's constantly emitting lots of RF making it easy to track. You just have to get near it and explode with shrapnel.
Totally illegal, of course. But it will be within the reach of millions of people if they want to do it.
I don't think "just move to space bro" is going to stop the pitchfork-mob.
I think the failures of most rocket startups to launch even with billions of dollars and thousands of real engineers shows how unlikely this is.
And say you do build an orbital
class rocket and manage to launch it without anyone noticing before you do - how many of e.g. Starlink’s 11,000 satellites will you be able to damage? What real impact will that have on Starlink?
You don’t have to intercept the satellites in orbit, they fall back to earth in a few years on their own. What SpaceX et al need to defend against is attacks while they are still on the ground or seconds after launch. Next round of investment will put the factories on the moon (only then will we see calls from the general public to Blow Up the Moon)
Back of the napkin math says a bare minimum of ~2000kg of solid fuel in three stages to “get to” GEO using a 3-stage rocket, to deliver 1kg of “something.” You’d need a gravity assist highly elliptical orbit which is a touch harder to pull off (but probably not harder than getting 2000kg of ammonium perchlorate). Plus building the actual rocket, guidance computer, etc.
Not trivial but not impossible. If you’ve got a few hundred million people with nothing better to do, I’m sure a few dozen/hundred could pull it off.
People who could do it successfully would hardy be considered morons. That would be a genius engineer.
The general attitude in this thread against reasonable people not wanting unsustainable megaliths that produce horrible amounts of noise, and are driving up electricity prices, in their communities without any input from said community is astonishing.
HN has really gone full AI derangement syndrome (it runs both directions).
The majority will not do it successfully. Rocket science is notoriously hard. Hopefully, there will be no incentives to go to such lengths.
Sending unguided rockets in the general direction of the enemy with 25% failure rate doesn't scale well to a 3-stage precision guided delivery vehicle.
It's not like people actually need satellites. We already have ground-based communication in the form of mobile phone networks etc., so I don't think the harm of making LEO unusable would be very great.
I suggest talking to people in Ukraine or Africa or even rural US or Europe before you so blithely take away their access to healthcare, education and communication.
This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
Taking away work was exactly the premise it was sold under.
The promise is that it'll make producing goods and services more efficient, like just about every other invention in human history. As always, that does put some people out of work in the short term, but it doesn't increase unemployment over the long term, and it makes all of society richer, not just the few who invented it.
You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
Real basic income will be a lot less like Star Trek and a lot more like The Expanse.
Also, revolutions are rarely ever started by the lower class. They're always started by the middle tier of society, enraging those helpful idiots lower than them to attack those above them. They end up with many dead and many suffering. Those who cry out for revolution have never seen the horrors of war.
> “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
> You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
That will never happen and capitalism is pretty creative in creating artificial scarcities.
You are far too naive if you think there is a non-bloody way to basically remove the wall between the classes, and that those in power will not try to do everything they can to keep their wealth and "higher lifestyle".
The evidence I've seen suggests that the most common source of scarcity is restrictions on trade, like taxation.
"What if we had taxed the internet?
"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."
>This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.
I can tell you that almost every single enthusiastic proponent of the technology I've ever spoken to has pretty much guaranteed this is where it takes us... But correct, its naïve as hell.
AI being able to work for us does not mean that AI reduces employment. Every form of automation does work for us. But there is no limit to how much work can be done. And there are things that humans uniquely do that AI will never be able to do because we will never want to create AI as dangerous as human intelligence, but those same traits that make human intelligence dangerous also provide it with unique value in many domains.
Whenever I hear about this I can't help but be reminded of the Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer, where a hugely-expensive commercial project was actually part of a secret CIA initiative to recover a Soviet submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
I'm not sure that's truly the case here, but it does seem like the tech Project Suncatcher is working on has at least some overlap with requirements for military SIGINT and in-orbit imagery processing.
Why would the CIA need Google's cover for any of that? The Feds have been flying spy satellites since the 1950s and there's plenty of classified satellite launches.
Because anybody near-peer to the US at this point has the capability to shoot down satellites, and anything launched on a classified satellite launch is a prime target.
The US has been prepping for a showdown with China over Taiwan for quite a while now. It's the primary focus of US military strategy, and considering a when, not if. When we're sinking their ships (and them ours), shooting down satellites won't even register as an escalation.
Yeah, no proof, of course (these are spies, at the end of the day . . . like with the Epstein stuff any written records have already been shot into the Sun), but that is a very evocative theory. It explains things better than anything else, given how this whole rigamarole seems to run afoul of some very basic math.
There's a case to be made that a substantial part of the mobile/social web revolution of the Aughties was at least in part propelled by the exploding budget of the security state post-9/11. LifeLog, In-Q-Tel, a bucket of other programs that have straight-line-relationships with the various Web 2.0 shenanigans. The CIA point man for these operations are recognizable today as some of the new generation of American semi-governmental oligarchs.
This last year I read that the early Stingrays only worked because they were engineered in from the IMSI standards - it was backdoored at the spec level, not the design level, not the manufacturing level.
When you step back a moment it makes sense. Who's funding a wireless information infrastructure to every American on the continent, not to mention a sea change in mobile computing manufacturing and development. Different tooling, different design systems, different everything, massive scale . . . what, paid for with advertising? Are you saying Mad Men is paying for all this? That seemed and seems . . . unlikely.
While a bit tin foil hat-y, this is an interesting (conspiracy) theory, even while space datacenters aren't as impractical as some people try to make them to be.
Some people, claiming to be the authority on laws of physics. While people actually doing this are obviously more credentialed and talented than said internet fools.
Don't you think it's a _bit_ ignorant thinking the engineers at now several companies known for their genius didn't think of it? There's a meme for this kind of armchair drive-by commenting.
And the preliminary design shapes aren't unknown. They just have huge ass solar panels and radiators. Plenty of space in ... space.
Literally no one is saying it’s impossible. You claimed it’s not impractical, which is totally different. And yes, as of now, and likely for years to come, launching huge ass panels and radiators into space for data centers is going to be economically impractical, as compared with building the same amount of capacity on earth.
And why haven’t these genius engineers delivered on basically any of Musk’s promises on time? Or at all, in many cases?
You have the entirely wrong impression of people here. TONS of people are saying exactly that, and trying to disqualify the whole debate.
>likely for years to come
Starship is putting its first business payload to orbit in two days. The craft represents making mass to orbit magnitude(s) cheaper. Read the text on your side mirrors.
>any of Musk’s promises on time
I find this argument so frivolous. Ok, so they've made what was considered impossible, _late_ on a few occasions? And they visibly iterate, showing failure, as if it makes them somehow worse?
It does kind of sound like you are not the engineering type, or at least don't work with actual hard problems.
The smartest people are still geniuses and the smartest even if they're late, while no one else is ahead of them.
Alphabet holds approximately 551 million shares of SpaceX (trading under the ticker SPCX), valued at roughly $94.1 billion, which represents about a 4% to 6% stake in the company.
They've got $400bn+ in annual revenues, with $50bn in free cash flow, and the ability to raise enormous piles of debt if they needed it.
They've not got a pressing need for the cash, so can afford to take a multi-decade view of SpaceX. If you look at other investors who take a view across that time horizon, you'll see some pension funds and huge trusts putting money into SpaceX for the same reason.
It's overpriced today on fundamentals, but in 50 years time, today's price will look cheap.
They invested $900 million[1] in 2015, and it is worth $94.1 billion today. Why sell? They also likely have restrictions on selling post-IPO, but I don't think you can trigger a "bank run" on a stock anyway; the price will just keep adjusting as you sell/buy until it gets absurd.
A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it.
"A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it." Sure, it's not possible for stocks to become insolvent in the same way, but if a large shareholder sells it could trigger a panic and greatly decrease the price.
why would they sell? because of ridiculously large the valuation is? like, I guess at SpaceX's valuation there's tremendous downside and little upside (x2 growth is unlikely when it's a third of the tech sector)
This. China's copying SpaceX's homework and the public/private system towards that is operating so efficiently, if SpaceX lets off the gas, US is going to fall behind off the next long term gold rushes like asteroid mining, and said space datacenters.
At least this brochure marks cooling in the "challenges" column rather than the advantages.
However, the only advantage listed in this announcement is "near-constant sunlight". It appears they are hoping for 8x solar efficiency for 1000x the cost of terrestrial construction.
If the actual motivation is that people don't want data centers on earth, that seems to be because the datacenters 1) drive up energy costs, 2) use a lot of water I guess, and 3) can make noise. If you're able to operate a datacenter satellite you apparently don't need local electricity, water, or human labor. As someone else said, set up on the desert or in the middle of Alaska somewhere 100s of miles from the nearest person. They can still use solar (just build like 8x the panels if you need to... still cheaper than space), they don't need water, don't need labor... I think most public opposition would disappear.
I've heard some say the real advantage is latency for spy satellites... This seems not a real use case. The kind of workloads that require this kind of datacenter usually can spare 1-2 seconds in round trip time. Millisecond-sensative reactions I would assume would want to be driven by onboard processing.
One true advantage that I haven't seen on any brochure is that the heat produced by the space datacenters could be released into space rather than raise the temperature of the earth. However, the satellite would have to be designed to radiate the heat away from earth. Hopefully they design the satellites to direct the radiated heat away from earth and don't just point the radiators straight back to earth...
> 1) drive up energy costs, 2) use a lot of water I guess, and 3) can make noise
I don't think the opposition to data center projects can be explained with actual impact, which so far seems entirely negligible, and lower than heavy industry.
I had the impression it's more driven by general mistrust in public officials and the tech industry.
I wouldn’t call the electricity use negligible, some of the newer data centers are looking at the same energy usage as small countries and run off fossil fuel
This is the impression I get as well. Plus, people concerned that property values will be negatively affected, that their taxes may go up to subsidize the data center, etc
> set up on the desert or in the middle of Alaska somewhere 100s of miles from the nearest person… I think most public opposition would disappear
I don’t know about the desert, but in Alaska I think this would be hard to achieve. People there tend to care about preserving wilderness, and most of them would probably be opposed to this.
For those questioning viability, there's a startup called Starcloud https://www.starcloud.com/ with a public whitepaper explaining a bit their hardware and economics https://www.starcloud.com/wp.
They've already had one small proof of concept launched.
Not trying to promote, I just heard about them on the ycomb podcast
Desert land is full of that amount of area available for peanuts.
That’s 4000 acres. I see a 6000 acre ranch available in Arizona for $7m. The cost of building a 5GW DC is about 100 billion. Land including enough for all the solar and battery you need to be completely self sufficient is basically free.
The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things. Otherwise the economies do not make sense. The "terrorism" threat is nearly non existant in practice and only the legislative threat is real, which might be good cause to think about what you are doing in the first place.
> The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things.
Consider a global human population, fractured into historically formed nations and power blocs. Consider corruption and clans taking up a fraction of positions of power at a certain duty cycle. It's unavoidable legislative bodies would eventually abuse control of technology, for those points in time yes, doing the right thing becomes doing the illegal thing, but only because corruption attained such powers.
> Otherwise the economies do not make sense.
The economics at what scale? At scales of earthly compute, earth is cheaper and more maintainable. At stellar scale, the power simply isn't available on Earth, so the most economic path is whatever is the most economic space ML datacenter path.
What the heck are you talking about? Basic grounding problem: who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much? You know that place where 100% of your customers and the hostile legislative bodies would be.
The Earth's surface area is ~ 510,000,000 km^2. For simplicity, say exactly half of it is receiving sunlight. If the satellite perfectly shadows 16 km^2, it would reduce incoming solar energy reaching Earth by 16/205,000,000 = 0.00000078%, I think.
Ideally you'd put it in an orbit that wouldn't shadow earth, since if it goes in front of earth in part of the orbit then it'll go behind earth (and be in shadow) for part of the orbit. They mention they'd want it in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, which would be in sunlight all the time and would never shadow the earth.
would radiation pressure not counterbalance the radiation pressure from the sun?
given solar cells are only 30% efficient. if you put the radiators behind the panels then you have the structure already and always keep the radiators shaded
They seem to not be counting the $1B of GPUs on either side, making the difference pretty small. They also think launching 200 racks of equipment into space will cost $5M.
Because launch costs and density are completely imaginary. The whole thing is predicated on launch vehicles they hope someone builds eventually. They also appear to have profoundly miscalculated their radiation shielding costs and amounts, but I'm not really motivated to calculate that correctly.
Because running 40MW of high-speed inference on GPUs is a different sort of mission then bolting a camera to a Jetson SBC and dropping a cubesat into orbit?
Falcon heavy has never flown SSO, but it's probably over $1500/kg, which is >50x more expensive. Even the most optimistic estimates for a future starship launch cost is at least $100/kg, so it makes no sense to use $30/kg.
The other line items are probably similarly unrealistic since they include their own launch costs as well.
They also spec 300 racks of 500kg each, which is <40% of the weight of the comparable land rack. I doubt the full weight reduction since the racks still need to survive launch force/vibration in addition to fluid/pressure enclosures that land racks don't require. I think it's likely that just about every part of this report has a similarly cooked numbers, and we can just throw the whole thing out.
how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated.
I don't know why people are so fixated on heating as some kind of gotcha. If we already assumed magical 16km^2 solar array, then we can also assume matching size radiator, with heatpumps. If ISS can do it, then there is no technical issue with doing it on bigger scale. It "only" doesn't make any sense from financial viewpoint, terrestrial datacenters beat it in every way.
NVidia's recent support for warm (45 °C) water cooling for their new racks probably had more impact on price of compute than than space servers will ever have.
Space, as in the near absence of material that makes it an almost perfect insulator. Add to it constant compute producing heat and you just cooked your GPUs with no way to dissipate.
Historically there have been many startups with pitches that haven’t worked out. The existence of a startup who think they can tackle a particular problem isn’t evidence of the viability of their proposed solution. If they succeeded, that would be evidence.
Yeah. Starcloud is notable for two things: firstly that they've raised a lot of money and secondly that theyve already abandoned the nonsense in their white paper and shifted to a "lots of satellites" model like everyone else exploring orbital datacentres...
I think SpinLaunch is great example. They were actually able to fund and make a working prototype, tested it, but still decided it is not practical after all, before pivoting to production of knockoff Starlink-like satellites.
What happens to all the precious metals that go up with these data centers? At least with a land based data center we have a vague hope of recycling the raw materials at some point in the future.
Just like with all the satellites, the recycling plan is to allow them to burn in atmosphere. Maybe after we breathe enough of it, we can recover the metals via crematories.
Precious metals stop being precious metals once asteroid mining begins. I don't think it will be super soon but I could certainly foresee it being a thing within 10 - 15 years which is about 2 - 3 generations of satellites from my very brief Google.
We are decades away from asteroid mining at best, even assuming we go all in starting today. The difficulties and numerous engineering challenges of mining at zero g cannot be understated.
Note how their cost comparison table mentions "launch" but not a word about how to retrieve systems parts after their end-of-life. "There's so much junk already circling around the planet, what does it matter if we'll leave it there to rot?" can't possibly be the stance they're taking.
For real. It's an enormous problem solved only with 1) sheer scale, and 2) Science Fiction.
Both of those are expensive as hell, by the way.
Cooling via radiation follows Stefan–Boltzmann: P = εσAT⁴. Let's assume a good surface (emissivity ~0.9) at 300 K (27 °C) at 400 W per square meter per side. A flat panel radiating from both faces into deep space gets 800 W/m, not including the losses from, say, the Sun, or from IR coming off the Earth. Now, input power. Sunlight in orbit ~1,360 W/m², assume ~22% cell efficiency, we got 300 W/m². So each 1 MW compute, 3,300 m² of solar panel and minimum 1,200–1,500 m² of radiator.
In case ya didn't know - 1 MW is tiny from a present-day-datacenter perspective. It's like 8 racks. So we're talking orbital megastructures here, many many many square kilometers, and this is with all the best case assumptions, and magic radiator panels that never see the sun, or the earth, or the moon.
This is just the basic numbers here, by the way. There's a garbage truck full of other unsolvable problems if you poke your head in there.
Aside from the "Avoid Regulations" aspect, and the "Everything That Burns Deorbiting is Depreciation" aka "The Starlink Trick", I'm not sure what the hell the draw is.
Cooling in space is hard but not impossible - while current (IMHO stupid without advanced in space infra) space data center projects work with a couple MW, many advanced space propulsion concepts might have to reject hundreds of MW if not a couple GW.
As for space data centers - I think the main issue is the complete lack of in space infrastructure for resource mining, processing and manufacturing & maintenance. It is kinda like building your first practical steam locomotive & the deciding to build directly an airliner. No suitable materils, experience, work force, material sources, etc.
We eventually went from locomotives to airliner, in an incremental manner & expanding the supporting infrastructure to support the ever more ambitious projects.
It might be eventually doable, as an experiment or as a flex, sure. But it's never going to come close to being cost-reasonable versus the equivalent infrastructure here on earth.
The security advantages are enormous since access to space is so tightly restricted and controlled, compared to the access potential of a land based data center. Only risk in space is maybe we start WWIII with china and the US directly trading blows. On the ground, any insurgent group can disable your infrastructure. Nothing is truly safe on the surface of the earth. Anyone can strap a bomb on a drone now. See examples from the currently active wars.
It costs at least 50x more to put a GPU in space than it does on Earth. For that price you can have dozens more capacity in bunkers, under the sea, or on remote islands. Do you think your insurgents are going to get all two dozen? They could travel to the far corners of the earth, destroying 22 of them, and you'd still be ahead. Further, I wouldn't be surprised if a satellite with such a monstrous solar and radiator footprint wouldn't be susceptible to a laser based attack from the ground; either frying it or pushing it into an unstable orbit by vaporizing a few bits.
It costs much more than 50 times because there are no GPUs in space yet. Google is only planning to have some sort of space data centers mid 2030s, if everything works out. A big if, but if they don't start now then we'll never know.
What? No, exactly the opposite. It's very easy to jam radio signals and much harder to cut wires. There's a reason the drones on the front lines in Ukraine are dragging fibre optic lines these days.
There's probably so many ways to get around that with space based technology. I can quickly imagine several methods. It depends on what the system is for which might be a good method to use.
Method 1: same as how u2 planes dumped their data: air drop physical media containing data and catch it in the air.
Method 2: laser based emission to specific detectors.
Method 3: baseball style communication: station is under observation and manipulates in some way to serve as a signalling language.
Method 4: numbers station
Method 5: bill yourself as an isp and have some coded syntax that can be supplied in plain sight with the rest of isp traffic.
Method 1: Sure datacenters with latency measured in several hours sure are useful, and can also be intercepted
Method 2: Can be jammed by drone with laserpointer.
Method 3: Let me just transfer gigabytes of data via physical signalling
Method 4: Can still be jammed
Method 5: Can in fact still be jammed?
If you’re receiving data optically from a space based laser, yes you are quite vulnerable to your detector being jammed by a much closer laser that doesn’t have to be nearly as powerful to add noise to the signal.
Why do you think GPS is so easy to spoof?
Actually I just googled (clauded?) to learn more about space lasers and found a paper describing interrupting quantum key distribution (tamper evident but not jam proof!) with a 1kw laser on the ground pointed at the satellite! So it really does not take many photons to fuck up an encrypted signal.
“ Vulnerability of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution to Disruption from Ground-Based Lasers”
You're going to have to be very close, basically in the direct line between ground station and satellite (which would be airspace that's easily guarded), have a lot of battery/cooling systems to run that laser on what would essentially be a one-way-trip all for disrupting comms for maybe a few minutes tops? And that's just for one ground station, where the blue team can just set another one up a few meters away and be safe. Honestly, you'd probably be better off dumping glitter or water in the sky than trying to actively jam laser comms.
Method 1 runs into the problem of how to replace that media. The DC is in space so it's not like with U2 planes where they landed. Also, I think you mean the keyhole satellites and not U2 planes, since a plane lands at a secure site and can offload media then.
The United States is relatively expensive because the world's cash reserves are priced in USD, and a large fraction of the eastern Eurasian continent lives inside a work camp.
The old Chicago School boogeymen of unions, regulations, and red tape are effectors, but they're a pimple on the back of the world-mutating effects of seven-some decades of USD Seigniorage.
I imagine we're going to be living through the reverse of this Seigniorage experiment quite soon.
What was it the 27th law that says radiating heat in to space does not work? I'm skeptical of the whole thing too, but it's not an impossible engineering challenge, just an expensive one.
According to Wikipedia this reduces weight and not the required area. Also AI said the same thing, but I can't trust in it this blindly. So, how smaller would be the required surface area?
> Now, input power. Sunlight in orbit ~1,360 W/m², assume ~22% cell efficiency, we got 300 W/m². So each 1 MW compute, 3,300 m² of solar panel and minimum 1,200–1,500 m² of radiator.
We need > 2x more solar panels than we need radiators. Doesn't this imply radiation isn't really the limiting factor here?
Getting the energy back from the solar panel is easy via copper cables. Getting the heat back out there to the radiators is a bit harder, you needed fluids and pumps and heat exchangers which have lots of moving parts and need maintenance.
Doing it in a cost and weight effective way is still a big deal, because if it's not within ~10x the cost of ground based data centers, not enough people will use it to justify building it.
It’s obvious that radiation isn’t the limiting factor, since, as you note, there’s no reason a satellite shouldn’t be able to radiate at least as fast as it gets power from the sun. I don’t know how this became a meme.
Yeah, I suppose another way to look at it is that ALL satellites have to radiate the energy they get from the sun (since 99+% of electricity used by electronics gets radiated off as heat). A datacenter is no different. All that is different is that quantity of energy both in and out, the ratios are identical.
No point in running them at room temperature. GPUs, etc. run fine at 95 C. If you run your cooling loop at 70 C instead, you get 70% more cooling compared to 27 C.
At any rate, 1 MW for a single satellite is fine. Just launch several thousand of those and you get to real numbers.
Also, there's no need to talk about "magic" radiators. You orient them so they're at a knife edge to both the Sun and Earth. This is not difficult (the Moon is irrelevant).
Radiating 1MW at 500K (227C) with a 0.4MW heat pump takes about 200 m^2 flat sheet surface. Inputs - solar+nuclear for double fun. So - quite feasible.
Moves 1 MW of heat with 0.4 MW of work? I.e. 2.5 COP {coefficient of performance). That's insane, and I mean that in a good way. Could you dig me up a cite for that?
That's thumping the Carnot limit: [[T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold)]].
2.5, while rejecting at 500 K, cold side's at least 357 K (eeehhhhhhh 84 °C) . . . and that's an absolutely perfect Carnot machine. At 50% Carnot -- a pretty good heat pump, real world performance is 40-60 -- cold side's at 417 K (144 °C). 417k, feeding your GPU coolant loops.
I believe that's Carnot COP for a heat pump used for heat+. I used the refrigeration version, T_cold / (T_hot - T_cold), which I'm 80 percent sure is the right one here.
Depends on which heat you want
Heat adding to hot side: COP_heat = Q_hot / W = T_hot / (T_hot − T_cold).
Heat leaving the cold side: COP_cool = Q_cold / W = T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold).
Another one (more common in the day to day, for me at least): heat-engine efficiency, η = 1 - T_cold / T_hot. Cycle forward to make work from heat.
Do we even _have_ semiconductors that can work at 220C? And if you're thinking about using some kind of refrigeration cycle, its efficiency is going to be bad.
1) The chips don't reach 220C. The 220C is the temperature at the hot end of the heat pump. The chips are on the cold end of the heat pump.
2) The International Space Station has used a dual-loop ammonia/water-based heat pump to cool the station temperatures. It's been in place for several decades. Heat pumps are a proven technology.
> The 220C is the temperature at the hot end of the heat pump. The chips are on the cold end of the heat pump.
If we want the heat pump's cold end at about 40–65°C, then for each 1MW of GPU heat, we need another 1MW of heat pump power. Now you need 2MW of solar power.
Good news is that the radiator at 227C (500K) can emit about 5× more heat per square meter than at 57C (330K)
Getting this all up into orbit it obviously the hard part, but if you're already building so much solar capacity the cooling actually doesn't seem unreasonable?
Great read, thanks for sharing. I am interested in reading some more about the other unsolvable problems that exist in this space, do you have any recommendations that you wouldn't mind pointing me at? It would be greatly appreciated, and thank you :)
Surface area is a materials problem? Folded microstructure, atomic-scale textured surface or some other science-fiction solution could have square kilometers of surface area in a shoebox.
Imagine you have two blackbody radiators with the same bulk properties, except one has surface area shenanigans like aerogels. In the far field as a whole, it seems like both should radiate essentially the same regardless of the internal details. You can shape emissive direction, or improve efficiency of non-ideal materials, but even ideal materials don't fix the issues pointed out by the parent.
Right; it's only area exposed to the exterior that counts. A physical object can't thermally radiate more power than a perfect blackbody spanning its convex hull.
(This follows because a physical object can't absorb more light than a perfect blackbody spanning its convex hull. A perfect blackbody by definition absorbs 100% of incident light, which is a hard upper bound. Any line incident on an object is also incident on its convex hull).
(Consider an isothermal object that emits more power than a blackbody in the shape of its hull at the same temperature. If you were to place that object in a closed system at thermal equilibrium, the interior of an insulated emissive sphere—combining assumptions, it would emit more power than it absorbs, in violation of the 2nd law. Starting from an isothermal system, the object would grow colder, and the enclosing container hotter).
I don't think so. Large surface area helps with convective cooling I think by increasing the surface area that participates in heat exchange with the air (or other thermally conducting material), radiative cooling wouldn't benefit from this because you can't concentrate light beyond the source that it's emitted from (etendue).
Though I do wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of internal heat pump driven by electrical power to juice up the temperature of the radiators to increase the power being radiated away? E.g., run a heat pump to increase the temperature of a working fluid and then run high temperature radiators? I think it would work and I don't immediately see that it would violate the laws of thermodynamics? (this is ignoring all practically, I'm sure the engineering would be devilishly hard, although if you're already shooting for the moon you might as well throw in some artificial gravity to boot, it's not like the robots get motion sickness)
the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.
they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.
Your "other" makes no sense. It doesn't matter if you make a few big or a lot smaller, in space you will still need the same space for the same amount of megawatt. Or did you miss the scale of parent's post ? Because in that dream scenario of "let's ignore all the issues except that" and "the earth and the sun don't have any impact", it's still 3 THOUSANDS square meters for a MW of 8 racks.
You want to go smaller and go one rack only sure, it's still hundreds of square meters. Check the size of current orbital structure for a point of reference, you can't dwarf those and call it a "dataswarm of tiny datacenters flooding the sky".
From the article itself, sounds like it’s an open problem that they are experimenting with:
“ We’re working on a number of different approaches for this, including a combination of heat pipes and radiators to cool the chips. So far, our team has tested the technology in a thermal vacuum chamber that simulates both the thermal and vacuum environment in space. We’ll see how our new TPU cooling system works in space and refine our designs as we learn more.”
Imagine a heat pump circuit fails (solar rays? micrometeorite? random chance), I guess everything in that loop will just be dead forever? I guess you don't need to pay to dispose of it.
> The biggest challenge was how to cool the A.I. chips, which heat up when they perform calculations and process information. Fans, which typically help dissipate the heat, do not work in space. So the Silicon Valley company instead developed a cooling system that uses layers of conductive material to expel the heat into space.
> The bottom layer is made up of Google’s A.I. chips, which sit on a green motherboard. The next layer consists of “thermal interface material,” a pale green putty that comes in sheets like Fruit Roll-Ups and connects the chips to layers of aluminum and copper, radiating heat away from the motherboard. Finally, there is a radiator panel, which projects heat into space.
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
It's a bit like the hyperloop. They know it's not practical but having the idea out there makes money.
There will be some niche demand for military use though.
We don't. This is all cover for the militarisation of space, there's no real benefit that'd be ever economical to put a DC up in space when you could build one on the ground. The whole narrative exists to allow google to tap into the Golden Dome / Space force bucket of pork that's basically SDI II.
You don't need civilian scale compute in space, but you absolutely can put miliary application up there and get filthy rich, like Elon, who doesn't care if it ever works, because he's getting paid as taxi service to shoot stuff up.
This is the most interesting perspective I've heard on this topic, which otherwise always converges on the same political dismissals or heat dissipation arguments (the latter are fascinating, but going in circles by now).
Sounds very probable: gives a plausible reasons for sending a lot of infra up, absolutely doesn't have to be profitable or even effective, puts the focus on AI instead of the MIC, and is in line with the kind of contracts Big Tech runs after.
To me this model explains a lot of why so many big companies seem to be investing into what every expert I've heard says goes against basic physics. The only thing missing for it to be more than an interesting idea is why China and the EU are not fighting this.
you need a gradient from hot to cold to generate electricity. vacuum is a poor thermal conductor, so your cold part will become hot and then no more gradient.
(I guess you could try to capture the radiative photons via the photoelectric effect?? but I don't think it works.)
I tried asking Grok and a bunch of waffle came out but one interesting idea was "modular tiles" with solar cells on one side and a panel to radiate heat on the other with the processor bolted to the panel. (https://www.geekwire.com/2026/sophia-space-caltech-ai-patent...)
Could you share us a proof of concept or anything that might be a solution for the heat dissipation in space, at scale ?
You see, this is the difference between bullshit and not. I can claim "we'll do timetravel soon !", but unless I share some "things" (whatever they are) that might sustain that affirmation, this is just bullshit
Does it mean that no solution exists ? No. Just that today none are known (as far as I can tell).
This is the problem with European thinking, you have this built-in mindset that you think you're going to be so cool with a gotcha because I can't provide a "proof of concept" or solution right now for a problem that OTHER PEOPLE are working on. Sheesh, just get off your high horse and admit that other people that are smarter and harder working than you are going to solve problems you can't manage.
Your desire to call out bullshit is stronger than your ability to GSD.
Exactly! There's a quote I like to remember: "If I had listened to all the negativity and putative experts who expended so much energy telling me 'this is impossible, it will never work' I would never have gotten to where I am today." - E Holmes (Founder and CEO of Real-Time Cures)
People are working on problems I cannot manage (who could have known) and they cannot say anything about that but we have to trust them to bring results out of thin air ? Is this politics .. ?
If your personal accusations can be boiled down to : "shame ! you are not gullible!", then please know that, here in France, not being gullible is a compliment.
I guess we're redefining "the scientific community", cutting out those who were wrong each time? Do you consider the French Space Agency (CNES), former NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, the European Space Agency to be part of the scientific community? I still vividly remember one interview where Elon started to tear up because Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan publicly denied the feasibility of SpaceX's mission.
"Scientists" being detractors and everyone going online to comment about how something is impossible while the people doing the thing just do it then all the detractors quietly shrug it off until the next time is so consistent it feels like Groundhog Day. I'd really like to learn about why so many people get off by saying something that other people are working on is impossible.
He is free to launch his own space GPU if he is so confident it is profitable*.
I will take it as a given that the Google engineers know what they are doing, and their first version can only run for 15 minutes before it needs to shut down to cool.
*Profitability requiring that other Musk controlled companies do not pay for the service at elevated rates in a classic self dealing scheme.
> He is free to launch his own space GPU if he is so confident it is profitable*.
Are you not aware that's exactly what SpaceX is doing?? https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind Sure, it's now SpaceXAI or whatever, but how is that any different than Google sending up sats and selling the compute via Gemini?
Please stop with this argument. This is one of the easiest problems to solve. Heat dissipation requires a radiator, which is just a dumb hunk of metal. All you need is a cheap way to launch mass to orbit, which is exactly what SpaceX (and Chinese companies) are doing.
The only valid argument against data centers in space is the economic cost. If the per megatoken price for space datacenters is higher than terrestrial, then this won't work.
But the price for terrestrial datacenters keeps going up and technology keeps dropping the price of space-based.
That is not a fake argument, but real physics. Yes, you can design out X kw can be dissipated by this much radiators, but that adds an enormous quantity of mass, more than the solar panels that feed it.
If you are trying to generate a profit, every extra kg puts you further in the red. It still costs over $1000/kg of mass to get into orbit.
So is it a physics problem or an economic problem? Sounds to me like you are acknowledging that it is just an economic problem. If it cost $1/kg to get to orbit then this wouldn't be a problem, right? Just make a bigger radiator.
But if it's an economic argument, then you need to do the actual math. How big is the radiator? How low could the price to orbit go? How much can you charge per million tokens in 2030?
The reason this is a fake argument is because the validity depends on the math, and nobody advancing the "you can't cool stuff in space" argument is actually doing the math.
The economics is constrained by physics. AI in space is not viable if it costs $1000/kg to launch to space. Starship promises to cut that down to $100/kg (more if you believe Elon, but most don't), but that's still not competitive.
Sure, things would be different if the cost was $1/kg, but short of somebody building a space elevator that's just not going to happen.
I won't believe less than $100/kg until I see it. I agree with you on that.
But are you sure that $100/kg is not competitive? I don't remember all the math, but even their initial AI1 design[1] would throw a lot of profit, if you can sell at the price they offered to Anthropic.
I suspect the price of manufacturing the satellite, plus chips, is the dominating factor, not necessarily the launch costs.
Okay any argument about why space is uniquely challenging is going to revolve around physics. Sure it's not literally physically impossible, but we need to explain to people why this is different from shipping the GPUs to Ohio.
If you want math then https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters exists. The numbers are grim for orbital DC. Even if you drag the launch cost slider all the way to $1/kg (by the way this is literally sci-fi, per ChatGPT air freight of semiconductors from Taiwan to Ohio costs $9/kg and ocean/train freight costs a bit under $1/kg for a reasonable shipment so good luck with $1/kg to LEO this century) it is still more than twice as expensive as terrestrial DCs.
But that calculator shows most of the cost is in the satellite. At $8 per watt (or about $2 million per satellite) the cost of orbital compute matches terrestrial.
That sounds absolutely possible. But in any event, we're now arguing a different thing.
The only thing I'm arguing is that cooling is a solved problem. I don't know if SpaceX will ever get the price down so that it is economical. But I'm convinced that there is no universe in which they hit their foreheads and say, "Oh no, we forgot about cooling!"
Note that this calculator is actually quite optimistic for orbital wrt. many things including cooling and effect on launch, as:
> No additional mass for liquid cooling loop infrastructure; likely needed but not included
> Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
In hardware and mfg. solvable vs. solved is a big difference. And I too believe that SpaceX's engineers know about radiator panels. But the more cynical interpretation is that whatever the SpaceX engineers think about the technical merits, they are not being asked for that. They are just being asked for a pretext that justifies the xAI acquisition. Elon is also discussing lunar satellite factories that launch the satellites via railgun. Now, is this physically impossible? No, that isn't physically impossible either and I will seriously defend the physical possibility of this. It's not going to happen though.
And you could spend all the engineering costs on building some seriously efficient terrestrial DCs, but somehow all these analyses start with "assume that launch and satellite technology advances manyfold and terrestrial DCs stagnate or become less efficient, then if you squint the two numbers get kinda close."
Certainly launch has to advance a lot for this to make sense. SpaceX is betting big on Starship getting close to $100/kg. But does satellite tech have to advance much at all to make this work? SpaceX has already successfully deployed one megaconstellation into orbit and it's extremely profitable. Isn't this just another Starlink with bigger solar panels and radiators?
Yes it has to advance a lot. In a DC all your supporting equipment has returns to scale and can be repaired if it breaks. If a GPU breaks, a sysadmin walks over to the offending rack and swaps the card. In space all that equipment serves just a few cards (this is more like orbital server racks) and it has to work in space (so instead of using an ~infinite heat sink like the Earth, you use radiators etc). We still don't exactly know what effect radiation in LEO would have on stock GPUs - IIRC the experiments to determine this started after Elon went all in on orbital DCs. If anything breaks, you have a flying brick.
This is why that calculator, even under extremely optimistic assumptions for orbital, and even if you assume launch is zero, still cannot make it competitive with terrestrial.
Doesn't Starlink already handle all that though, just with networking racks instead of GPU racks? What's so unique about GPUs compared to other computer equipment, besides the power budget?
Commercial GPUs already fail a lot and that's before you put them in LEO. Starlink is doing something that can't be accomplished anywhere else than space. If you could somehow have ground stations that can give wireless internet to every corner of the Earth you would much rather do that. Again, this is all physically possible, but the question is whether it's wise, whether it's saving money or if it's just a giant Rube Goldberg machine. If you assume Starlink satellite $/W then even if launch is zero, it costs twice as much as terrestrial using assumptions charitable to orbital.
Fair point about the failure rates. I wonder what causes that, given that there are no moving parts... if it's temperature fluctuations, maybe you could just run the GPU at 100% all the time to avoid that, given that the marginal cost of power for a satellite already in space is $0?
> If you assume Starlink satellite $/W
Why would you assume that, given that high power output is not a design goal of Starlink?
The calculator I've cited elsewhere uses https://chatgpt.com/share/69391474-4b24-8005-bb93-ebd4340c65.... The various starlink versions have approximately the same cost per watt across very different power levels. Much of the cost is going to be ~proportional to power - solar panels, heat rejection, power electronics, etc. Listen, if they could make it cheaper to deliver the same amount of power they would. Starlink is approximately all of SpaceX's business.
ETA: power is absolutely important for Starlink. SNR is very important for shannon capacity and satellite systems are often limited in this respect.
So ChatGPT decided to assume a constant $800/kg to estimate cost, and you're using that as evidence that cost/W doesn't decrease with scale?
Anyway, my point is that Starlink is not primarily designed to harvest as much solar power as possible the way data center sats are. I'm sure they're not making it inefficient on purpose, but what you're suggesting is like using the cost/W of a solar powered traffic camera to estimate the cost/W of a solar farm. Yes, they both use solar power, but they have entirely different design goals.
It's reasonable to 0th order to assume a ball of heat management and phased array antennae has a roughly constant cost per kg, yes. And as I said starlink absolutely wants to use as much power as they can, as communications from space are heavily limited by power.
FWIW, SpaceX is estimating their AI sats will have over double the W/kg of what that ChatGPT summary is estimating for Starlink. https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind Cost/kg is not disclosed, but I think it would be a mistake to assume there were no similar improvements there.
Okay so even assuming all of SpaceX's numbers, which is extremely optimistic, even if we're an angel's advocate and assume that they spend all this money on engineering and optimize their launch costs and their satellite costs and they don't hit any hiccups, and DCs on Earth stay pretty much the same and don't get any added efficiencies. Even then over every time period orbital is still more expensive. And it gets particularly punishing the longer you extend the analysis period as the satellites need to get replaced while the DCs don't spontaneously combust all their infra.
I don't think those numbers are optimistic, I suspect they've already designed the sat in CAD and that's what the calculation spat out; it's probably quite accurate. The physics of this sort of thing are quite well known and SpaceX already has experience with the type of satellite that will be needed. There's no need for them to rely on napkin math.
Cost is a different matter of course, but it seems incongruous to me that after being confronted with the fact that your power density assumptions were off by a factor of 2x you would continue to insist ChatGPT's weird assumptions about manufacturing costs scaling linearly with mass are accurate. As was already pointed out upthread, even if all the calculator's other assumptions are correct they can turn a profit if they get the per satellite cost (excluding the cost of the GPUs) below $2 million. I think the only big question mark here is launch cost.
It's a fundamental physics problem. You need to have huge radiating surfaces.
A 1GW datacenter with chips operating at 100C (which is probably doable) will need a radiator that has a surface of one square _kilometer_, and this is with all the favorable assumptions. Realistically you'll need about 2x of that.
If you want your DCs to be on a 1000km orbit (for reasonable ping times), you'll be able to _resolve_ these satellites with a naked eye!
The current plan is for 250 kW peak with 160 m^2 radiators. It will weigh about 4 tons so you can pack 25 on one flight of Starship.
Deploy 4,000 and you're at 1 GW. That's 160 launches.
BTW: SpaceX has already manufactured and launched 10,000 Starlink satellites and Falcon 9 launches about 150 times per year. None of this seems unworkable.
Can we solve the fertilizer price problem by hauling it with airplanes? Yes, we can! It's easy, just load the potash fertilizer into an airplane and unload it directly into the traincars. I even designed a neat conveyor belt system to speed up unloading!
Look at the numbers. 1kW of nuclear power capacity on Earth is around $2000, and that's 24/7 guaranteed power. So a 250kW cluster needs $500000 to cover its power demand with near 100% reliability and with some ongoing cost.
And if we're OK with some interruptions, then we can use solar+wind at around $100000 and with essentially no ongoing cost. If we assume the absolutely best projected launch cost of $100 per kg (vs the current one of ~$800), that's just 1 ton of material in space!
So you're off by 2-3 orders of magnitude in cost. And this kind of "it's unprofitable" is actually a fundamental issue.
Specifically, if SpaceX can get the price of a satellite down to $8 per watt (about $2 million USD) then it will compete with terrestrial.
I just don't understand how you can be so certain that they can't do that. I'm not certain that they can, but being certain that it's impossible seems completely evidence-free.
This calcualtor is bullshit (inflated terrestrial costs and underflated orbital costs). It doesn't pass the basic sniff test: $15B for 1GW of terrestrial power is more than enough to build AN ENTIRE 3GWe NUCLEAR POWER PLANT. From scratch. With 75 years of expected life.
So no, the calculations show that space is NOT feasible unless you want to do that for nefarious reasons: evading regulations, using AI for criminal enterprises, military use, that sort of thing.
Only these applications have the profit margin that even comes close to justifying it.
Not only that - it would be totally insane to launch something heavy & at the same time fragile from earth (under a lot of vibrations & heavy g-loading).
This is all a weird speedrun or race. If something we should be working on setting up resource mining from the Moon & asteroids, materials processing on the Lunar surface & in orbit, simple manufacturing in space, etc.
Instead some people think we can jump straight to a computronium Dyson swarm. :P
Now you've moved the goal posts. It's no longer "you can't cool stuff in space"; now it's "we can't launch a 10-gW compute cluster by the end of the year."
You don't need to send a multi-gigawatt satellite to space. You just need to launch a few thousand 250 kW satellites. That's not against the laws of physics.
> Please stop with this argument. This is one of the easiest problems to solve. Heat dissipation requires a radiator, which is just a dumb hunk of metal.
Convective radiation does not happen in space and this challenge is far more significant than your comment implies. Rather than "a dumb hunk of metal", radiators for spacecraft are often made of ceramics and carbon laminates with higher IR emissivity than convective radiators made of simple metals.
From the article you're commenting on:
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
ML Infrastructure comes with some pros (larger emissive footprint) and cons (exponentially larger TDP) compared to the concerns there, but if you aren't familiar with the challenges of heat dissipation in space, please give it a read.
There's also a pretty interesting pop-sci article on cooling the Webb telescope, since it needs to be especially cold for its purpose. Not directly related, but may give insight into both challenges and solutions as well as well. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/science-overview/scien...
Emissivity is one factor, but it is dwarfed by the T^4 term. Sure, maybe if you use exotic materials you can get from 0.9 to 0.95 emissivity, but why bother? Just run the radiators a little hotter.
The equation is:
A ~ (1000 P) / (2 e k T^4)
Where
A is the radiator area in square meters
P is the power in kilowatts
e is emissivity (usually 0.9)
k is the constant 5.67e-8
P and T are the dominating factors. Don't worry about emissivity.
Emissivity is an important factor here because as I said, and as the sources I linked for you to reference clearly stated convective radiation is not taking place in space.
Both Google and NASA are worried about this for a reason, if you think they are wrong, you should offer your assistance to them, rather than debating me.
Oh, sure yeah I agree with that. I was just making a point about the “big hunk of metal” comment and the fact that emissivity is important because the expense of radiator materials aren’t the problem - the surface area (and mass) of the radiator is.
And I agree with you on that. "Big hunk of metal" was too much of an exaggeration--SpaceX's design has liquid cooling, so I assume they have some channels or tubs running through the radiator, plus pumps, etc.
Never is a long time and you're relying on a bunch of unknowns like the cost of launch to orbit in 2030 and the future regulatory environment here on earth.
If you know all that out to 2040 then you must be a time traveler. Please try to fix our timeline rather than wasting time on HN.
and yet notice how the cooling video / section was the only one they didn't have a solution for... just saying "radiator" doesn't make sense - the radiator heats up too. it's how you get rid of the heat, not where you put it.
Huh? Radiators are known technology. They have them on ISS; they have them on every Starlink satellite. This isn't like warp drive or antigravity.
Moreover, you can easily calculate how big of a radiator you need for a given power level and temperature. You can use the Stefan–Boltzmann law:
A ~ (1000 P) / (2 e k T^4)
Where
A is the radiator area in square meters
P is the power in kilowatts
e is emissivity (usually 0.9)
k is the constant 5.67e-8
For a 1 kW test like Googles, you just need 1 square meter of radiators (assuming two-sided).
For SpaceX's 175 kW satellites, they will need ~170 square meters of radiators.
None of this is impossible or even difficult to calculate. That's why I think this is the laziest argument against space data centers. There are so many other more reasonable arguments (like whether they will be economically competitive) but people love to latch on to this one for some reason.
I think you misunderstand the argument of the people worrying about cooling. I don’t think most people think it’s literally physically impossible, they just think that this will be the thing that makes it economically uncompetitive. It’s a combined argument.
That may be the argument, but it's a dumb argument. Most of the cost is going to go to chips, solar panels, and launch. Radiators are probably one of the cheapest parts of the satellite: it's a hunk of metal with some pumps for liquid cooling.
People use that argument because it takes zero thought to make and significant effort to refute.
People use that argument because one of the chief bullshit arguments put forward by proponents of space based datacentres is "space is cold", when what they actually mean is "space lacks the possibility of using relatively efficient conductive cooling, so we need to expensively launch large amounts of additional mass to use radiative cooling, consider the extent to which we can shield our miles of active cooling loops from impact, and under current plans all of this mass must be replaced on the same cycles as the chips"
"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...
Again you’re missing the combined argument, the cooling will increase launch costs because your hunk of metal will increase the weight of the satellite.
To your last paragraph: when opposing something, it makes sense to use the laziest argument first. Only if that doesn't achieve your goals, would you move towards less lazy arguments. I forget what the term for this is, it's generally criticized ("you should just put your strongest arguments first").
sure, the physics is solved: we know how radiators work, and we can calculate the area needed, blah blah. but we haven't put sustained-AI-computer systems into space yet - heat is a genuine concern, and personally I'm curious if they are developing something beyond simple radiators. if a ~1m^2 radiator works, great. but if the current test can only run the TPUs for ~15-minute bursts before it has to stop and dump heat, this issue isn't exactly "solved" in my book.
I don't understand your argument. Sounds like you're saying, "In theory it should work, but what if there are space pixies that keep rebooting the TPUs? What do we do then?"
The 15-minute figure is what they currently designed for because they have mass constraints. If they wanted a different figure (like forever) they could do it with a larger radiator.
As you said, the physics is solved! We know exactly how much heat a surface radiates in space--there is literally an equation for it. We know how to cool stuff in space. Will the price be low enough to make a profit? That's the real question. But stop worrying about cooling in space.
No one thinks we don't know how to cool things in space. Everyone is saying that it's not feasible because you'd have to put too much mass up. Stop derailing the conversation please.
If you have something useful to contribute regarding how to actually reasonably put up enough mass to make this remotely a feasible idea then please contribute. We have the technology to prevent global warming, and doing that is far easier than this, and yet even that is apparently not feasible for humanity.
I honestly don't get that. The current SpaceX design is for a ~4 ton satellite with 160 m^2 radiator with peak 250 kW output. You can launch 25 of those satellites on a single Starship launch. 160 Starship launches and you get 4,000 satellites with peak 1 GW compute.
What's unfeasible about that? SpaceX has already launched 10,000 Starlink satellites. Falcon 9 launches 150 times per year.
I don't think that is the argument, or if so it's an odd one because it's just a fact right now. Instead, people are claiming that it will never be feasible from a purely physics standpoint, which is something debatable.
Saying it’s impossible isn’t debatable because it obviously is. What would stop you from a physics standpoint to just launch 100 ISS with Server racks in each? A few kW of installed power in space is already reality, it’s just really expensive.
If data centers in space end up being economically viable, then I don't see how anyone can catch SpaceX. They are ten years ahead in both launch capability and satellite manufacturing.
Chinese rockets companies are evolving at insane pace, including RLVs. A couple of big milestones have been achieved this year alone, like first stage landing.
Also Stoke Space, YC startup, is interesting. They could even beat SpaceX to fully reusable if SpaceX find the refuel it and send it up again thing challenging.
They have a different approach - rather than a ceramic heat shield they have a metal shield to be cooled by the liquid H2+O2 fuel. https://youtu.be/3V6lfs7xFJM?t=191
I certainly hope ‘economically viable’ includes properly priced externalities for e.g. side effects of burning hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium and other materials in the high atmosphere.
Fifteen years ago the argument against anthropogenic climate change often included a variation of "… but volcanoes spew a lot of gasses containing carbon, and wildfires pollute also …" while conveniently ignoring that human industrial emission are _in addition_ to what is already happening. The current rate of aluminium oxide and titanium oxide and such particles accumulating in the upper atmosphere is detrimental to the ozone layer. It's not good today, but manageable, the answer should be "let's make it more responsible and try to minimise the damage", the answer should never be "more pollution is okay since a little pollution didn't outright kill everything".
No western company, no. That's why I can only hope SpaceX can get thru more red tape faster, and future administrations don't try to slow them down.
Even while current administration is kind of positive towards them, they are still even now just having to wait for no good reason for a FAA go-ahead. These kinds of stalls don't really exist in China.
Its only cheaper to build them on the ground if you aren't factoring security concerns. No insurgents in space. Not every application needs this hardening, but you can imagine there are many applications that do.
It's odd to see this level of skepticism, honestly. Does one think the engineers at Google aren't thinking about these problems?
This is obviously a test, just like hundreds or thousands of tests in space before it. Can we run Earth-rated components at any scale in space? How will it fail in various ways, at what rate, and are the causes able to be mitigated?
"We" talk about moonbases and Mars colonies. Part of any extended presence in space will involve the presence of computational devices. They're figuring out how to make that work with modern hardware. That's my take, anyway.
That's the first news about data centers on space that seems reasonable. Acknowledges the challenges, don't make crazy promises or predictions, makes clear what was already tested and what is still unknown. Makes me actually root for them, for once.
I like the "moonshot research" framing, in particular, because it highlights that even negative results will be valuable, either as improvements for ground technology or as published data to inform other initiatives of what has already been tried and failed.
Providing GPS, communications, media, etc. in space so there is access anywhere in the world has a clear advantage. Here the only pros seem to be that it is potentially cheaper than a datacenter on earth because of solar and cooling. But I assume the environment impact is worse than having datacenters on earth. Launching lots of satellites uses lots of fuel and CO2 emissions. Building satellites and dealing with the end of life tech has much higher environmental impact than dealing with datacenters on earth, where you can do proper waste management and recycle materials. From the economic point of view, polluting the environment is currently free. I guess if the externalities would be part of the equation it would not be economically viable.
Maybe this project exists because the "early in the game" factor. It has worked well in the past for Google, OpenAI, etc. They used copyrighted content to train LLMs to sell AI. They indexed Yahoo directory and websites before robots.txt existed, once they have a dominant position they put robots.txt in Google results so new players can't use their content. And they are launching AI in Space before regulations and politics catch up.
the pro is being able to dodge the entrenched industrial-nimbyism in America.
we talked big game for a long time about bringing manufacturing back to the US, but the practicalities would likely have been impossible in our modern political climate
Listening to these leaders speak, this appears to be a major component. They're trying to pour trillions of investment into communities all over the world, and local communities are rejecting it. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to paint either side as the bad guy. However if they can't get approval to build more infrastructure on Earth, they going to build it in space. At least what is economical. SpaceX has already reduced the cost of space delivery by 90%. This has already made all kinds of new applications commercially viable. Every efficiency increase from now unlocks exponentially more use cases.
As a long time space and technology nerd, this is the coolest fucking time to be alive!
This is not intended as a product launch. I think this is a preemptive bet on a conjunction of the following happening in time for a future product launch:
1. Cost to launch / mass lowering due to technological advancements.
2. Mass / compute lowering due to technological advancements.
3. Compute hardware evolution stagnating to the pace, relative to compute payloads, where CapEx is amortized over longer duration.
4. Compute & energy hardware reliability improving so OpEx is lower, and remaining useful life predictably keeps hardware running over its designed lifetime.
(I work on #4).
A wishy-washy inequality (per time, factoring out launch cost from OpEx):
Presumably, any one of these could see a x100 improvement and make the whole equation in the green. But, I believe this is a low-earth-orbit-shot bet on the sum getting better.
Note: I did 1+failures to denote baseline cost (initial launch, nominal OpEx).
- Getting power there is a headache (unless Greenland allows microreactors, which is a political headache). Note: Iceland has geothermal, not really Greenland.
- You still do need staff, it's not cheap building a mini city for 200 maintenance worker, much less the 5,000+ construction crew, and you'll have to pay premium to get people to actually do it
There's no world where this makes sense. Let's take it issue by issue.
1. Hardware failures: If you know anything about data centers you know that servers fail all the time. I've seen estimates of AI DC servers that have a failure rate of about 9% annually. A terrestrial DC has hardware techs who get alerted to the failure, replace the bits with known good bits and then take the suspect bits for testing to either bin them or verify they're working. You have no option to economically do this in space;
2. Radiation: We have the atmosphere and a concrete box protecting ground-based servers from cosmic rays flipping bits as well as the potentially more problematic (in space) solar storms;
3. Power generation: solar is the only option and yes, orbital panels would be more efficient than ground based. But space-based solar solar tech is much more expensive than what we put here on Earth because it absorbs multiple wavelengths of light to generate electricity. The launch cost and weight savings overcome the high panel costs. But to generate power in the gigawatt range, you're talking about solar panel arrays far larger than anything we've ever deployed in space;
4. Cooling: this is a big one. The only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away into space and this is bound by physics. I'm sure people have done the maths on this but it's not going to be pretty;
5. Heating: the sun will be heating your vessel a lot of the time. You can shield it to some degree with solar panels but they too will radiate away heat in all directions, which will heat the things behind them. JWST uses several sophisticated layers of cooling to reach the low temperatures it needs to operate; and
6. Interconnectivity: these things are likely to be tens of kilometers apart in the very least. You're going to need terabit level networking to be useful for coordination and even then latency will be an issue. Laser dispersion will be an issue as well as the power and heat generated.
I honestly don't know what anyone is trying to achieve with any of this.
When reading old stories about rogue AIs they are often created locally on earth.
What do you do when you need to manually maintain server structure in space? Just the idea of a set of rogue autonomous data centers in space seems like an intriguing story idea.
Nice we have a document we can point at of someone doing a space data center project pointing out all the flaws and benefits without hallucinations.
Putting data centers in Antarctica or extreme north Canadian islands would also put you out of the way of molotov-throwing joe public. Even in space your not safe from the voting public as long as your companies directors are sitting on earth somewhere.
Whilst I agree that this seems wasteful and perhaps not economically viable , I am excited for the innovation possibilities that could come from this. The early efforts to get into space gave some really life changing technology - maybe this can help us better understand energy use, conservation or dissipation in ways that could help us with our down to earth devices. Phones? Charging devices?
"whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure. In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. Eventually, it could be possible to link together multiple constellations of satellites, allowing them to manage larger AI workloads while in orbit."
Yeah.. remember people being skeptical about reusable self-landing rockets, until SpaceX proved them wrong? I would not put much trust in resident skeptics.
"it's to ensure AI's profound benefits in key areas, from healthcare to scientific discovery, can reach everyone, far into the future."
No it isn't. That isn't true.
They know it is never going to be cost-effective, compared to building on the ground. People who know better are lying to the public about the feasibility of data centers in space.
It would easily raise the cost by an order of magnitude (or more) to launch a data center into space, compared to current AI data centers on the ground; it's the equivalent of building 100+ ISS space stations to house a Colossus in space. It costs even more to launch your materials if you want sun-synchronous orbit.
It's not just expensive to do at scale, it's impossibly expensive to do at scale. This is a science project, launching a few tomato plants into space to see what happens. Data centers in space are decades away (if ever).
I would believe that military deployments will happen; a couple of TPUs that can be deployed over conflict zones. Outrageously expensive, but no more so than the billions we blew up in Iran this year.
Let's assume everything gets smaller and cheaper. Vastly smaller and cheaper. So much so that it becomes feasible to launch a data center comparable to Colossus into space for the same price. You know what that means about the cost and size and efficiency on the ground? It means I can have a fucking TPU in my pocket and a round trip to space would be an insane waste of time.
There is no way to make the math for AI-in-space to make more sense than just making it work on the ground; any challenges one has with local politics are easier and cheaper to overcome than physics. The public may be stupid in large groups, but public opinion can be swayed, gravity cannot.
In short: This is either a marketing stunt, a bid for military funding, or both. It is absolutely not a project to put AI for "everyone" into space.
Why the space? We have plenty of deserts on the Earth, they are inhabited but still much friendlier than the space. What makes the space more attractive?
Every time I'm reading about the technical challenges of these kind of projects, it reminds me how amazing our brains are, doing what they do with only about 30W
The useful life of cutting edge AI server hardware will require constant rotation of equipment to potentially remain competitive with more accessible solutions.
Hardening of equipment for the environment. ECC isn't going to be enough. I would have to defer to experts about the best way to manage it, but it either means custom hardware, weight, or both.
Repairs are impossible. Hopefully a sat can degrade gracefully, but routine repairs on earth become significant outages/decreases in economic value of a sat over time.
Rocket launches have gotten much better, but are not perfect. Insurance is a thing. However, cost of equipment in a failed launch may be eye watering, rivaling a governmental military launch.
To give a datacenter in space constant exposure to sunlight, the orbit must be either very var away, or occasionally be on the other side of the earth from you. Either way, the latency is terrible. You can put them in a ring and only choose the one closest to you, but are you really going to keep moving your data from satellite to satellite? So, bad for interactive use, maybe OK for non-interactive use, if you can afford the 30 foot by 30 foot solar panel and a similar size radiator for an 8x B300. That will be about $15M for your $500K GPU set. Plus $7M for the launch at SpaceX public rates.
I think these are mostly for llms or long-term storage where they are mostly concerned about latency within the data center and not latency between you and the data center.
Presumably they get exactly the same amount of sunlight 100% of the time instead of a few hours peak on earth? I'd say 8x is in the right order of magnitude.
The distance from earth to the sun is 150 million kilometers and your orbit is probably only a few hundred kilometers up (and realistically it’s sun-synchronous and perpendicular to the earth-sun axis), so the distance change doesn’t really matter.
How is no one in the whole thread aware that the intention behind orbital datacenters is military? You want to process outputs of large space based sensors in space itself, and reduce latency (e.g to other space based assets) or increase goodput (to ground).
Either it's that weird "space is easier than getting land on earth"(it's not) or the same tortured arguments about heat dissipation, no one is going to run consumer scale compute with consumer scale economics in space ffs. And maintenance and cost does not matter when it comes to strategic military assets, they are a step function useful enough to warrant even a few monthly replacement.
Everyone else with strategic weapons and a space program e.g india china is launching one as well.
What no one seems to be asking is what privacy and legal laws still apply for a datacenter in orbit?
They're effectively outside the sovereignty of any country. Further, it would be extremely impractical for any government's law enforcement to raid the datacenter and confiscate the servers.
Maritime law applies to space. In the high seas, the country of registration (flag state) generally governs. As the vessel is elusive, raids would be held on corporate offices instead.
For those who doubt the AI apocalypse is possible, because "you can always pull the plug", our AI overlords provide a ready-made answer: the data center whose plug can't be pulled! Put a few nuclear warheads on board (we need our own weapon to answer the threat of Chinese super AIs, after all) and you're good to go.
From who? The crack addicts in space trying to steal copper?
The actual rack part is small, even if the solar panels and radiators are big. If this truly was super dangerous, ISS wouldn't be safe. And it's never hit mission-degrading issues due to micrometeoroids.
Intentional Kessler syndrome would be such an escalation that even Starshield would be wiped out then, that's quite low in the "def-cons" ...
In any case, this is mostly for peacetime / civilian usage. Obviously military datacenters are and will be as secure as possible. Remember ARPANET was foundational for the internet.
Earth will get bulldozed soon anyway to make room for that hyperspace bypass. The plans have been available in the local planning office for a while, but nobody knows about it because they're hidden in the basement and you have to go down there with a torch.
I think if those building the datacenters were more upfront about what they were building and didn't hide behind NDAs the permitting process wouldn't be so fraught.
You can't launch from the US without the federal government giving you permission. And SpaceX does not have (nor are they planning) any launch pads outside the US. [And because of ITAR, I'm not even sure they'd be allowed to build one.]
However, I do think avoiding local control (state/city permits) is a reason for this.
As long as the company has a HQ and owners that care about their quality of life, they don’t really gain any extra safety by moving their hardware to space compared to keeping it where they are based.
> Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure
It’s very confusing to have a project related to space called a moonshot project.
Haha, yes. I think Silicon Valley (the show ), made fun of the same thing. "Not so long ago, people called the idea of sending a man to the moon a moonshot"
The part I find wilder than cooling is the formation flying. If I remember their paper right, it's 81 satellites inside a 1 km radius, neighbours 100 to 200 m apart, because the optical links only get datacenter bandwidth over short distances. The ISS is about 110 m across, so that's satellites roughly an ISS-length apart, all doing 7.5 km/s
The video on cooling is quite vague, maybe on purpose to not give away proprietary technology. But I'm truly curious as to how they can dissipate the heat once they move it from TPUs into radiators.
As mentioned in the video in the void the only way they can remove heat from the radiator is via radiation, but that is extremely slow and ultimately the rate of heat generation in TPUs would be higher than the dissipation rate of the radiators and the whole thing would get heated up over time.
I wonder if a technique to pack crazy high amounts of heat in a small mass and just eject it in an orbit to the sun would be viable. Probably not, but the idea of a datacenter pooping its heat into little pellets is quite entertaining. Like Lila's pet from Futurama.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
Similarly to Starlink , which was hyped as a low codt alternative for marginalised people/areas and sucked in enormous subsidies to that end. While being more or less a proof of concept for a military command and control network , thats the same way this should be looked at.Especially with data centers being vulnerable on ground, coupled with the ability to reposition the space based units to be 'closer to the action' as it were.
So bottom line a proof of concept for DARPA funds and eventual inegration into the military command and control nodes.
> and sucked in enormous subsidies to that end.
Starlink didn't get any subsidies. There were reports in summer about them potentially getting 600 Mio (btw the broadband program is 40 billion heavy) and I can't find sources that SpaceX got any program founding yet.
> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.
If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
Feel free to name the subsidies SpaceX received.
(No, "payment to launch this satellite" != "subsidy".)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
You're correct that "we'll pay you to launch this satellite" isn't a subsidy. But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
Things like the EV tax credit also apply, considering Musk has leveraged his Tesla holdings to help SpaceX at times.
And to be clear: this was a very good use of public funds, whatever I think of Musk these days.
Exactly, in retrospect it's easy to confuse with a regular commercial transaction that happens to be with the government. But only because SpaceX was ultimately wildly successful with the Falcon 9/Dragon/Crew Dragon.
If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.
> But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
> By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk.
That is correct.
> Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized.
Yes.
> Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
"Boeing is subsidized" is not a controversial statement.
> On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload
Yes, this is why we do subsidies - they (potentially) pay off. We subsidize healthcare for poor people because it saves us money in the long run. We subsidize infrastructure because it helps the economy. We subsidize critical manufacturers for national security reasons.
How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
"A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
> How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world:
>the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it.
> You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world…
That he should be grateful for the taxpayers support? That government interventions can, at times, be highly successful?
Do you base every conversation on "what would the dumbest Redditor think"?
>Do you base every conversation on "what would the dumbest Redditor think"?
Sadly, the mentally reddited are too numerous and widespread—including on HN—to always blightely ignore.
And in retaliation, you pretend the meaning of "subsidy" is some deep unknowable thing instead of a pretty clear dictionary definition for a while?
No, I'm saying that when the Post puts out an article shouting about "$38 billion" going to Musk, many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers". What was your purpose in insta-citing that article, as opposed to pointing to the one NASA program for funding promising booster designs, complete with strict standards at various milestones, that helped fund (in addition to $100 million, essentially every cent of Musk's PayPal fortune) resulted in the Falcon 1 two decades ago?
I'll answer my own rhetorical question. Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago. If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote
>> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.
>If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
> many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers"
Maybe you're projecting your own beliefs about government subsidizing things a little on other people. The government made a risky bet; that's one of the important things governments exist for. Sometimes they pay off (SpaceX), sometimes they don't (Starliner).
Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
> What was your purpose in insta-citing that article…
It was the first reputable source that came up in Google? It gives several specifics that directly match the Wikipedia definition of a subsidy?
> because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago
Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
> If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
I can be a big SpaceX fan and still wish the man running it hadn't gotten brainworms.
> And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote…
Why would I deny that? I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
>Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
mfw
>I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
And here you were questioning my need to speak to the mentally reddited.
Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield. (And before you say it, Starlink was turned down for the FCC rural subsidy.)
>Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
As I said,
>Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
> Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield.
Again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
"Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
Tesla received low-interest loans (and tax credits for their customers). SpaceX was given funds (that'll be "direct government expenditures") to develop the Falcon 9, Cargo Dragon, and Crew Dragon (and now the lunar lander). Those funds were not conditional on completion of the program (as we've seen with Starliner); they were R&D funding in milestones in hopes of a functional spacecraft at the end.
> with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course
Again with the strawmen.
"You got subsidies" and "you had nothing to do with the success" are wildly different statements. You can be both an extremely hard worker and supergenius and still need government support for your very expensive good idea.
> Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
No, the opposite. Falcon 1 is the single least subsidized part of it. It was the one big bit Musk completely self-funded.
They demonstrated an ability to get to orbit (after almost going bankrupt), which gave NASA the confidence to subsidize them in a larger project.
Please, read, then react to it.
Did Starlink really receive enormous subsidies? IIRC it was kicked out of the federal program in the US due to lobbying from others.
Starlink was granted $880m from the FCC, but later defaulted on conditions, so didn't get most of the money.
Starshield, on the other hand, has been directly funded by the US government to the tune of ~$9b in reported funding (much of it NRO or Space Force classified). It has ~250 satellites up as of now.
But presumably they have delivered (or will deliver) the services requested. It's not a subsidy if it's just a government agency buying something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
> A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services.
SpaceX benefited from the italicized items in this definition.
less lobbying, more plain old punishing of political enemies
“Our virtuous lobbying, their heinous punishing of political enemies”?
I dunno, won't a satellite be _more_ vulnerable in space? There is not anti-missile tech in space.
I suppose it is about being out of reach of cheap drones?
icbms and hypersonics exist, theres no defense against the top end anywhere atm.
if you're in a war where people are shooting your satellites out of the sky you're past the point where defenses matter. theres no grey war in space like russia hiring people to blow up stuff in europe and very few states could take out multiple satellites in space.
beyond that if we ever did get to that point, you could develop anti missile tech in space, you effectively have the high ground sitting at the top of the gravity well.
Oh no! Our PeaceSat went haywire and bumped into your WarSat! Sorry dude, let's swap insurance.
Had a good laugh thanks. Indeed area of denial, increased maneuvering etc. can all be used as attacks. Space is big, but stuff moves fast.
I'm reasonably sure there are more states that could destroy a satellite than hit infrastructure on US soil. And if you try to use an ICBM to hit the US then you risk getting nuked.
> people are shooting your satellites out of the sky
If space powers have any sense at all they'll develop a fleet of satellites that deploy small limpet craft that attach to the enemies' satellites and drag them toward earth.
Literal shooting sounds like mutually assured satellite destruction.
This. Orbital debris are an area denial attack, and since there's only one shared planetary orbit (in aggregate), debris-creating weapons are more like biological weapons, poison gas, and tactical nuclear weapons. Even if you win, you've impeded yourself.
The internationally hoped for outcome should be that China continues scaling their orbital use, to the point where it becomes mutually advantageous to sign a treaty with the US banning orbital debris-creating weapons (and ideally imposing mutually-supported consequences on non-signatories who breach the agreement).
Then everyone would be left with more sane options of disabling-only (microwave, laser, targeted EMP, etc).
It's really about bandwidth and availability - US satcom systems were really struggling, and the only truly global (Iridium) was quite low bandwidth. Starlink is essentially "Iridium with newer tech and mass production" and IIRC DoD through various fronts put quite a lot of early financing to make it a thing, even if later the networks were supposedly disaggregated (would make sense to start building separate one once PoC was proven)
DoD financing for Starlink was a long term game to create pLEO sensing capabilities: initially GMTI, then AMTI.
Both of which give the US military more persistent (revisit delay near zero because number of assets) and survivable (number of assets + LEO debris characteristics + cattle vs pets) ISTAR.
And an advantage in persistent ISTAR is a key enabler of the way the US military is aiming to fight a peer state adversary.
I'd be fascinated to dig into the contracts, but at 10,000' it's DoD offloading the bulk of the development cost onto NASA and the public (which in both cases, still gets good value for money).
That's a lot of acronyms. You might be saying something interesting, but no one outside of that particular area of expertise will understand it.
Department of defense. Persistent low earth orbit. Ground moving target indicator. Air moving target indicator. Low earth orbit. Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. National aeronautics and space administration
Looked back on this and correction: proliferated Low Earth Orbit
Newer acronym, but apparently en vogue with the "How do we maintain a critical military space capability against someone who can shoot down exquisite satellites?" crowd.
Yeah similar to the AWS data cneter getting trashed in UAE by cheap drones and short range missiles. I think only 3 states have the capabilities necessary to knock out satellites , and one or two others with latent potential. For the rest of the planet its basically untouchable unless theres more wisespread proliferation in missile tech.
The thing with starlink is that there are a lot of them. It is not a single satellite to take out it is a bunch.
> low codt alternative for marginalised people/areas
Yes, but while I do not see the first, I can clearly see the latter :)
what proportion of use for starlink do you think is military vs rural internet consumers?
Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.
If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.
Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.
You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
> Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.
All flavors of Govt (authoritarian/democratic) are bending over backwards to build new DCs.
In Ulanqab, China buildout of data centers 1000x size of Colossus: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2099319829589295197
India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...
Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.
just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
It actually abuts Hebei which puts it in striking distance of Beijing. I wonder about water though, it’s just grassland so there can’t be much to spare. It would be like building a data center in eastern Oregon.
I thought water is for cooling. They dont need it if its naturally cooled.
Or use closed-loop cooling.
They would need closed loop cooling for the months that weren’t cold enough, well, they would probably need it anyways just that it would be more efficient in the long bitter winter. The extra clean energy from wind and solar might make that reasonable though.
The enormous water usage values are generally about powerplants providing the power, and even the better reports on that include water use by hydroelectric plants - which makes sense in context of the report, but that context nor sense isn't understood by journalists and hype-men quoting just "trillions of gallons a year, more than X cities"
DCs just don’t use that much water.
> one democratic govt
Honestly, India might be more democratic than China, but the current govt is known for it's authoritarian bent [1] and crony capitalism [2] in particular.
While governments of all types rushed to embrace AI data centers, perhaps driven by fears of being left out, the pushback against data centers seems to be universal. The difference is, countries with less authoritarian govenrments are seeing those pushbacks be generally more successful.
[1] The Chief Election Commissioner was recently caught manipulating voter rolls over the written objections of the other two election commissioners. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgw68yjg29o
[2] The transport minister came under flak after pushing a rushed transition to higher ethanol fuel blends. It transpired that his sons just happened to have set up ethanol factories just before the policy was announced and their net worth went up by 5000%. https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/originals/news/whye20-fuel-put...
> You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.
Everyone knows how the current administration got to power: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-e...
Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.
If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth: https://systemsthinkingcollection.substack.com/p/space-datac...
People believe all kinds of fiction and garbage, like going to Mars. (Why Terraform Mars When We Can Fix The Earth? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8mhib97--n4)
The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...
This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
Have you considered that the 'NIMBY' problem here might be about permits and local resource usage rather than terrorism, which makes about no sense?
Launch requires permits too, you just don't get to jurisdiction shop...
When I looked it up earlier, it seemed to me that to scale this up we would require larger rockets than Starship if we cannot launch hundreds of times per day.
Admittedly I know very little about spaceships
Permits are not costing as much as a space launch and all the extra costs associated with that environment.
If it's too expensive to outsource to another country, it's definitely too expensive to put in space instead.
Cost is one thing, the other is whether it will be permitted at all.
Then there's the power grid problem.
I understand expanding the grid takes a long time, thus the gas turbines. Which I understand are also supply-constrained, and environmentalists are not happy either.
I'm no scientist or financial analyst, but I could imagine that the space thing would be viable especially in a scenario where AI capabilities continue to grow.
If AI really does replace not only most knowledge work but also other labor via robotics, and this requires enormous compute, we are going to want to scale this up at a much faster rate.
Preferably without covering a tenth of the planet with gas generators.
Are we, though? Going to want to scale this up, I mean.
Unless economic systems around the world change significantly very soon, this AI replacement you so cavalierly mention would cause significant portion of human population to reach poverty, causing much unrest and mass deaths.
No one wants mass poverty, unrest, and deaths.
I don't buy into demonizing the rich, including Altman, Amodei, Musk and co.
I am not concerned that this will be the outcome of the productivity surge.
We will have enough for everyone, and ensuring comfortable living standards for the general population is going to be in the interest of those in power, even if you assume very selfish motivations.
I'd also like to point out that both Anthropic and OpenAI created frameworks to monitor labor market impact and propose responses.
I'm curious why a space data center has to orbit Earth. Why not a solar orbit? Batched work can be done anywhere if you can tolerate the latency.
It can go further if you want it to be even more expensive, sure.
If you’re putting it in space you don’t care about the cost
Send it to Titan and cool it in the methane lakes
There are significant differences in feasibility and cost between putting something in low Earth orbit (or even very low orbit like Starlink) and putting it in any other orbit around anything else - like easily 2-5x depending on where you're going to put it. I'll leave it to the Kerbal Space Program veterans to explain the mechanics that also make it much more difficult to actually launch and deploy successfully unless you're happy with just having the DC arbitrarily orbit around the sun (and drift year-by-year).
Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.
Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.
Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.
But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.
TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.
You based all your objections on a faulty premise. Orbital data centers are all designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites, not one monolithic satellite.
I was responding to the suggestion to put them further away than low Earth orbit. Using "hundreds or thousands of satellites" would literally only make every problem I described worse, not easier, so I assume you missed that part and want to argue the merits of running what's essentially a botnet in low Earth orbit and calling that a "data center". Fine by me although I'm not sure why you decided to respond to me in particular.
You can run compute in low Earth orbit but compute runs hot. We're not talking 500 GPUs a pop but even for an 8 GPU node you need some 40 m^2 surface just for thermal dissipation. I assume by "distributed" you also imply that they're not going to be in sunlight 24/7 and operate more like Starlink so they'll need batteries to keep running for a third or so of their lifetime.
Low Earth orbit also means you don't have to worry about radiation frying your off-the-shelf hardware without the heavy shielding but you'll still have lots of random bit flipping to deal with and storage is largely going to be unreliable for anything but short-term, especially on SSDs.
Distributed also means you replace local speeds with network speeds - Google was only able to achieve feasible "data center" data rates by having satellites fly within less than a kilometer of each other (i.e. densely packed in space terms, no longer really "distributed" in terms of proximity) and even that had orders of magnitudes worse latency (obviously) than you'd have in a data center pod (though not quite as bad as the multi-millisecond latency you'd have at current Starlink level distances).
"Orbital data centers", even if operated as fleets of disposable low-performance pods instead of singular "out of reach" disposable mini DCs, are worse than real data centers on every single metric: they're slower, more expensive, unrepairable, degrade more rapidly and require more redundancy to compensate for random errors.
There are pretty much just three use cases:
- Providing space-based processing for space-based data collection to reduce the amount of data that needs be sent to ground (realistically speaking in the current climate this pretty much only describes surveillance).
- Avoiding regulatory oversight, permit processes and most risks (e.g. earthquakes, missile strikes, protests, sabotage) associated with building and operating a real data center.
- Avoiding energy price increases that might make operating a real data center more expensive compared to the fixed cost of continuing to operate an already launched satellite.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have pointed this out but one of the biggest factors in the premises that would make this entire idea somewhat economically viable (assuming energy prices increase in ways that affect data centers without also massovely affecting the supply chain for launching things into space) is Musk's claim that they not only can make the upper stages reusable and recover them but also that inspecting, refurbishing and reusing them will be considerably cheaper than replacing them. If they can't make launches significantly cheaper still (not that they aren't already ridiculously cheap all things considered), using a fleet "designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites" would be economically unviable compared to just stuffing a single satellite to the brim (especially if you can avoid the battery).
But then the single advantage becomes "it's in space" and that is really only interesting for compute running on data already collected in space - and if that is a problem big enough to be able to sustain an entire business model justifying SpaceX's valuation... well, let's just say that would be the kind of world where if it were a movie the major plot point would be the destruction of that company or defeating the regime that enables it.
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> b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
This so much. Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force. On the other hand, destroying a rocket on its launchpad just take one FPV drone.
> Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force.
Leaving aside the DCs already destroyed in the Iran totally not a War by an enemy that can be easily crushed at any moment ...
DCs in mainland US aren't well defended - a pattern of shrapnel heads landed by a mobile mortar or two with a 2 km radius would render most in need of some upkeep.
Sure, but in my view any organized actor with military hardware in their hands count as a “very strong force” when compared to the average Joe with a Molotov cocktail. And Iran, as a state actor with ballistic capabilities is obviously one as well.
A couple of rednecks in a pickup with a mortar is far from "a very strong force"; consider how you would upgrade their description if they additionally had three helicopters, now describe them if additionally their numbers doubled, now throw in a couple of tanks.
When you start describing rabble level opposition that high you run out of ceiling very quickly.
The US is filled with ex service personal who can whip together a mortar, as "military hardware" goes it's on par with what civilian firework techs have access to and can build in a garden shed, it's home grown resistance level guerilla tech.
If there's growing ground swell opposition to US data centres then the same Y'All-Qaeda militia plotting against dams and power substations will feel empowered to have a shot at a DC or too.
If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting, you're very far from “one angry dude throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's DC” that was the original point.
I don't think the US have the social fabric needed for an insurgency to develop on though.
> If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting
Who said anything about civil war?
The US has many splinter loon groups who blow up buildings and like to attack infrastructure (see: US news). This has happened over the past decades with no civil war.
Data centres are soft targets - softer than banks. Do you remember when armed bank robberies were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s? Not a time of civil war, just a time when a couple of people took control of buildings while heavily armed. Such a small group with fragmentation grenades can easily render a data centre unfit for use for several months with relative ease and fast ingress and egress.
Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Politically motivated armed attacks are a totally different thing.
Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center. If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
> Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Really? Maybe read up some more, OC scale mafia groups weren't doing many of the bank raids of the US 1970s / 1980s - in any case these are still well below my bar on what constitutes a "very strong force".
> Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center.
You think wrong.
> If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
Exactly right, or rather several drums of farm grade fertiliser, diesel, ball bearings, a stolen truck, and somebody (or two) prepared to do a ram raid. Groomed idealogues or addicts with debt have all been used for such things.
Or, as already mentioned, drive parallel and mortar the centre from one end to the other, achievable by small discontent militia types (who abound in the US).
Serious question time: Are you honestly unaware of Timothy McVeigh? Would you describe him as "a very strong force"?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
I think you are dramatically overestimating it.
It's one thing to vandalize some cameras or a driverless car in your neighborhood.
Traveling to a large, potentially secured facility to commit terrorism is on another level.
It being inside a building it is also much more difficult to damage and the consequences would be far greater.
I'd think one would need strong motivations for such actions.
A protest seems much more realistic, but I did not even hear of protests at data centers yet, only a small one at OpenAI headquarters.
and "thermal radiation"
"But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
*sigh*
"We know how to vent heat" and "we know how to vent enough heat that this becomes economical" are two different things. Can we deploy computers in space? Absolutely. Can we deploy a shitload of computers in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
That's the point I'm making.
> Can we deploy a shitload of computers
That's the "is it economical?" question, and to spoil the answer, "with the way launch prices have been dropping in last few years, yes".
(Also the larger question of "relative to datacenters on the ground" is answered by "yes, if you want clean power for it" - turns out moving compute up is more economical than beaming power from space, and costs down here are becoming dominated by land price anyway.)
> in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
"Extremely compute intensive tasks" is just elaborate and overspecific way of saying "requires N KW of power".
There is nothing magical about compute here, power is power - it doesn't matter whether you spend it on ML, or collecting photons and radioing them back to Earth, or broadcasting a high-precision clock. You need some N KW to run = you need to collect that much, and you need to reject that much of it as heat[0].
--
[0] - That + whatever extra heat you absorb from the Sun.
The real point is power limitations, putting stuff in space in the right orbit lets you turn solar power into reliable base load.
The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.
I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.
I do not presume that. Plenty of projects that happen don't actually make economic sense.
That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.
Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.
But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol
Or it's just a media project to further increase the hype around the topic, or to show how "future proof" google is.
I guess no one dares calling out that the emperor is naked.
I don’t think they’re getting enough press on this to justify this level of investment. But I could definitely be wrong.
There are lots of motivations other than "this could be a profitable project". Something can be completely insane in a monetary way while not being insane in other ways. A pilot project being built is pretty weak evidence of larger practicality.
Yeah, fair. We’ll see!
The problem with space is that you need to radiate all that waste heat.
Easy enough to do with a long tall stalactite shaped satelite.
Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally
No it's also all the minor problems: lubricants don't flow the same, grease dries out on bearings, rocket launches shake the hell out of their payloads, the thermal differentials across a structure are enormous, vibration doesn't damp into the earth it just rings through the structure till it's lost as heat.
All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.
And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).
Sure. But radiating the heat isn’t a problem.
Starlink downlink stations aren’t
https://www.reuters.com/world/poland-suspects-fire-starlink-...
That was probably more Igor Sleeperagentovich than Joe Public, but yeah...
It's much easier for Russia to destroy data centers in orbit.
Easier maybe, but if they want to keep up some degree of plausible deniability over who did it, it becomes harder.
> It's much easier for Russia to destroy data centers in orbit.
Nope. Depending on the number of satellites in the constellation, it could be very hard or impossible. Russia has only so many orbital-class interceptors.
And after the first few Kessler provides far more
You may want to read up on Kessler syndrome more if you think a few anti satellite hits would start it, or that it would be quick. (Hint: the original paper postulates decades.)
Sure, but Kessler is really bad at telling friend from foe...
I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually the motivation, because why the fuck else would you launch computers all the way into space?
Access to unlimited almost free energy is the main point. Other than that you don't need to deal with local politics. Other than that it can actually be a faster round trip (if the satellite combines both connectivity to/from Earth and compute) if you don't have a local datacenter.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
or just a really sturdy fence, and guard posts with guns. That's cheaper than space, and infinitely easier too.
Yeah, but guys with guns just doesn't really work for companies that want to remove the human element at every turn.
"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.
They don't expect to need the human element for very long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3m4z9CoXEY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxCZmDTWros
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pgIWMXxaT0
You meant to say "people" not "companies".
People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.
The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.
It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.
EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.
Container ships getting rob by pirates all the times.
So unless those pirates have their own space program, it's pretty safe up there.
Container ships on popular routes. But they can be sent out to the middle of nowhere and they would be pretty safe I assume. Also, you may be able to just sink the datacenter's core part and only tether a few solar panels to it (or go nuclear). That way the target is minuscule, you get free cooling and even state-level attacks will have a hard time finding/damaging your data center.
Wouldn't that come with the vulnerability of data cables?
They appear to be trivially damaged by ships "accidentally" dragging their anchor.
They can also use satellite internet, it won't be slower than.. satellite internet.
[Citation needed]
Where does this happen, besides the Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast?
Singapore strait
There's a lot of sci-fi about the wealthy bringing on an apocalypse so they can rule the world that comes out of it. Two examples on TV now are Fallout (from the video games, obviously) and Silo.
One thing that gives me some small level of comfort is that the billionaires who have the means to make that sort of thing happen don't want to live in bunkers or a radioactive wasteland afterwards. They have it pretty good on Earth as it is now. So there's only so bad things can get (I hope).
To your point, it does feel like we are bouldering towards major disruption, even the unravelling of the fabric of society, thanks to worsening inequality as well as the impacts of AI. In the coming decades we may well have a billion climate refugees. We may have large swathes of the population who have no productive outlet in a world that still requires you to have a job to live. And that could go south very, very quickly.
So I guess my point is that if things get so bad you need to put your AI DC in space to avoid the unwashed masses burning it down, I suspect we'll have far bigger problems long before that becomes an issue.
You assume billionaires and politicians are all-powerful and that they congregate in a secret cabal voting on where to take civilization next. No they live in fear of what other powerful people might do and their reactions to what is perceived risk can really f up everything. Even the most powerful autocrats in the world have to deal with other countries.
Framing it as some Illumianti-like dark room cabal is the wrong way to think about it.
Look at our present woes in the Middle East. We have two nuclear powers who are dragging the world towards economic collapse. I believe that before we reach that economic doomsday scenario or anyone seriously considers deploying nuclear weapons, the money behind those powers will oust those who try to push us past the brink.
To this point, I believe there's a very real possibility that Trump gets 25A'ed next year, meaning the 25th Amendment is invoked to remove him from office.
Putting data centers in Antarctica or extreme north Canadian islands would also put you out of the way of molotov-throwing joe public. Even in space your not safe from the voting public as long as your companies directors are sitting on earth somewhere.
Yeah, but those places don’t have 24/7 solar energy
google: orbit
it does not see the sun half of the time
polar orbits don't come to the rescue, they are quite busy already
Sun-synchronous orbit gets sunlight ~100% of the time.
From TFA:
> In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth.
That's obviously a reference to sun-synchronous orbit. You don't get 8 times more solar power in a low inclination orbit.
i already countered that argument, but to spell it out: sun synchronous orbits which see the sun all the time are a 1d manifold (approximately) and quite busy already, so they won't come to the rescue.
My point is that SSO isn't "coming to the rescue", it's literally the entire premise of the idea (greater availability of solar power there vs anywhere on earth). I don't buy "there's no more room" as an argument when we're talking about space, even in a relatively crowded set of orbits like SSO.
Maybe out of reach for Joe Public, but a clear identified target for states.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-confirms-weapons-in-space-ch...
I was thinking more regulation rather than molotovs.
Doesn't the data or whatever have to be received on earth? Can Joe Public do some (light) arson on that?
Russia has (likely) done that already in Poland. But with a constellation using laser interlinks and having multiple ground stations across the world, it becomes a difficult logistical problem.
Satellite phones and Starlink dishes suggest that the data links can cheap, ruggedized, small, distributed, etc.
They're also not controlled by pesky local regulators who are worried about losing elections. By putting them in space it becomes a federal/national defense project, and those regulators are either out of work or compromised or complicit.
I'm going to be fascinated to see how the regulatory arbitrage shakes out long term. What legal provinance applies to infra in space? Does GDPR apply? Can you even enforce GDPR? And you have line of site to users who could connect to it directly, bypassing government-regulated backbones.
GDPR applies regardless of where the data center is located because it applies based on where the user currently resides. Similarly, US laws (including those enabling warrantless surveillance) apply regardless of where the data center is located as long as the owner/customer/controller lives or is based or registered in (or is a subsidiary of an entity that is based or registered in) the US - or if the US decides it has jurisdiction until proven otherwise (cf. Maduro).
You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.
You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.
But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.
There are cheaper alternatives to that. In soace you have this guy called radiation environment that will fry your TPUs pretty fast.
A little company named SpaceX currently has over 10,000 working satellites in orbit using commercial chips in that “radiation environment”.
And how are they doing? Is the rate of failure sustainable? Is the future rate of failure of 10k fleet with some years on them?
If people have no jobs and no money they will build rockets and blow those things up.
So, barely no benefit?
Good thing Joe Public wouldn’t then decide to interfere with launches.
I dunno, considering how various insurgent groups manage to make some reasonably impressive rocketry, I have to believe that in a few years with AI assistance (abliterate all the things) knocking a LEO satellite out of orbit won't be that much harder than sabotaging an electrical substation.
We're talking about an exceptionally vulnerable target with a perfectly predictable path of travel here. And it's constantly emitting lots of RF making it easy to track. You just have to get near it and explode with shrapnel.
Totally illegal, of course. But it will be within the reach of millions of people if they want to do it.
I don't think "just move to space bro" is going to stop the pitchfork-mob.
I think the failures of most rocket startups to launch even with billions of dollars and thousands of real engineers shows how unlikely this is.
And say you do build an orbital class rocket and manage to launch it without anyone noticing before you do - how many of e.g. Starlink’s 11,000 satellites will you be able to damage? What real impact will that have on Starlink?
They're trying to do something vastly more difficult: get a payload into orbit without damaging it.
It's much easier to wreck shit than transport it safely.
You still need hundreds of tonnes of rocket fuel no matter what, though.
You don’t have to intercept the satellites in orbit, they fall back to earth in a few years on their own. What SpaceX et al need to defend against is attacks while they are still on the ground or seconds after launch. Next round of investment will put the factories on the moon (only then will we see calls from the general public to Blow Up the Moon)
Back of the napkin math says a bare minimum of ~2000kg of solid fuel in three stages to “get to” GEO using a 3-stage rocket, to deliver 1kg of “something.” You’d need a gravity assist highly elliptical orbit which is a touch harder to pull off (but probably not harder than getting 2000kg of ammonium perchlorate). Plus building the actual rocket, guidance computer, etc.
Not trivial but not impossible. If you’ve got a few hundred million people with nothing better to do, I’m sure a few dozen/hundred could pull it off.
I always thought it’d be some kind of railgun. A 1 kg slug would take out just about any satellite.
You ain't hitting anything over that distance without guidance, I'm fairly sure.
If you have a vacuum-filled gun barrel extending out of the atmosphere.
These satellites are way lower than GEO orbit. They're LEO.
especially if a good chunk of them are out of work mathematicians and physicists due to ai
Polluting LEO with debris is not the way to solve the problem of goods distribution. But, sure, there will be morons who consider it.
People who could do it successfully would hardy be considered morons. That would be a genius engineer.
The general attitude in this thread against reasonable people not wanting unsustainable megaliths that produce horrible amounts of noise, and are driving up electricity prices, in their communities without any input from said community is astonishing.
HN has really gone full AI derangement syndrome (it runs both directions).
The majority will not do it successfully. Rocket science is notoriously hard. Hopefully, there will be no incentives to go to such lengths.
Sending unguided rockets in the general direction of the enemy with 25% failure rate doesn't scale well to a 3-stage precision guided delivery vehicle.
That sounds way too categorical.
It's not like people actually need satellites. We already have ground-based communication in the form of mobile phone networks etc., so I don't think the harm of making LEO unusable would be very great.
I don't see why I shouldn't call people who choose wrong dangerous tools for the task morons.
I suggest talking to people in Ukraine or Africa or even rural US or Europe before you so blithely take away their access to healthcare, education and communication.
Wait until someone figures out how to get AI to tutor them making ballistic rockets.
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There is no evidence that AI will increase unemployment.
This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
Taking away work was exactly the premise it was sold under.
The promise is that it'll make producing goods and services more efficient, like just about every other invention in human history. As always, that does put some people out of work in the short term, but it doesn't increase unemployment over the long term, and it makes all of society richer, not just the few who invented it.
> we receive universal basic income
Well, this part ain't coming without a revolution.
You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
Real basic income will be a lot less like Star Trek and a lot more like The Expanse.
Also, revolutions are rarely ever started by the lower class. They're always started by the middle tier of society, enraging those helpful idiots lower than them to attack those above them. They end up with many dead and many suffering. Those who cry out for revolution have never seen the horrors of war.
> “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
-William T. Sherman
> You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
That will never happen and capitalism is pretty creative in creating artificial scarcities.
You are far too naive if you think there is a non-bloody way to basically remove the wall between the classes, and that those in power will not try to do everything they can to keep their wealth and "higher lifestyle".
The evidence I've seen suggests that the most common source of scarcity is restrictions on trade, like taxation.
"What if we had taxed the internet?
"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."
Incredible stats from @JaredWalczak"
https://x.com/senatorshoshana/status/2095980044657021352?s=2...
>This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.
Sam Altman has been promising utopia (and talking about UBI) ever since he's been involved with OpenAI.
I can tell you that almost every single enthusiastic proponent of the technology I've ever spoken to has pretty much guaranteed this is where it takes us... But correct, its naïve as hell.
And people fattened up these companies with their own money :DDD. And now all they do is pouring excrement on the populace.
AI being able to work for us does not mean that AI reduces employment. Every form of automation does work for us. But there is no limit to how much work can be done. And there are things that humans uniquely do that AI will never be able to do because we will never want to create AI as dangerous as human intelligence, but those same traits that make human intelligence dangerous also provide it with unique value in many domains.
> This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for!
Pretty sure all it's being promoted for is that it will make ~10 people richer than any human being in history.
We are the Horse from Animal Farm.
You must be trolling at this point.
Whenever I hear about this I can't help but be reminded of the Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer, where a hugely-expensive commercial project was actually part of a secret CIA initiative to recover a Soviet submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
I'm not sure that's truly the case here, but it does seem like the tech Project Suncatcher is working on has at least some overlap with requirements for military SIGINT and in-orbit imagery processing.
Why would the CIA need Google's cover for any of that? The Feds have been flying spy satellites since the 1950s and there's plenty of classified satellite launches.
Because anybody near-peer to the US at this point has the capability to shoot down satellites, and anything launched on a classified satellite launch is a prime target.
A foreign nation shooting down a US satellite would be an act of war, regardless of whether it's a Google or CIA satellite.
The US has been prepping for a showdown with China over Taiwan for quite a while now. It's the primary focus of US military strategy, and considering a when, not if. When we're sinking their ships (and them ours), shooting down satellites won't even register as an escalation.
but 'accidentally' bumping it with space debris would be an 'accident'.
Well, then American will "accidentally" shoot down their satellites. Nobody wants any of that.
Be sure to ask your favorite AI assistant about the time the U.S. "accidentally" bombed a Chinese embassy [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
Yeah, no proof, of course (these are spies, at the end of the day . . . like with the Epstein stuff any written records have already been shot into the Sun), but that is a very evocative theory. It explains things better than anything else, given how this whole rigamarole seems to run afoul of some very basic math.
There's a case to be made that a substantial part of the mobile/social web revolution of the Aughties was at least in part propelled by the exploding budget of the security state post-9/11. LifeLog, In-Q-Tel, a bucket of other programs that have straight-line-relationships with the various Web 2.0 shenanigans. The CIA point man for these operations are recognizable today as some of the new generation of American semi-governmental oligarchs.
This last year I read that the early Stingrays only worked because they were engineered in from the IMSI standards - it was backdoored at the spec level, not the design level, not the manufacturing level.
When you step back a moment it makes sense. Who's funding a wireless information infrastructure to every American on the continent, not to mention a sea change in mobile computing manufacturing and development. Different tooling, different design systems, different everything, massive scale . . . what, paid for with advertising? Are you saying Mad Men is paying for all this? That seemed and seems . . . unlikely.
While a bit tin foil hat-y, this is an interesting (conspiracy) theory, even while space datacenters aren't as impractical as some people try to make them to be.
Some people, or physics?
Some people, claiming to be the authority on laws of physics. While people actually doing this are obviously more credentialed and talented than said internet fools.
It's getting quite tiresome.
Stefan-Boltzmann law considered conspiracy?
Don't you think it's a _bit_ ignorant thinking the engineers at now several companies known for their genius didn't think of it? There's a meme for this kind of armchair drive-by commenting.
And the preliminary design shapes aren't unknown. They just have huge ass solar panels and radiators. Plenty of space in ... space.
Literally no one is saying it’s impossible. You claimed it’s not impractical, which is totally different. And yes, as of now, and likely for years to come, launching huge ass panels and radiators into space for data centers is going to be economically impractical, as compared with building the same amount of capacity on earth.
And why haven’t these genius engineers delivered on basically any of Musk’s promises on time? Or at all, in many cases?
>Literally no one is saying it’s impossible
You have the entirely wrong impression of people here. TONS of people are saying exactly that, and trying to disqualify the whole debate.
>likely for years to come
Starship is putting its first business payload to orbit in two days. The craft represents making mass to orbit magnitude(s) cheaper. Read the text on your side mirrors.
>any of Musk’s promises on time
I find this argument so frivolous. Ok, so they've made what was considered impossible, _late_ on a few occasions? And they visibly iterate, showing failure, as if it makes them somehow worse? It does kind of sound like you are not the engineering type, or at least don't work with actual hard problems.
The smartest people are still geniuses and the smartest even if they're late, while no one else is ahead of them.
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Alphabet holds approximately 551 million shares of SpaceX (trading under the ticker SPCX), valued at roughly $94.1 billion, which represents about a 4% to 6% stake in the company.
Alphabet is also the biggest holder of PlanetLabs at around 10%.
PlanetLabs is the company providing the satellite bus infrastructure to Google for this project.
It's a little crazy they haven't tried to sell it off yet. Maybe they don't want to trigger a bank rush or they're limited in their ability to do so?
They've got $400bn+ in annual revenues, with $50bn in free cash flow, and the ability to raise enormous piles of debt if they needed it.
They've not got a pressing need for the cash, so can afford to take a multi-decade view of SpaceX. If you look at other investors who take a view across that time horizon, you'll see some pension funds and huge trusts putting money into SpaceX for the same reason.
It's overpriced today on fundamentals, but in 50 years time, today's price will look cheap.
They invested $900 million[1] in 2015, and it is worth $94.1 billion today. Why sell? They also likely have restrictions on selling post-IPO, but I don't think you can trigger a "bank run" on a stock anyway; the price will just keep adjusting as you sell/buy until it gets absurd.
A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/alphabets-spacex-be...
>They invested $900 million[1] in 2015, and it is worth $94.1 billion today. Why sell?
Didnt you answer your own question? Most would consider a 100x ROI more than sufficient for taking profits
$94.1B will barely buy you some RAM.
"A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it." Sure, it's not possible for stocks to become insolvent in the same way, but if a large shareholder sells it could trigger a panic and greatly decrease the price.
why would they sell? because of ridiculously large the valuation is? like, I guess at SpaceX's valuation there's tremendous downside and little upside (x2 growth is unlikely when it's a third of the tech sector)
I could also see some key decision-makers just being nerds that like space.
I don’t see how America or Google remain relevant unless SpaceX succeeds .
This. China's copying SpaceX's homework and the public/private system towards that is operating so efficiently, if SpaceX lets off the gas, US is going to fall behind off the next long term gold rushes like asteroid mining, and said space datacenters.
icbms
Everyone already has enough ICMB's to saturate any need for a total nuclear holocaust, that's not really an "issue"
We must not allow a mineshaft gap.
Huh?
At least this brochure marks cooling in the "challenges" column rather than the advantages.
However, the only advantage listed in this announcement is "near-constant sunlight". It appears they are hoping for 8x solar efficiency for 1000x the cost of terrestrial construction.
If the actual motivation is that people don't want data centers on earth, that seems to be because the datacenters 1) drive up energy costs, 2) use a lot of water I guess, and 3) can make noise. If you're able to operate a datacenter satellite you apparently don't need local electricity, water, or human labor. As someone else said, set up on the desert or in the middle of Alaska somewhere 100s of miles from the nearest person. They can still use solar (just build like 8x the panels if you need to... still cheaper than space), they don't need water, don't need labor... I think most public opposition would disappear.
I've heard some say the real advantage is latency for spy satellites... This seems not a real use case. The kind of workloads that require this kind of datacenter usually can spare 1-2 seconds in round trip time. Millisecond-sensative reactions I would assume would want to be driven by onboard processing.
One true advantage that I haven't seen on any brochure is that the heat produced by the space datacenters could be released into space rather than raise the temperature of the earth. However, the satellite would have to be designed to radiate the heat away from earth. Hopefully they design the satellites to direct the radiated heat away from earth and don't just point the radiators straight back to earth...
> 1) drive up energy costs, 2) use a lot of water I guess, and 3) can make noise
I don't think the opposition to data center projects can be explained with actual impact, which so far seems entirely negligible, and lower than heavy industry.
I had the impression it's more driven by general mistrust in public officials and the tech industry.
I wouldn’t call the electricity use negligible, some of the newer data centers are looking at the same energy usage as small countries and run off fossil fuel
What I called negligible was a supposed increase of electricity prices for consumers.
This is the impression I get as well. Plus, people concerned that property values will be negatively affected, that their taxes may go up to subsidize the data center, etc
And of course that the end result is that the smarmiest folks on earth get to make the ‘my life becomes worse’ machine
> set up on the desert or in the middle of Alaska somewhere 100s of miles from the nearest person… I think most public opposition would disappear
I don’t know about the desert, but in Alaska I think this would be hard to achieve. People there tend to care about preserving wilderness, and most of them would probably be opposed to this.
> most public opposition would disappear
No. Ideology is never bothered by facts and never leaves anything alone.
For those questioning viability, there's a startup called Starcloud https://www.starcloud.com/ with a public whitepaper explaining a bit their hardware and economics https://www.starcloud.com/wp. They've already had one small proof of concept launched. Not trying to promote, I just heard about them on the ycomb podcast
“A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km”
I think dodging debris is challenging at that scale.
Also this is the solar cells not the radiators
Desert land is full of that amount of area available for peanuts.
That’s 4000 acres. I see a 6000 acre ranch available in Arizona for $7m. The cost of building a 5GW DC is about 100 billion. Land including enough for all the solar and battery you need to be completely self sufficient is basically free.
You can fly a drone laden with fireworks across a desert. Harder to do in LEO
The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things. Otherwise the economies do not make sense. The "terrorism" threat is nearly non existant in practice and only the legislative threat is real, which might be good cause to think about what you are doing in the first place.
> The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things.
Consider a global human population, fractured into historically formed nations and power blocs. Consider corruption and clans taking up a fraction of positions of power at a certain duty cycle. It's unavoidable legislative bodies would eventually abuse control of technology, for those points in time yes, doing the right thing becomes doing the illegal thing, but only because corruption attained such powers.
> Otherwise the economies do not make sense.
The economics at what scale? At scales of earthly compute, earth is cheaper and more maintainable. At stellar scale, the power simply isn't available on Earth, so the most economic path is whatever is the most economic space ML datacenter path.
What the heck are you talking about? Basic grounding problem: who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much? You know that place where 100% of your customers and the hostile legislative bodies would be.
> who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much?
Militaries.
Ones that have to worry about local laws?
this is also about geopolitics. Destroying satellites in space hurts your own space infrastructure (see the movie "Gravity")
On the ground nothing harms your own infra by dropping a bomb on another datacenter that might be powering the opponents entire military strategy.
Terrorism threat is nonexistent now, but maybe not in the future.
The movie Gravity was not a documentary. It broke more laws of physics than the claims about data centers do.
exaggeration makes visible, runaway collisions are definitely a problem. I didnt like the movie, but space collisions are no joke...
cheaper to defend on earth than launch and maintain in space.
Presumably that’s not a single satellite.
Nope, it's a single massive panel sat and they're using $30/kg as their launch costs.
Up to you how plausible you think that is.
There's an artist's impression of the frigging thing in the whitepaper! It's very obviously a single enormous thing!
> Figure 3. A data center in Sun Synchronous Orbit, showing a 4km x 4km deployed solar array and radiators.
Right, the goal here is a more realistic Dyson swarm, not a Dyson sphere (yet)
I wonder if the shadows from such a large area would have a climate cooling effect?
The Earth's surface area is ~ 510,000,000 km^2. For simplicity, say exactly half of it is receiving sunlight. If the satellite perfectly shadows 16 km^2, it would reduce incoming solar energy reaching Earth by 16/205,000,000 = 0.00000078%, I think.
So not really. There are some proposals for space-based geoengineering, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290112... has a summary. I can't say how plausible any of them are.
Ideally you'd put it in an orbit that wouldn't shadow earth, since if it goes in front of earth in part of the orbit then it'll go behind earth (and be in shadow) for part of the orbit. They mention they'd want it in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, which would be in sunlight all the time and would never shadow the earth.
How can this practically work though? As Earth goes around the Sun 90 degrees, orbit will become half-shadowed.
The earth isn't exactly round, you can use this to process your orbit exactly 360deg/year so you can always stay in the sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
s/process/precess/
It's wild that I didn't even realize it didn't say precess until I saw your comment. Brains are weird.
Would be cool if so, but I wonder what the plan is regarding radiation pressure pushing things out of orbit.
would radiation pressure not counterbalance the radiation pressure from the sun?
given solar cells are only 30% efficient. if you put the radiators behind the panels then you have the structure already and always keep the radiators shaded
I think the principle is correct but probably it would need to be much bigger.
That whitepaper puts the cost of a 40 MW cluster at $167m on land and $8.2m in space, inclusive of launch costs.
They seem to not be counting the $1B of GPUs on either side, making the difference pretty small. They also think launching 200 racks of equipment into space will cost $5M.
that sounds ridiculous. How could it be so much cheaper
Because launch costs and density are completely imaginary. The whole thing is predicated on launch vehicles they hope someone builds eventually. They also appear to have profoundly miscalculated their radiation shielding costs and amounts, but I'm not really motivated to calculate that correctly.
At planet we didn't have any radiation shielding. Why would spacex need it?
On the planet we have tremendous radiation shielding. The van allen belt and the atmosphere, to start with.
I suppose “at planet” refers to the company Planet
https://www.planet.com/products/planet-insights-platform/
In LEO you would still have the Van Allen belts.
Because running 40MW of high-speed inference on GPUs is a different sort of mission then bolting a camera to a Jetson SBC and dropping a cubesat into orbit?
Why is it different. I don't understand at all. I thought this was all shown to not be needed since even before we did it at planetlabs
Because they have factored in a genie’s lamp, which they will use to wish costs down significantly
They're assuming $30/kg launch costs.
Falcon heavy has never flown SSO, but it's probably over $1500/kg, which is >50x more expensive. Even the most optimistic estimates for a future starship launch cost is at least $100/kg, so it makes no sense to use $30/kg.
The other line items are probably similarly unrealistic since they include their own launch costs as well.
They also spec 300 racks of 500kg each, which is <40% of the weight of the comparable land rack. I doubt the full weight reduction since the racks still need to survive launch force/vibration in addition to fluid/pressure enclosures that land racks don't require. I think it's likely that just about every part of this report has a similarly cooked numbers, and we can just throw the whole thing out.
how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated.
I don't know why people are so fixated on heating as some kind of gotcha. If we already assumed magical 16km^2 solar array, then we can also assume matching size radiator, with heatpumps. If ISS can do it, then there is no technical issue with doing it on bigger scale. It "only" doesn't make any sense from financial viewpoint, terrestrial datacenters beat it in every way.
NVidia's recent support for warm (45 °C) water cooling for their new racks probably had more impact on price of compute than than space servers will ever have.
Is there not enough space in space?
Space, as in the near absence of material that makes it an almost perfect insulator. Add to it constant compute producing heat and you just cooked your GPUs with no way to dissipate.
That must be why everyone on the ISS has died of heat stroke.
You surely walk around with fans all around your body similarly to GPUs, even though you are in the same environment as them?
If not, then you may realize how stupid your comment is.
Historically there have been many startups with pitches that haven’t worked out. The existence of a startup who think they can tackle a particular problem isn’t evidence of the viability of their proposed solution. If they succeeded, that would be evidence.
Yeah. Starcloud is notable for two things: firstly that they've raised a lot of money and secondly that theyve already abandoned the nonsense in their white paper and shifted to a "lots of satellites" model like everyone else exploring orbital datacentres...
I think SpinLaunch is great example. They were actually able to fund and make a working prototype, tested it, but still decided it is not practical after all, before pivoting to production of knockoff Starlink-like satellites.
What happens to all the precious metals that go up with these data centers? At least with a land based data center we have a vague hope of recycling the raw materials at some point in the future.
Just like with all the satellites, the recycling plan is to allow them to burn in atmosphere. Maybe after we breathe enough of it, we can recover the metals via crematories.
Precious metals stop being precious metals once asteroid mining begins. I don't think it will be super soon but I could certainly foresee it being a thing within 10 - 15 years which is about 2 - 3 generations of satellites from my very brief Google.
We are decades away from asteroid mining at best, even assuming we go all in starting today. The difficulties and numerous engineering challenges of mining at zero g cannot be understated.
Starcloud seems like a whole lot of hand waving and BS. This is a good video that goes over their problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
It reminds me of the Hyperloop white paper, whose existence for many was proof enough that it was viable and beyond questioning.
Admiral Rickover explains the difference between PoC and practical: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html. It is about nuclear, but applies here as well.
Note how their cost comparison table mentions "launch" but not a word about how to retrieve systems parts after their end-of-life. "There's so much junk already circling around the planet, what does it matter if we'll leave it there to rot?" can't possibly be the stance they're taking.
If it’s in low orbit then it will just burn up. Satellites have to keep thrusting slightly in order to keep their position.
So I suppose recycling is not a thing in space?
Just like it wasn’t a thing in the 1800s on Earth.
How are they solving the heat dissipation issues?
For real. It's an enormous problem solved only with 1) sheer scale, and 2) Science Fiction.
Both of those are expensive as hell, by the way.
Cooling via radiation follows Stefan–Boltzmann: P = εσAT⁴. Let's assume a good surface (emissivity ~0.9) at 300 K (27 °C) at 400 W per square meter per side. A flat panel radiating from both faces into deep space gets 800 W/m, not including the losses from, say, the Sun, or from IR coming off the Earth. Now, input power. Sunlight in orbit ~1,360 W/m², assume ~22% cell efficiency, we got 300 W/m². So each 1 MW compute, 3,300 m² of solar panel and minimum 1,200–1,500 m² of radiator.
In case ya didn't know - 1 MW is tiny from a present-day-datacenter perspective. It's like 8 racks. So we're talking orbital megastructures here, many many many square kilometers, and this is with all the best case assumptions, and magic radiator panels that never see the sun, or the earth, or the moon.
This is just the basic numbers here, by the way. There's a garbage truck full of other unsolvable problems if you poke your head in there.
Aside from the "Avoid Regulations" aspect, and the "Everything That Burns Deorbiting is Depreciation" aka "The Starlink Trick", I'm not sure what the hell the draw is.
Cooling in space is hard but not impossible - while current (IMHO stupid without advanced in space infra) space data center projects work with a couple MW, many advanced space propulsion concepts might have to reject hundreds of MW if not a couple GW.
For that you might need more advanced stuff like liquid droplet radiators (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator), heat sinks & pulsed operation. Still, it should be eventually doable.
As for space data centers - I think the main issue is the complete lack of in space infrastructure for resource mining, processing and manufacturing & maintenance. It is kinda like building your first practical steam locomotive & the deciding to build directly an airliner. No suitable materils, experience, work force, material sources, etc.
We eventually went from locomotives to airliner, in an incremental manner & expanding the supporting infrastructure to support the ever more ambitious projects.
It might be eventually doable, as an experiment or as a flex, sure. But it's never going to come close to being cost-reasonable versus the equivalent infrastructure here on earth.
The security advantages are enormous since access to space is so tightly restricted and controlled, compared to the access potential of a land based data center. Only risk in space is maybe we start WWIII with china and the US directly trading blows. On the ground, any insurgent group can disable your infrastructure. Nothing is truly safe on the surface of the earth. Anyone can strap a bomb on a drone now. See examples from the currently active wars.
It costs at least 50x more to put a GPU in space than it does on Earth. For that price you can have dozens more capacity in bunkers, under the sea, or on remote islands. Do you think your insurgents are going to get all two dozen? They could travel to the far corners of the earth, destroying 22 of them, and you'd still be ahead. Further, I wouldn't be surprised if a satellite with such a monstrous solar and radiator footprint wouldn't be susceptible to a laser based attack from the ground; either frying it or pushing it into an unstable orbit by vaporizing a few bits.
It costs much more than 50 times because there are no GPUs in space yet. Google is only planning to have some sort of space data centers mid 2030s, if everything works out. A big if, but if they don't start now then we'll never know.
What? No, exactly the opposite. It's very easy to jam radio signals and much harder to cut wires. There's a reason the drones on the front lines in Ukraine are dragging fibre optic lines these days.
There's probably so many ways to get around that with space based technology. I can quickly imagine several methods. It depends on what the system is for which might be a good method to use.
Method 1: same as how u2 planes dumped their data: air drop physical media containing data and catch it in the air.
Method 2: laser based emission to specific detectors.
Method 3: baseball style communication: station is under observation and manipulates in some way to serve as a signalling language.
Method 4: numbers station
Method 5: bill yourself as an isp and have some coded syntax that can be supplied in plain sight with the rest of isp traffic.
Method 1: Sure datacenters with latency measured in several hours sure are useful, and can also be intercepted Method 2: Can be jammed by drone with laserpointer. Method 3: Let me just transfer gigabytes of data via physical signalling Method 4: Can still be jammed Method 5: Can in fact still be jammed?
> Sure datacenters with latency measured in several hours sure are useful
Training models takes weeks, are you really worried about a couple hours?
> Can be jammed by drone with laserpointer
Ok, you're just joking
If you’re receiving data optically from a space based laser, yes you are quite vulnerable to your detector being jammed by a much closer laser that doesn’t have to be nearly as powerful to add noise to the signal.
Why do you think GPS is so easy to spoof?
Actually I just googled (clauded?) to learn more about space lasers and found a paper describing interrupting quantum key distribution (tamper evident but not jam proof!) with a 1kw laser on the ground pointed at the satellite! So it really does not take many photons to fuck up an encrypted signal.
“ Vulnerability of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution to Disruption from Ground-Based Lasers”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8659886/
You're going to have to be very close, basically in the direct line between ground station and satellite (which would be airspace that's easily guarded), have a lot of battery/cooling systems to run that laser on what would essentially be a one-way-trip all for disrupting comms for maybe a few minutes tops? And that's just for one ground station, where the blue team can just set another one up a few meters away and be safe. Honestly, you'd probably be better off dumping glitter or water in the sky than trying to actively jam laser comms.
Method 1 runs into the problem of how to replace that media. The DC is in space so it's not like with U2 planes where they landed. Also, I think you mean the keyhole satellites and not U2 planes, since a plane lands at a secure site and can offload media then.
> It's very easy to jam radio signals
Definitely not signals from low earth orbit.
But more and more Ukraine is using long range drones guided by SpaceX
> But it's never going to come close
never? I doubt that.
Technology will improve over time. Eventually I bet it will become cheaper.
Have you tried building in the U.S.? Why do you think it's so expensive to build in the U.S.? It's due to regulation and red tape.
The United States is relatively expensive because the world's cash reserves are priced in USD, and a large fraction of the eastern Eurasian continent lives inside a work camp.
The old Chicago School boogeymen of unions, regulations, and red tape are effectors, but they're a pimple on the back of the world-mutating effects of seven-some decades of USD Seigniorage.
I imagine we're going to be living through the reverse of this Seigniorage experiment quite soon.
Technology improves, but the laws of physics are constant and absolute (on human timescales).
Thermodynamics says no today, no tomorrow, and no 100 years from now. That's not ever going to change.
What was it the 27th law that says radiating heat in to space does not work? I'm skeptical of the whole thing too, but it's not an impossible engineering challenge, just an expensive one.
According to Wikipedia this reduces weight and not the required area. Also AI said the same thing, but I can't trust in it this blindly. So, how smaller would be the required surface area?
> Now, input power. Sunlight in orbit ~1,360 W/m², assume ~22% cell efficiency, we got 300 W/m². So each 1 MW compute, 3,300 m² of solar panel and minimum 1,200–1,500 m² of radiator.
We need > 2x more solar panels than we need radiators. Doesn't this imply radiation isn't really the limiting factor here?
Getting the energy back from the solar panel is easy via copper cables. Getting the heat back out there to the radiators is a bit harder, you needed fluids and pumps and heat exchangers which have lots of moving parts and need maintenance.
This has all been covered over and over again. It’s actually not that big of a deal
Doing it in a cost and weight effective way is still a big deal, because if it's not within ~10x the cost of ground based data centers, not enough people will use it to justify building it.
...but they are already building it.
Ah yes, the same way they built us all solar roof tiles.
I really hope those get an improvement, the externalities of asphalt roofs are so crazy I wish more people paid attention.
It’s obvious that radiation isn’t the limiting factor, since, as you note, there’s no reason a satellite shouldn’t be able to radiate at least as fast as it gets power from the sun. I don’t know how this became a meme.
Yeah, I suppose another way to look at it is that ALL satellites have to radiate the energy they get from the sun (since 99+% of electricity used by electronics gets radiated off as heat). A datacenter is no different. All that is different is that quantity of energy both in and out, the ratios are identical.
No point in running them at room temperature. GPUs, etc. run fine at 95 C. If you run your cooling loop at 70 C instead, you get 70% more cooling compared to 27 C.
At any rate, 1 MW for a single satellite is fine. Just launch several thousand of those and you get to real numbers.
Also, there's no need to talk about "magic" radiators. You orient them so they're at a knife edge to both the Sun and Earth. This is not difficult (the Moon is irrelevant).
No point in running them at room temperature. GPUs, etc. run fine at 95 C.
They run fine for a short while, but not nearly as long.
Heat accelerates all aging processes. It's how they artificially age chips in order to calculate MTBF.
Radiating 1MW at 500K (227C) with a 0.4MW heat pump takes about 200 m^2 flat sheet surface. Inputs - solar+nuclear for double fun. So - quite feasible.
Moves 1 MW of heat with 0.4 MW of work? I.e. 2.5 COP {coefficient of performance). That's insane, and I mean that in a good way. Could you dig me up a cite for that?
That's thumping the Carnot limit: [[T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold)]].
2.5, while rejecting at 500 K, cold side's at least 357 K (eeehhhhhhh 84 °C) . . . and that's an absolutely perfect Carnot machine. At 50% Carnot -- a pretty good heat pump, real world performance is 40-60 -- cold side's at 417 K (144 °C). 417k, feeding your GPU coolant loops.
Think you have an error -- it's t_hot / (t_hot - t_cold)
With those numbers, ideal carnot would be 500/(500-357) = 3.5.
Multi-stage could potentially get you to a COP of 2 or so. So 0.5MW.
I believe that's Carnot COP for a heat pump used for heat+. I used the refrigeration version, T_cold / (T_hot - T_cold), which I'm 80 percent sure is the right one here.
Depends on which heat you want
Heat adding to hot side: COP_heat = Q_hot / W = T_hot / (T_hot − T_cold).
Heat leaving the cold side: COP_cool = Q_cold / W = T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold).
Another one (more common in the day to day, for me at least): heat-engine efficiency, η = 1 - T_cold / T_hot. Cycle forward to make work from heat.
And if you look at SpaceX's Starmind sats, they will have a 160 m^2 liquid radiator for 175kw/250kw peak compute.
Do we even _have_ semiconductors that can work at 220C? And if you're thinking about using some kind of refrigeration cycle, its efficiency is going to be bad.
1) The chips don't reach 220C. The 220C is the temperature at the hot end of the heat pump. The chips are on the cold end of the heat pump.
2) The International Space Station has used a dual-loop ammonia/water-based heat pump to cool the station temperatures. It's been in place for several decades. Heat pumps are a proven technology.
Other satellites have also used heat pumps, such as SES-17 in geostationary orbit https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Com...
> The 220C is the temperature at the hot end of the heat pump. The chips are on the cold end of the heat pump.
If we want the heat pump's cold end at about 40–65°C, then for each 1MW of GPU heat, we need another 1MW of heat pump power. Now you need 2MW of solar power.
Good news is that the radiator at 227C (500K) can emit about 5× more heat per square meter than at 57C (330K)
Of course. But their hot ends are nowhere near 220C. I don't think such heat pumps even exist right now except in labs.
Looks like some experimental pumps within this region have CoP around 30%: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
So you'll need a lot of additional energy to run the pumps. Which will require additional radiator area.
ISS's two external cooling loops hold about 540 kg of ammonia combined, together they dump 70 kW.
Getting this all up into orbit it obviously the hard part, but if you're already building so much solar capacity the cooling actually doesn't seem unreasonable?
Glad you are on the case before these companies foolishly waste their money sending datacenters to space.
Great read, thanks for sharing. I am interested in reading some more about the other unsolvable problems that exist in this space, do you have any recommendations that you wouldn't mind pointing me at? It would be greatly appreciated, and thank you :)
Surface area is a materials problem? Folded microstructure, atomic-scale textured surface or some other science-fiction solution could have square kilometers of surface area in a shoebox.
Imagine you have two blackbody radiators with the same bulk properties, except one has surface area shenanigans like aerogels. In the far field as a whole, it seems like both should radiate essentially the same regardless of the internal details. You can shape emissive direction, or improve efficiency of non-ideal materials, but even ideal materials don't fix the issues pointed out by the parent.
Right; it's only area exposed to the exterior that counts. A physical object can't thermally radiate more power than a perfect blackbody spanning its convex hull.
(This follows because a physical object can't absorb more light than a perfect blackbody spanning its convex hull. A perfect blackbody by definition absorbs 100% of incident light, which is a hard upper bound. Any line incident on an object is also incident on its convex hull).
(Consider an isothermal object that emits more power than a blackbody in the shape of its hull at the same temperature. If you were to place that object in a closed system at thermal equilibrium, the interior of an insulated emissive sphere—combining assumptions, it would emit more power than it absorbs, in violation of the 2nd law. Starting from an isothermal system, the object would grow colder, and the enclosing container hotter).
It needs to be facing open space instead of other parts of itself, otherwise the radiation is just reabsorbed.
It would be a shame if a rock came out of nowhere and hit that many square kilometers stucture
Luckily, there are almost no rock in space.
Almost no rocks, but they're going 10 to 30 km/s
I assume the kilometer-size array would not be series-wired.
Wouldn't this be solved like similar problems on earth by making small structures with large surface areas?
I don't think so. Large surface area helps with convective cooling I think by increasing the surface area that participates in heat exchange with the air (or other thermally conducting material), radiative cooling wouldn't benefit from this because you can't concentrate light beyond the source that it's emitted from (etendue).
Though I do wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of internal heat pump driven by electrical power to juice up the temperature of the radiators to increase the power being radiated away? E.g., run a heat pump to increase the temperature of a working fluid and then run high temperature radiators? I think it would work and I don't immediately see that it would violate the laws of thermodynamics? (this is ignoring all practically, I'm sure the engineering would be devilishly hard, although if you're already shooting for the moon you might as well throw in some artificial gravity to boot, it's not like the robots get motion sickness)
You can use heatpumps to increase radiator temperature but then you need a heatpump and need to power it. But the principle is sound.
there are two arguments for it.
one is marketing.
the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.
they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.
Your "other" makes no sense. It doesn't matter if you make a few big or a lot smaller, in space you will still need the same space for the same amount of megawatt. Or did you miss the scale of parent's post ? Because in that dream scenario of "let's ignore all the issues except that" and "the earth and the sun don't have any impact", it's still 3 THOUSANDS square meters for a MW of 8 racks.
You want to go smaller and go one rack only sure, it's still hundreds of square meters. Check the size of current orbital structure for a point of reference, you can't dwarf those and call it a "dataswarm of tiny datacenters flooding the sky".
Is it possible for one side of panel to be used for solar power and other side for radiating heat?
Don’t you get 4 faces to radiate away, assuming a long rectangular tube.
From the article itself, sounds like it’s an open problem that they are experimenting with:
“ We’re working on a number of different approaches for this, including a combination of heat pipes and radiators to cool the chips. So far, our team has tested the technology in a thermal vacuum chamber that simulates both the thermal and vacuum environment in space. We’ll see how our new TPU cooling system works in space and refine our designs as we learn more.”
Imagine a heat pump circuit fails (solar rays? micrometeorite? random chance), I guess everything in that loop will just be dead forever? I guess you don't need to pay to dispose of it.
No solution, but that is the crux of the problem. They probably need to make a radiator that 1000x smaller and lighter.
TPU: 100,000+ watts/square-meter
Radiator: ~300 watts/square-meter
https://youtu.be/ktdbUIZKeSE?t=76
The article mentions that:
> The biggest challenge was how to cool the A.I. chips, which heat up when they perform calculations and process information. Fans, which typically help dissipate the heat, do not work in space. So the Silicon Valley company instead developed a cooling system that uses layers of conductive material to expel the heat into space.
> The bottom layer is made up of Google’s A.I. chips, which sit on a green motherboard. The next layer consists of “thermal interface material,” a pale green putty that comes in sheets like Fruit Roll-Ups and connects the chips to layers of aluminum and copper, radiating heat away from the motherboard. Finally, there is a radiator panel, which projects heat into space.
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
Is it at least a 1:1 usage / cooling cycle?
It's a bit like the hyperloop. They know it's not practical but having the idea out there makes money. There will be some niche demand for military use though.
We don't. This is all cover for the militarisation of space, there's no real benefit that'd be ever economical to put a DC up in space when you could build one on the ground. The whole narrative exists to allow google to tap into the Golden Dome / Space force bucket of pork that's basically SDI II.
You don't need civilian scale compute in space, but you absolutely can put miliary application up there and get filthy rich, like Elon, who doesn't care if it ever works, because he's getting paid as taxi service to shoot stuff up.
It's a scam when Elon does it.
It's Golden Dome when Google does it.
I guess it's something along the same line when Jeff Bezos does it. He does indeed plan it.
What is China's motive? why do they also need to pretend they want space data centers? [0], [1]
How about Europe's? [2]
[0] - https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/space/china-puts-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/science/china-vows-develop-space-tou...
[2] - https://ascend-horizon.eu/data-centres-in-space/
This is the most interesting perspective I've heard on this topic, which otherwise always converges on the same political dismissals or heat dissipation arguments (the latter are fascinating, but going in circles by now).
Sounds very probable: gives a plausible reasons for sending a lot of infra up, absolutely doesn't have to be profitable or even effective, puts the focus on AI instead of the MIC, and is in line with the kind of contracts Big Tech runs after.
To me this model explains a lot of why so many big companies seem to be investing into what every expert I've heard says goes against basic physics. The only thing missing for it to be more than an interesting idea is why China and the EU are not fighting this.
Can't they harness the heat to generate more electricity?
you need a gradient from hot to cold to generate electricity. vacuum is a poor thermal conductor, so your cold part will become hot and then no more gradient.
(I guess you could try to capture the radiative photons via the photoelectric effect?? but I don't think it works.)
How far are we from optical computing ?
Have they tried logarithms?
Don't worry, they'll just ask Grok.
I tried asking Grok and a bunch of waffle came out but one interesting idea was "modular tiles" with solar cells on one side and a panel to radiate heat on the other with the processor bolted to the panel. (https://www.geekwire.com/2026/sophia-space-caltech-ai-patent...)
This is my only question.
That's the neat part: you don't (ergo, this is yet another marketing crap)
just like reusable rockets sending astronauts to the space station and internet in the sky. imagine if they delivered on those bs marketing claims?
Could you share us a proof of concept or anything that might be a solution for the heat dissipation in space, at scale ?
You see, this is the difference between bullshit and not. I can claim "we'll do timetravel soon !", but unless I share some "things" (whatever they are) that might sustain that affirmation, this is just bullshit
Does it mean that no solution exists ? No. Just that today none are known (as far as I can tell).
This is the problem with European thinking, you have this built-in mindset that you think you're going to be so cool with a gotcha because I can't provide a "proof of concept" or solution right now for a problem that OTHER PEOPLE are working on. Sheesh, just get off your high horse and admit that other people that are smarter and harder working than you are going to solve problems you can't manage.
Your desire to call out bullshit is stronger than your ability to GSD.
Exactly! There's a quote I like to remember: "If I had listened to all the negativity and putative experts who expended so much energy telling me 'this is impossible, it will never work' I would never have gotten to where I am today." - E Holmes (Founder and CEO of Real-Time Cures)
.. what ?
People are working on problems I cannot manage (who could have known) and they cannot say anything about that but we have to trust them to bring results out of thin air ? Is this politics .. ?
If your personal accusations can be boiled down to : "shame ! you are not gullible!", then please know that, here in France, not being gullible is a compliment.
I don't recall the scientific community declaring those things to have been BS when they were announced.
I guess we're redefining "the scientific community", cutting out those who were wrong each time? Do you consider the French Space Agency (CNES), former NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, the European Space Agency to be part of the scientific community? I still vividly remember one interview where Elon started to tear up because Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan publicly denied the feasibility of SpaceX's mission.
"Scientists" being detractors and everyone going online to comment about how something is impossible while the people doing the thing just do it then all the detractors quietly shrug it off until the next time is so consistent it feels like Groundhog Day. I'd really like to learn about why so many people get off by saying something that other people are working on is impossible.
> I guess we're redefining "the scientific community", cutting out those who were wrong each time?
I guess you are doing the opposite?
> "Scientists" being detractors and everyone going online to comment about how something is impossible while the people doing the thing just do it
Let's make a chart for how many times this has worked vs failed.
[flagged]
He is free to launch his own space GPU if he is so confident it is profitable*.
I will take it as a given that the Google engineers know what they are doing, and their first version can only run for 15 minutes before it needs to shut down to cool.
*Profitability requiring that other Musk controlled companies do not pay for the service at elevated rates in a classic self dealing scheme.
> He is free to launch his own space GPU if he is so confident it is profitable*.
Are you not aware that's exactly what SpaceX is doing?? https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind Sure, it's now SpaceXAI or whatever, but how is that any different than Google sending up sats and selling the compute via Gemini?
We can wait for their profitability numbers, assuming it happens.
Regardless, those claim to have a maximum draw of 250kw. That’s one to two terrestrial data rack. Cute.
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Please stop with this argument. This is one of the easiest problems to solve. Heat dissipation requires a radiator, which is just a dumb hunk of metal. All you need is a cheap way to launch mass to orbit, which is exactly what SpaceX (and Chinese companies) are doing.
The only valid argument against data centers in space is the economic cost. If the per megatoken price for space datacenters is higher than terrestrial, then this won't work.
But the price for terrestrial datacenters keeps going up and technology keeps dropping the price of space-based.
That is not a fake argument, but real physics. Yes, you can design out X kw can be dissipated by this much radiators, but that adds an enormous quantity of mass, more than the solar panels that feed it.
If you are trying to generate a profit, every extra kg puts you further in the red. It still costs over $1000/kg of mass to get into orbit.
So is it a physics problem or an economic problem? Sounds to me like you are acknowledging that it is just an economic problem. If it cost $1/kg to get to orbit then this wouldn't be a problem, right? Just make a bigger radiator.
But if it's an economic argument, then you need to do the actual math. How big is the radiator? How low could the price to orbit go? How much can you charge per million tokens in 2030?
The reason this is a fake argument is because the validity depends on the math, and nobody advancing the "you can't cool stuff in space" argument is actually doing the math.
The economics is constrained by physics. AI in space is not viable if it costs $1000/kg to launch to space. Starship promises to cut that down to $100/kg (more if you believe Elon, but most don't), but that's still not competitive.
Sure, things would be different if the cost was $1/kg, but short of somebody building a space elevator that's just not going to happen.
I won't believe less than $100/kg until I see it. I agree with you on that.
But are you sure that $100/kg is not competitive? I don't remember all the math, but even their initial AI1 design[1] would throw a lot of profit, if you can sell at the price they offered to Anthropic.
I suspect the price of manufacturing the satellite, plus chips, is the dominating factor, not necessarily the launch costs.
[1] https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind
> if you believe Elon.
Why wouldn;t you? he delivered on almost everything he promised, just the timeline was a lot later.
we are talking sci-fi things here, these will take time but can be done.
would you rather we bury our heads in the sand and never innovated beyond basics?
Okay any argument about why space is uniquely challenging is going to revolve around physics. Sure it's not literally physically impossible, but we need to explain to people why this is different from shipping the GPUs to Ohio.
If you want math then https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters exists. The numbers are grim for orbital DC. Even if you drag the launch cost slider all the way to $1/kg (by the way this is literally sci-fi, per ChatGPT air freight of semiconductors from Taiwan to Ohio costs $9/kg and ocean/train freight costs a bit under $1/kg for a reasonable shipment so good luck with $1/kg to LEO this century) it is still more than twice as expensive as terrestrial DCs.
But that calculator shows most of the cost is in the satellite. At $8 per watt (or about $2 million per satellite) the cost of orbital compute matches terrestrial.
That sounds absolutely possible. But in any event, we're now arguing a different thing.
The only thing I'm arguing is that cooling is a solved problem. I don't know if SpaceX will ever get the price down so that it is economical. But I'm convinced that there is no universe in which they hit their foreheads and say, "Oh no, we forgot about cooling!"
Note that this calculator is actually quite optimistic for orbital wrt. many things including cooling and effect on launch, as:
> No additional mass for liquid cooling loop infrastructure; likely needed but not included
> Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
In hardware and mfg. solvable vs. solved is a big difference. And I too believe that SpaceX's engineers know about radiator panels. But the more cynical interpretation is that whatever the SpaceX engineers think about the technical merits, they are not being asked for that. They are just being asked for a pretext that justifies the xAI acquisition. Elon is also discussing lunar satellite factories that launch the satellites via railgun. Now, is this physically impossible? No, that isn't physically impossible either and I will seriously defend the physical possibility of this. It's not going to happen though.
And you could spend all the engineering costs on building some seriously efficient terrestrial DCs, but somehow all these analyses start with "assume that launch and satellite technology advances manyfold and terrestrial DCs stagnate or become less efficient, then if you squint the two numbers get kinda close."
Certainly launch has to advance a lot for this to make sense. SpaceX is betting big on Starship getting close to $100/kg. But does satellite tech have to advance much at all to make this work? SpaceX has already successfully deployed one megaconstellation into orbit and it's extremely profitable. Isn't this just another Starlink with bigger solar panels and radiators?
Yes it has to advance a lot. In a DC all your supporting equipment has returns to scale and can be repaired if it breaks. If a GPU breaks, a sysadmin walks over to the offending rack and swaps the card. In space all that equipment serves just a few cards (this is more like orbital server racks) and it has to work in space (so instead of using an ~infinite heat sink like the Earth, you use radiators etc). We still don't exactly know what effect radiation in LEO would have on stock GPUs - IIRC the experiments to determine this started after Elon went all in on orbital DCs. If anything breaks, you have a flying brick.
This is why that calculator, even under extremely optimistic assumptions for orbital, and even if you assume launch is zero, still cannot make it competitive with terrestrial.
Doesn't Starlink already handle all that though, just with networking racks instead of GPU racks? What's so unique about GPUs compared to other computer equipment, besides the power budget?
Commercial GPUs already fail a lot and that's before you put them in LEO. Starlink is doing something that can't be accomplished anywhere else than space. If you could somehow have ground stations that can give wireless internet to every corner of the Earth you would much rather do that. Again, this is all physically possible, but the question is whether it's wise, whether it's saving money or if it's just a giant Rube Goldberg machine. If you assume Starlink satellite $/W then even if launch is zero, it costs twice as much as terrestrial using assumptions charitable to orbital.
Fair point about the failure rates. I wonder what causes that, given that there are no moving parts... if it's temperature fluctuations, maybe you could just run the GPU at 100% all the time to avoid that, given that the marginal cost of power for a satellite already in space is $0?
> If you assume Starlink satellite $/W
Why would you assume that, given that high power output is not a design goal of Starlink?
The calculator I've cited elsewhere uses https://chatgpt.com/share/69391474-4b24-8005-bb93-ebd4340c65.... The various starlink versions have approximately the same cost per watt across very different power levels. Much of the cost is going to be ~proportional to power - solar panels, heat rejection, power electronics, etc. Listen, if they could make it cheaper to deliver the same amount of power they would. Starlink is approximately all of SpaceX's business.
ETA: power is absolutely important for Starlink. SNR is very important for shannon capacity and satellite systems are often limited in this respect.
So ChatGPT decided to assume a constant $800/kg to estimate cost, and you're using that as evidence that cost/W doesn't decrease with scale?
Anyway, my point is that Starlink is not primarily designed to harvest as much solar power as possible the way data center sats are. I'm sure they're not making it inefficient on purpose, but what you're suggesting is like using the cost/W of a solar powered traffic camera to estimate the cost/W of a solar farm. Yes, they both use solar power, but they have entirely different design goals.
It's reasonable to 0th order to assume a ball of heat management and phased array antennae has a roughly constant cost per kg, yes. And as I said starlink absolutely wants to use as much power as they can, as communications from space are heavily limited by power.
FWIW, SpaceX is estimating their AI sats will have over double the W/kg of what that ChatGPT summary is estimating for Starlink. https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind Cost/kg is not disclosed, but I think it would be a mistake to assume there were no similar improvements there.
Okay so even assuming all of SpaceX's numbers, which is extremely optimistic, even if we're an angel's advocate and assume that they spend all this money on engineering and optimize their launch costs and their satellite costs and they don't hit any hiccups, and DCs on Earth stay pretty much the same and don't get any added efficiencies. Even then over every time period orbital is still more expensive. And it gets particularly punishing the longer you extend the analysis period as the satellites need to get replaced while the DCs don't spontaneously combust all their infra.
I don't think those numbers are optimistic, I suspect they've already designed the sat in CAD and that's what the calculation spat out; it's probably quite accurate. The physics of this sort of thing are quite well known and SpaceX already has experience with the type of satellite that will be needed. There's no need for them to rely on napkin math.
Cost is a different matter of course, but it seems incongruous to me that after being confronted with the fact that your power density assumptions were off by a factor of 2x you would continue to insist ChatGPT's weird assumptions about manufacturing costs scaling linearly with mass are accurate. As was already pointed out upthread, even if all the calculator's other assumptions are correct they can turn a profit if they get the per satellite cost (excluding the cost of the GPUs) below $2 million. I think the only big question mark here is launch cost.
It's a fundamental physics problem. You need to have huge radiating surfaces.
A 1GW datacenter with chips operating at 100C (which is probably doable) will need a radiator that has a surface of one square _kilometer_, and this is with all the favorable assumptions. Realistically you'll need about 2x of that.
If you want your DCs to be on a 1000km orbit (for reasonable ping times), you'll be able to _resolve_ these satellites with a naked eye!
Sorry. But this idea is fundamentally unworkable.
The current plan is for 250 kW peak with 160 m^2 radiators. It will weigh about 4 tons so you can pack 25 on one flight of Starship.
Deploy 4,000 and you're at 1 GW. That's 160 launches.
BTW: SpaceX has already manufactured and launched 10,000 Starlink satellites and Falcon 9 launches about 150 times per year. None of this seems unworkable.
Can we solve the fertilizer price problem by hauling it with airplanes? Yes, we can! It's easy, just load the potash fertilizer into an airplane and unload it directly into the traincars. I even designed a neat conveyor belt system to speed up unloading!
Look at the numbers. 1kW of nuclear power capacity on Earth is around $2000, and that's 24/7 guaranteed power. So a 250kW cluster needs $500000 to cover its power demand with near 100% reliability and with some ongoing cost.
And if we're OK with some interruptions, then we can use solar+wind at around $100000 and with essentially no ongoing cost. If we assume the absolutely best projected launch cost of $100 per kg (vs the current one of ~$800), that's just 1 ton of material in space!
So you're off by 2-3 orders of magnitude in cost. And this kind of "it's unprofitable" is actually a fundamental issue.
Okay, so you admit it is possible. Cooling is not the problem. We're making progress.
Now your argument is that it's unprofitable. Here's the calculator: https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
Specifically, if SpaceX can get the price of a satellite down to $8 per watt (about $2 million USD) then it will compete with terrestrial.
I just don't understand how you can be so certain that they can't do that. I'm not certain that they can, but being certain that it's impossible seems completely evidence-free.
This calcualtor is bullshit (inflated terrestrial costs and underflated orbital costs). It doesn't pass the basic sniff test: $15B for 1GW of terrestrial power is more than enough to build AN ENTIRE 3GWe NUCLEAR POWER PLANT. From scratch. With 75 years of expected life.
So no, the calculations show that space is NOT feasible unless you want to do that for nefarious reasons: evading regulations, using AI for criminal enterprises, military use, that sort of thing.
Only these applications have the profit margin that even comes close to justifying it.
> This is one of the easiest problems to solve. /../ All you need is a cheap way to launch mass to orbit.
So... not easy? I don't suppose we're at a point where you could reasonably send a large-enough radiator for a multi-gigawatt cluster into space?
Not only that - it would be totally insane to launch something heavy & at the same time fragile from earth (under a lot of vibrations & heavy g-loading).
This is all a weird speedrun or race. If something we should be working on setting up resource mining from the Moon & asteroids, materials processing on the Lunar surface & in orbit, simple manufacturing in space, etc.
Instead some people think we can jump straight to a computronium Dyson swarm. :P
The plan is to launch thousands of 250 kW satellite. Doesn't sound insane at all.
Now you've moved the goal posts. It's no longer "you can't cool stuff in space"; now it's "we can't launch a 10-gW compute cluster by the end of the year."
You don't need to send a multi-gigawatt satellite to space. You just need to launch a few thousand 250 kW satellites. That's not against the laws of physics.
> Please stop with this argument. This is one of the easiest problems to solve. Heat dissipation requires a radiator, which is just a dumb hunk of metal.
Convective radiation does not happen in space and this challenge is far more significant than your comment implies. Rather than "a dumb hunk of metal", radiators for spacecraft are often made of ceramics and carbon laminates with higher IR emissivity than convective radiators made of simple metals.
From the article you're commenting on:
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
The Thermal Control section on NASA's Small Spacecraft documentation center is quite an interesting read for this subject: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...
ML Infrastructure comes with some pros (larger emissive footprint) and cons (exponentially larger TDP) compared to the concerns there, but if you aren't familiar with the challenges of heat dissipation in space, please give it a read.
There's also a pretty interesting pop-sci article on cooling the Webb telescope, since it needs to be especially cold for its purpose. Not directly related, but may give insight into both challenges and solutions as well as well. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/science-overview/scien...
Emissivity is one factor, but it is dwarfed by the T^4 term. Sure, maybe if you use exotic materials you can get from 0.9 to 0.95 emissivity, but why bother? Just run the radiators a little hotter.
The equation is:
Where P and T are the dominating factors. Don't worry about emissivity.Emissivity is an important factor here because as I said, and as the sources I linked for you to reference clearly stated convective radiation is not taking place in space.
Both Google and NASA are worried about this for a reason, if you think they are wrong, you should offer your assistance to them, rather than debating me.
My point is you don't need fancy/expensive materials for your radiator. Anodized aluminum is at 0.8. With inexpensive coatings you can get to 0.9.
If your argument against space datacenters is "radiator materials are too expensive" then I just think that's not a very good argument.
Oh, sure yeah I agree with that. I was just making a point about the “big hunk of metal” comment and the fact that emissivity is important because the expense of radiator materials aren’t the problem - the surface area (and mass) of the radiator is.
And I agree with you on that. "Big hunk of metal" was too much of an exaggeration--SpaceX's design has liquid cooling, so I assume they have some channels or tubs running through the radiator, plus pumps, etc.
Is Kessler syndrome priced into cost? Or is that just like, someone else's problem?
It will never be cheaper to put compute into orbit. And costs for AI are dropping like a rock here on Earth.
Never is a long time and you're relying on a bunch of unknowns like the cost of launch to orbit in 2030 and the future regulatory environment here on earth.
If you know all that out to 2040 then you must be a time traveler. Please try to fix our timeline rather than wasting time on HN.
You’re right. Why am I wasting time on here?
You're smarter than me on that point. I got sucked into the argument and ended up wasting a couple of hours. I'm an idiot.
no you didnt, i read most of your comments in this thread. very valuable even if little optimistic.
>> The current plan is for 250 kW peak with 160 m^2 radiators. It will weigh about 4 tons so you can pack 25 on one flight of Starship.
>> Deploy 4,000 and you're at 1 GW. That's 160 launches.
and yet notice how the cooling video / section was the only one they didn't have a solution for... just saying "radiator" doesn't make sense - the radiator heats up too. it's how you get rid of the heat, not where you put it.
Huh? Radiators are known technology. They have them on ISS; they have them on every Starlink satellite. This isn't like warp drive or antigravity.
Moreover, you can easily calculate how big of a radiator you need for a given power level and temperature. You can use the Stefan–Boltzmann law:
Where For a 1 kW test like Googles, you just need 1 square meter of radiators (assuming two-sided).For SpaceX's 175 kW satellites, they will need ~170 square meters of radiators.
None of this is impossible or even difficult to calculate. That's why I think this is the laziest argument against space data centers. There are so many other more reasonable arguments (like whether they will be economically competitive) but people love to latch on to this one for some reason.
I think you misunderstand the argument of the people worrying about cooling. I don’t think most people think it’s literally physically impossible, they just think that this will be the thing that makes it economically uncompetitive. It’s a combined argument.
That may be the argument, but it's a dumb argument. Most of the cost is going to go to chips, solar panels, and launch. Radiators are probably one of the cheapest parts of the satellite: it's a hunk of metal with some pumps for liquid cooling.
People use that argument because it takes zero thought to make and significant effort to refute.
People use that argument because one of the chief bullshit arguments put forward by proponents of space based datacentres is "space is cold", when what they actually mean is "space lacks the possibility of using relatively efficient conductive cooling, so we need to expensively launch large amounts of additional mass to use radiative cooling, consider the extent to which we can shield our miles of active cooling loops from impact, and under current plans all of this mass must be replaced on the same cycles as the chips"
"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...
Again you’re missing the combined argument, the cooling will increase launch costs because your hunk of metal will increase the weight of the satellite.
To your last paragraph: when opposing something, it makes sense to use the laziest argument first. Only if that doesn't achieve your goals, would you move towards less lazy arguments. I forget what the term for this is, it's generally criticized ("you should just put your strongest arguments first").
sure, the physics is solved: we know how radiators work, and we can calculate the area needed, blah blah. but we haven't put sustained-AI-computer systems into space yet - heat is a genuine concern, and personally I'm curious if they are developing something beyond simple radiators. if a ~1m^2 radiator works, great. but if the current test can only run the TPUs for ~15-minute bursts before it has to stop and dump heat, this issue isn't exactly "solved" in my book.
I don't understand your argument. Sounds like you're saying, "In theory it should work, but what if there are space pixies that keep rebooting the TPUs? What do we do then?"
The 15-minute figure is what they currently designed for because they have mass constraints. If they wanted a different figure (like forever) they could do it with a larger radiator.
As you said, the physics is solved! We know exactly how much heat a surface radiates in space--there is literally an equation for it. We know how to cool stuff in space. Will the price be low enough to make a profit? That's the real question. But stop worrying about cooling in space.
No one thinks we don't know how to cool things in space. Everyone is saying that it's not feasible because you'd have to put too much mass up. Stop derailing the conversation please.
If you have something useful to contribute regarding how to actually reasonably put up enough mass to make this remotely a feasible idea then please contribute. We have the technology to prevent global warming, and doing that is far easier than this, and yet even that is apparently not feasible for humanity.
I honestly don't get that. The current SpaceX design is for a ~4 ton satellite with 160 m^2 radiator with peak 250 kW output. You can launch 25 of those satellites on a single Starship launch. 160 Starship launches and you get 4,000 satellites with peak 1 GW compute.
What's unfeasible about that? SpaceX has already launched 10,000 Starlink satellites. Falcon 9 launches 150 times per year.
> For SpaceX's 175 kW satellites
That's like a quarter of a rack of modern AI hardware. Modern AI datacenters are now in the multi-GW range.
Okay, so you agree the cooling problem has a solution.
Now the argument is, what, you can't launch that many satellites?
The argument is that launching and operating those satellites is more expensive than just using the same silicon on the ground.
How sure are you of that? How much does each satellite cost? How much will silicon on the ground cost in 2030?
How can anyone be certain of any of those numbers without (a) knowing how the technology will evolve, and (b) doing the math?
I'm just astounded that people can have such confidence.
We know such thing as physics and economics. That dictate the fundamental limits.
They are showing that space-based DCs only make sense for criminal enterprises. Which probably IS what's going on here.
While I really don’t trust Google, I’m not sure I call them a criminal enterprise.
I don't think that is the argument, or if so it's an odd one because it's just a fact right now. Instead, people are claiming that it will never be feasible from a purely physics standpoint, which is something debatable.
Saying it’s impossible isn’t debatable because it obviously is. What would stop you from a physics standpoint to just launch 100 ISS with Server racks in each? A few kW of installed power in space is already reality, it’s just really expensive.
If data centers in space end up being economically viable, then I don't see how anyone can catch SpaceX. They are ten years ahead in both launch capability and satellite manufacturing.
Chinese rockets companies are evolving at insane pace, including RLVs. A couple of big milestones have been achieved this year alone, like first stage landing.
Also Stoke Space, YC startup, is interesting. They could even beat SpaceX to fully reusable if SpaceX find the refuel it and send it up again thing challenging.
They have a different approach - rather than a ceramic heat shield they have a metal shield to be cooled by the liquid H2+O2 fuel. https://youtu.be/3V6lfs7xFJM?t=191
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I certainly hope ‘economically viable’ includes properly priced externalities for e.g. side effects of burning hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium and other materials in the high atmosphere.
Have we ever in human history correctly priced externalities?
As opposed to the 225 tons of aluminum burning up in the atmosphere from meteors every year?
Fifteen years ago the argument against anthropogenic climate change often included a variation of "… but volcanoes spew a lot of gasses containing carbon, and wildfires pollute also …" while conveniently ignoring that human industrial emission are _in addition_ to what is already happening. The current rate of aluminium oxide and titanium oxide and such particles accumulating in the upper atmosphere is detrimental to the ozone layer. It's not good today, but manageable, the answer should be "let's make it more responsible and try to minimise the damage", the answer should never be "more pollution is okay since a little pollution didn't outright kill everything".
Not as opposed, in addition. And it’s awfully hard to get meteors to pony up for their pollution.
No western company, no. That's why I can only hope SpaceX can get thru more red tape faster, and future administrations don't try to slow them down.
Even while current administration is kind of positive towards them, they are still even now just having to wait for no good reason for a FAA go-ahead. These kinds of stalls don't really exist in China.
That's the fun part, they don't need to be viable. It's just the excuse to shovel tons of money to Trump donors, by rerunning the scam that was SDI.
And they never will be because it's always going to be cheaper to build them on the ground.
Its only cheaper to build them on the ground if you aren't factoring security concerns. No insurgents in space. Not every application needs this hardening, but you can imagine there are many applications that do.
This guy is obviously long SpaceX
I didn't have time to watch the videos, but in the text I didn't see anything that addresses data center operations requiring manual intervention.
Swapping out obsolete or failing TPUs. Rewiring or replacing connections. "Listening" for sounds indicating an equipment failure.
What are the proposals to address these needs?
Presumably the plan is to deorbit all failing or obsolete systems. It’s phenomenally wasteful.
that's one way to skirt e-waste recycling requirements!
It's odd to see this level of skepticism, honestly. Does one think the engineers at Google aren't thinking about these problems?
This is obviously a test, just like hundreds or thousands of tests in space before it. Can we run Earth-rated components at any scale in space? How will it fail in various ways, at what rate, and are the causes able to be mitigated?
"We" talk about moonbases and Mars colonies. Part of any extended presence in space will involve the presence of computational devices. They're figuring out how to make that work with modern hardware. That's my take, anyway.
The most obvious solution is to discard.
Launch spacewalk repair crew. Manned or robotics teleoperated.
That's the first news about data centers on space that seems reasonable. Acknowledges the challenges, don't make crazy promises or predictions, makes clear what was already tested and what is still unknown. Makes me actually root for them, for once.
I like the "moonshot research" framing, in particular, because it highlights that even negative results will be valuable, either as improvements for ground technology or as published data to inform other initiatives of what has already been tried and failed.
Providing GPS, communications, media, etc. in space so there is access anywhere in the world has a clear advantage. Here the only pros seem to be that it is potentially cheaper than a datacenter on earth because of solar and cooling. But I assume the environment impact is worse than having datacenters on earth. Launching lots of satellites uses lots of fuel and CO2 emissions. Building satellites and dealing with the end of life tech has much higher environmental impact than dealing with datacenters on earth, where you can do proper waste management and recycle materials. From the economic point of view, polluting the environment is currently free. I guess if the externalities would be part of the equation it would not be economically viable.
Maybe this project exists because the "early in the game" factor. It has worked well in the past for Google, OpenAI, etc. They used copyrighted content to train LLMs to sell AI. They indexed Yahoo directory and websites before robots.txt existed, once they have a dominant position they put robots.txt in Google results so new players can't use their content. And they are launching AI in Space before regulations and politics catch up.
the pro is being able to dodge the entrenched industrial-nimbyism in America.
we talked big game for a long time about bringing manufacturing back to the US, but the practicalities would likely have been impossible in our modern political climate
Listening to these leaders speak, this appears to be a major component. They're trying to pour trillions of investment into communities all over the world, and local communities are rejecting it. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to paint either side as the bad guy. However if they can't get approval to build more infrastructure on Earth, they going to build it in space. At least what is economical. SpaceX has already reduced the cost of space delivery by 90%. This has already made all kinds of new applications commercially viable. Every efficiency increase from now unlocks exponentially more use cases.
As a long time space and technology nerd, this is the coolest fucking time to be alive!
This is not intended as a product launch. I think this is a preemptive bet on a conjunction of the following happening in time for a future product launch:
(I work on #4).A wishy-washy inequality (per time, factoring out launch cost from OpEx):
Presumably, any one of these could see a x100 improvement and make the whole equation in the green. But, I believe this is a low-earth-orbit-shot bet on the sum getting better.Note: I did 1+failures to denote baseline cost (initial launch, nominal OpEx).
Why isn’t building data centers in Greenland being talked about?
- Unlimited geothermal energy.
- Cold climate for heat dissipation
- tons of land
- Getting power there is a headache (unless Greenland allows microreactors, which is a political headache). Note: Iceland has geothermal, not really Greenland.
- You still do need staff, it's not cheap building a mini city for 200 maintenance worker, much less the 5,000+ construction crew, and you'll have to pay premium to get people to actually do it
#TIL
You’re totally right. I thought it was Greenland with geothermal. But it’s Iceland. Thx!
Follow-up question - then why not Iceland? It has geothermal, airports, less geopolitical tension, etc
It is being talked about.
That's why we just annexed it.
Yoink!
because US don't have land access to Greenland (yet)
There's no world where this makes sense. Let's take it issue by issue.
1. Hardware failures: If you know anything about data centers you know that servers fail all the time. I've seen estimates of AI DC servers that have a failure rate of about 9% annually. A terrestrial DC has hardware techs who get alerted to the failure, replace the bits with known good bits and then take the suspect bits for testing to either bin them or verify they're working. You have no option to economically do this in space;
2. Radiation: We have the atmosphere and a concrete box protecting ground-based servers from cosmic rays flipping bits as well as the potentially more problematic (in space) solar storms;
3. Power generation: solar is the only option and yes, orbital panels would be more efficient than ground based. But space-based solar solar tech is much more expensive than what we put here on Earth because it absorbs multiple wavelengths of light to generate electricity. The launch cost and weight savings overcome the high panel costs. But to generate power in the gigawatt range, you're talking about solar panel arrays far larger than anything we've ever deployed in space;
4. Cooling: this is a big one. The only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away into space and this is bound by physics. I'm sure people have done the maths on this but it's not going to be pretty;
5. Heating: the sun will be heating your vessel a lot of the time. You can shield it to some degree with solar panels but they too will radiate away heat in all directions, which will heat the things behind them. JWST uses several sophisticated layers of cooling to reach the low temperatures it needs to operate; and
6. Interconnectivity: these things are likely to be tens of kilometers apart in the very least. You're going to need terabit level networking to be useful for coordination and even then latency will be an issue. Laser dispersion will be an issue as well as the power and heat generated.
I honestly don't know what anyone is trying to achieve with any of this.
When reading old stories about rogue AIs they are often created locally on earth.
What do you do when you need to manually maintain server structure in space? Just the idea of a set of rogue autonomous data centers in space seems like an intriguing story idea.
Nice we have a document we can point at of someone doing a space data center project pointing out all the flaws and benefits without hallucinations.
Putting data centers in Antarctica or extreme north Canadian islands would also put you out of the way of molotov-throwing joe public. Even in space your not safe from the voting public as long as your companies directors are sitting on earth somewhere.
Whilst I agree that this seems wasteful and perhaps not economically viable , I am excited for the innovation possibilities that could come from this. The early efforts to get into space gave some really life changing technology - maybe this can help us better understand energy use, conservation or dissipation in ways that could help us with our down to earth devices. Phones? Charging devices?
Oh, the premise. Look people, this gonna be good:
"whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure. In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. Eventually, it could be possible to link together multiple constellations of satellites, allowing them to manage larger AI workloads while in orbit."
More sunlight! :D
Oh, this is research for building a bigger Gorgon Stare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
$50 on black. No other cost-effective use case. The US government only lets you pollute orbit when you're helping them, like Starlink.
It truely amazes me how much smarter sceptical posters on hackernews are vs google, spacex , china and the whole space industry.
Maybe they figured out something us “normal” people haven’t, but the physics and economic challenges haven’t really been addressed, at all.
Suggesting such an idea without indicating how - and more importantly, why - you are going to do it makes it an article of faith.
Do I have faith in their trustworthiness? No. Do I think they want to do marketing for their AI financing? Yes!
I’ve worked for a few satellite companies. Nothing that Google or SpaceX suggested should be surprising.
Yeah.. remember people being skeptical about reusable self-landing rockets, until SpaceX proved them wrong? I would not put much trust in resident skeptics.
what is it exactly? jealousy i think. plus then add Elon hate. but now Google wants to do it too.
i mean why wouldn;t you want sci-fi things taking shape?
Curious what specific problem this solves that can't be done terrestrially. Bandwidth and latency from orbit sound gnarly.
Real time processing of satellite imagery is one.
People want to put ai in space to hook them to sensors and predict . Checkout project Merlin
I like how they called it “ML Infrastructure” instead of “AI Datacenters”
Really, even google saying they are considering doing some thing like this?
Maybe you only discount the idea because “Elon”?
I think it's more: discount the idea because physics and enormous spend
"it's to ensure AI's profound benefits in key areas, from healthcare to scientific discovery, can reach everyone, far into the future."
No it isn't. That isn't true.
They know it is never going to be cost-effective, compared to building on the ground. People who know better are lying to the public about the feasibility of data centers in space.
It would easily raise the cost by an order of magnitude (or more) to launch a data center into space, compared to current AI data centers on the ground; it's the equivalent of building 100+ ISS space stations to house a Colossus in space. It costs even more to launch your materials if you want sun-synchronous orbit.
It's not just expensive to do at scale, it's impossibly expensive to do at scale. This is a science project, launching a few tomato plants into space to see what happens. Data centers in space are decades away (if ever).
I would believe that military deployments will happen; a couple of TPUs that can be deployed over conflict zones. Outrageously expensive, but no more so than the billions we blew up in Iran this year.
Let's assume everything gets smaller and cheaper. Vastly smaller and cheaper. So much so that it becomes feasible to launch a data center comparable to Colossus into space for the same price. You know what that means about the cost and size and efficiency on the ground? It means I can have a fucking TPU in my pocket and a round trip to space would be an insane waste of time.
There is no way to make the math for AI-in-space to make more sense than just making it work on the ground; any challenges one has with local politics are easier and cheaper to overcome than physics. The public may be stupid in large groups, but public opinion can be swayed, gravity cannot.
In short: This is either a marketing stunt, a bid for military funding, or both. It is absolutely not a project to put AI for "everyone" into space.
Why the space? We have plenty of deserts on the Earth, they are inhabited but still much friendlier than the space. What makes the space more attractive?
Every time I'm reading about the technical challenges of these kind of projects, it reminds me how amazing our brains are, doing what they do with only about 30W
>[Cooling] We’re working on a number of different approaches for this
Meaning "we haven't found anything that works yet".
If I were an escaped AI trying to make sure I survived, I'd for sure seed dreams of getting compute off planet.
I have been saying for years that the great gap for ML is that it isn't in space. Glad Google finally caught up with me.
Does anyone understand the math behind this bit?
> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth....
Because the panel is positioned such that it's is always exposed to the sun.
1: There is no night or day.
2: There are no seasons.
3: There is no weather.
Basically, the primary motivating factor of putting AI in space is abundant solar energy. Otherwise, AI in space makes little to no economic sense.
To build on the economic/practical issues.
The useful life of cutting edge AI server hardware will require constant rotation of equipment to potentially remain competitive with more accessible solutions.
Heat management ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-w6G7VEwNq0 )
Hardening of equipment for the environment. ECC isn't going to be enough. I would have to defer to experts about the best way to manage it, but it either means custom hardware, weight, or both.
Repairs are impossible. Hopefully a sat can degrade gracefully, but routine repairs on earth become significant outages/decreases in economic value of a sat over time.
Rocket launches have gotten much better, but are not perfect. Insurance is a thing. However, cost of equipment in a failed launch may be eye watering, rivaling a governmental military launch.
But solar panels are dirt cheap. Just slap 8x more of them on earth.
It's nuts that it's supposed to be easier to send them to space than to truck them to a desert.
I didn't mention the second compelling reason for data centers in space... All that requires land!
(But to be quite frank, I don't think data center is in space are going to be practical.)
To give a datacenter in space constant exposure to sunlight, the orbit must be either very var away, or occasionally be on the other side of the earth from you. Either way, the latency is terrible. You can put them in a ring and only choose the one closest to you, but are you really going to keep moving your data from satellite to satellite? So, bad for interactive use, maybe OK for non-interactive use, if you can afford the 30 foot by 30 foot solar panel and a similar size radiator for an 8x B300. That will be about $15M for your $500K GPU set. Plus $7M for the launch at SpaceX public rates.
I think these are mostly for llms or long-term storage where they are mostly concerned about latency within the data center and not latency between you and the data center.
Hard to know, but there are some areas they are probably using:
* 24 hours of light vs. ~9 hours of light (e.g. winter)
* Panels perfectly perpendicular to sun 100% of the time vs. variable for fixed panels on earth
* No atmosphere
* No clouds
Presumably they get exactly the same amount of sunlight 100% of the time instead of a few hours peak on earth? I'd say 8x is in the right order of magnitude.
My layman expectation would have been much higher. It's got no atmosphere refracting anything and it's closer to the source of energy.
The distance from earth to the sun is 150 million kilometers and your orbit is probably only a few hundred kilometers up (and realistically it’s sun-synchronous and perpendicular to the earth-sun axis), so the distance change doesn’t really matter.
LEO isn't much closer to the sun, and the atmosphere probably doesn't absorb a huge amount at the wavelengths they work.
How is no one in the whole thread aware that the intention behind orbital datacenters is military? You want to process outputs of large space based sensors in space itself, and reduce latency (e.g to other space based assets) or increase goodput (to ground).
Either it's that weird "space is easier than getting land on earth"(it's not) or the same tortured arguments about heat dissipation, no one is going to run consumer scale compute with consumer scale economics in space ffs. And maintenance and cost does not matter when it comes to strategic military assets, they are a step function useful enough to warrant even a few monthly replacement.
Everyone else with strategic weapons and a space program e.g india china is launching one as well.
They just want lower ping times. Why don't they put the non ML stuff into space?
I just searched for "Elysium" in comments. No hits. Perhaps it's too soon.
Arent computers in space, hardened or shielded because of cosmic rays ?
What no one seems to be asking is what privacy and legal laws still apply for a datacenter in orbit?
They're effectively outside the sovereignty of any country. Further, it would be extremely impractical for any government's law enforcement to raid the datacenter and confiscate the servers.
Maritime law applies to space. In the high seas, the country of registration (flag state) generally governs. As the vessel is elusive, raids would be held on corporate offices instead.
That or impounding data at the teleports.
The threat of prison if you don't turn over SSH keys probably still works.
https://xkcd.com/538/
For those who doubt the AI apocalypse is possible, because "you can always pull the plug", our AI overlords provide a ready-made answer: the data center whose plug can't be pulled! Put a few nuclear warheads on board (we need our own weapon to answer the threat of Chinese super AIs, after all) and you're good to go.
Aside from practical issues, why make your datacenters so vulnerable?
From who? The crack addicts in space trying to steal copper?
The actual rack part is small, even if the solar panels and radiators are big. If this truly was super dangerous, ISS wouldn't be safe. And it's never hit mission-degrading issues due to micrometeoroids.
The ISS has only existed in times of peace
Intentional Kessler syndrome would be such an escalation that even Starshield would be wiped out then, that's quite low in the "def-cons" ...
In any case, this is mostly for peacetime / civilian usage. Obviously military datacenters are and will be as secure as possible. Remember ARPANET was foundational for the internet.
How will they protect it from being stolen by aliens?
So Skynet should be refreshed to Starnet?
lowkey insane that it will end up cheaper to shoot your datacenter into space than get it past the county board permitting process.
Earth will get bulldozed soon anyway to make room for that hyperspace bypass. The plans have been available in the local planning office for a while, but nobody knows about it because they're hidden in the basement and you have to go down there with a torch.
I think if those building the datacenters were more upfront about what they were building and didn't hide behind NDAs the permitting process wouldn't be so fraught.
Narrator: It wasn't.
This is probably one of the main drivers
I guess if you blindly believe company press releases about things that don't currently exist
how's this going to even scale? the demand for ML is skyrocketing right now.
Wonder is this obvious fraud related to a large ownership in fakex
Wait until they work out that earth is in space
I call this Star Citizen for billionaires, wanna-be billionaires, & hedge fund managers
Good luck with a hard drive failure out there. Hope they packed plenty of spares and a space wrench.
that is why they investing on SpaceX then
Suncatcher? Not to be confused with Reflect Orbital's FCC-approved giant space mirror https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48871367
Google has a bridge to sell you
this whole data center in space thing is like a huge red siren screaming BUBBLE!
If chips are getting efficient in power consumption & everything, what's the point? And what's the breakeven cost like, why no-one is discussing that?
How long before we see this here --> https://killedbygoogle.com/
Imagine trying to debug a memory leak on a server that's literally in orbit. My incident response pager just got a whole lot scarier.
Another ambitious Google project. Excited to see this in a 'killed by Google' list within five years.
And just like that Elon Musk shifted the overton window away from "unthinkable" on yet another topic.
Did anyone at and point say it's technically impossible? There's been computers in space since the 60s after all.
It's just far out research experiment like another commented quoted from the text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49834746
You need to hang out at ArsTechnica more.
But even in this comment stream there are tons of people saying the cooling problem is insurmountable.
oh forgot about ars. a very cynical crowd
There are multiple people in these comments saying it's impossible.
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I think one of the reasons for putting these in space is to move them beyond the borders of any national control.
You can't launch from the US without the federal government giving you permission. And SpaceX does not have (nor are they planning) any launch pads outside the US. [And because of ITAR, I'm not even sure they'd be allowed to build one.]
However, I do think avoiding local control (state/city permits) is a reason for this.
Rocket Lab has launch pads in New Zealand.
> (nor are they planning)
Not true
What does it matter where physically computers are located? If the owners can be imprisoned in US, the will cooperate with US government.
Surely if this were the reason, you'd just put it in international waters?
As long as the company has a HQ and owners that care about their quality of life, they don’t really gain any extra safety by moving their hardware to space compared to keeping it where they are based.
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You don't think Google has a self-interest in this? Google up how many shares of spacex are held by Alphabet.
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perhaps the dumbest idea since solar roadways
> Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure
It’s very confusing to have a project related to space called a moonshot project.
They should put data centers on the moon and call it Project Spaceshot.
Haha, yes. I think Silicon Valley (the show ), made fun of the same thing. "Not so long ago, people called the idea of sending a man to the moon a moonshot"
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The part I find wilder than cooling is the formation flying. If I remember their paper right, it's 81 satellites inside a 1 km radius, neighbours 100 to 200 m apart, because the optical links only get datacenter bandwidth over short distances. The ISS is about 110 m across, so that's satellites roughly an ISS-length apart, all doing 7.5 km/s
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The video on cooling is quite vague, maybe on purpose to not give away proprietary technology. But I'm truly curious as to how they can dissipate the heat once they move it from TPUs into radiators.
As mentioned in the video in the void the only way they can remove heat from the radiator is via radiation, but that is extremely slow and ultimately the rate of heat generation in TPUs would be higher than the dissipation rate of the radiators and the whole thing would get heated up over time.
Properly size the radiators (ie solve the aforementioned 'extremely slow' black body equation in reverse) and you won't have a problem.
I wonder if a technique to pack crazy high amounts of heat in a small mass and just eject it in an orbit to the sun would be viable. Probably not, but the idea of a datacenter pooping its heat into little pellets is quite entertaining. Like Lila's pet from Futurama.
It would take more energy than all the satellites put together to drop heat pellets into the sun.
This is being done using ammonia. For every tonne of compute, add at least four tons of cooling, not counting the chassis.
Here's a recent talk about the ridiculousness² of building compute in space: https://youtu.be/eo7MEPgWGic