The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.
I think stopping the heat conductivity is a solved problem - space telescopes manage to do this. But all in all, cooling in space remains a very big challenge.
No, it isn’t solved. The James Webb telescope was shipped with cryogenic coolant, and put in an orbit in the shadow of the moon far from the radiating earth. Once it runs out in a few years, it’s done.
James Webb, being an infrared telescope, has to be extremely cold: It's Mid-Infrared Instrument is actively cooled to 7°K (-266°C).
Most other instruments (NIRCam, NIRSpec, FGS/NIRISS) operate at about 40 Kelvin (-233°C) using only passive cooling (i.e. the sunshield).
Clearly this would be cold enough for a data center. Clearly the sunshield can be very well thermally insulated from the rest of the telescopy. The sun-facing side is up to 300°C hot. The cold side is -233°C.
I'm not saying radiating the heat from the GPUs is a solved problem. Just the thermal insulation between the solar panels and the rest of the spacecraft.
There's very little on JWST that makes it hot. Furthermore, the spacecraft bus where the non-scientific instruments exist) is on the other side of the sunshade so that the waste heat from the RAD750 (a single processor clocked at 118 MHz - PowerPC 750 architecture (Macintosh computers in '97) that uses 5 watts of power designed to operate -55°C to 125°C) doesn't interfere with the scientific instruments.
Putting an AI rack there is a completely different scale of power and cooling than what JWST uses.
Yes. Radiating heat away is a big problem - I totally agree! But stopping heat conduction is a solved problem! Consider the temperature of your pot handles. That‘s all I was saying.
The energy collected from the solar panels must be converted into heat in the AI chips. It's really like putting the AI chips directly into the sun, just with extra steps. Sunlight gets transformed into electricity which gets transformed into heat in the chips.
So the satelite receives say 13kW of heat energy as it has a 10 square metre surface facing the sun.
That is converted to 2.5kW electic and 10.5kW heat. The electric is then used to power the computer and ply doom or whatever. That 2.5kW of electric is then converted to 2.5kW of heat. That means the satelite has to dissipate 13kW of heat.
But even without the electric use it still receives 13kW of heat and dissipates 13kW of heat.
Any object in space will emit as much energy via radiation as it receives otherwise it will continue to increase in temperature. The question is thus what temperature does it sit at to make this in equilibrium.
If the satelite was perfectly flat it would run at 120c for a black body. If it was a lump of stew it would be about 150c.
To reduce that to 20C you need about 50sqm radistor, or 5 times the surface area in shadow. The shadow is about 350-400m long
So you build it as a cone with the flat circular area facing the sun and the pointy area in its shadow you’d only need a cone height of about 20m to emit enough heat to keep the satelite to room temperature.
They actually need the entirety of the backside of the panels to cool them - if not they would literally burn out from the accumulated heat from being exposed to the sun.
The benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets. It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15 years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything is more money and power.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Musk is running out of runway on his way to infinity dollars and since Tesla is slowly crumbling compared to its valuation, the ideas need to become crazier and crazier: humanoid robots tomorrow, self driving taxis tomorrow, reusable rockets going to Mars tomorrow, data centers in space tomorrow.
It would be fun to watch if Musk wouldn't funnel a lot of money that could be used for good, instead. Imagine how many diseases we could cure with all that money. Or feed and educate the poor. Or how much walkable and bikeable and ultimately liveable infrastructure we could build world wide. Or how fewer plastics we could use, ingest and discard if we could promote healthy and natural alternatives.
And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
There is no accountability anymore. Literal crypto pump and dump schemes mint millionaires and funnel money to billionaires and not a single investigation, indictment, court case, sentence, or even fine!
It's a casino and the mirage of billionaire competency would vanish instantly if the media were even slightly skeptical.
The media is owned, it's a sham. It's a play.
> And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
Not all techies, but enough of them to keep the raft afloat.
I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing out the fact that the moon is not made of blue cheese a kind of "rigorous" reporting?
Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the press extra constitutional protections for.
I was poorly trying to raise this trite distinction, asserting skepticism falls closer to Opinion than Journalism. The line gets more fine every day. I know. Take it up with them/their peers.
'Rigorous' would be "Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'", not "Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'... and here's how we feel/think about it".
I'd argue this is not opinion but fact. Also, articles very often didn't say "Musk says" but just took his word for fact, not even quoting him. And in the era of Trump/Musk, their practices should evolve.
The same thing happened with Hyperloop. Many journalists are simple stenographers of the utterances of others and there's no verification applied to any of the claims.
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
> I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center
Which is very nice for Musk, who can spend 30 seconds running his mouth, and people jump to assuming that a) it's being designed, b) by skilled people, c) the math and finances works out already, d) that 'completely obvious' problems must simply be your lying eyes, and contort themselves to put all the effort into defending it.
Even though Musk has a history of lying announcements and not being able to deliver and the 'completely obvious' problems were actually problems that nobody solved. Where is the 2017 full self driving car? Where is the Vision-over-LIDAR success? Where is the Hyperloop that "would be able to whisk passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in just 35 minutes"? Where are the 2025 orbital refuelling test flights for the Moon and Mars schedule, and the plans for how to keep cryogenic liquid Hydrogen cold in Space? Where was the "funding secured" Musk lied about for taking Tesla stock private in 2018 when judges found there wasn't any funding and fined him $20M? Where's the person Musk said in 2011 he could "put on Mars in a decade"? Where's the uncrewed Mars ship in 2022 he announced in 2017? The human voyage in 2024?
> "I'm a physicist myself"
And if someone tells you they have found a quantum zero-point free energy room temperature superconducting over-unity perpetual motion machine, do you jump to their defense because you assume the speaker must be very careful and smarter than everyone else? Or do you say "sounds unlikely; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
> "I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed."
The ISS cost 100-150 billion, is "larger than a 6 bedroom house", and its solar panels can generate 250 kW. NVidia says their AI datacenter costs $50-60 billion, needs 1GW of electricity, and look at the size of it: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nvidia-worth-5-trillion-...
You're looking at that multiple-warehouses-structure which could sink the output of an entire nuclear power station, and going with "it would be cheaper if we launched that into space"?
Sure, until you need to replace or upgrade it. How long does a server on earth last for, how often does it need maintenance / replacing? And how long is the expected or desired lifetime for a server in space? Then calculate weight and cost etc.
> Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
"Maybe" is hope, you can't build a business on hope / wishful thinking. And the running costs for data centers on earth can be reduced too if you build them the same way as a sattelite - solar panels + battery + radiative cooling gives you enough data to compare. But servers / data centers aren't built that way because of cost vs benefit.
> If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done.
See, it's possible for sure - we HAVE computers in space, powered, cooled, running 24/7. The questions are whether it makes economic sense, both launch costs and running / maintenance costs. That's straight math, and the math isn't mathing.
> I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
Sure, but the ISS itself cost ~100 billion to build and operate - probably more, this is based on a ten second search query. While I'm sure launches are cheaper than ever and will be even cheaper in the future, it's still tens of billions to build a data center in space, plus you'd need astronauts, supplies, hardware, etc - all a LOT more expensive than the equivalent processing power on earth.
> These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
True, so we as humanity should offer resistance to plans to launch thousands of objects into space unless they have a clear and definite benefit. I'm not worried about Starlink, it's a benefit to all the areas that don't have (open) access to the internet and they're in low-earth orbit so they'll fall back within 5 years. But I just don't see the benefit in putting datacenters in space, not when it's so much cheaper and more viable to put them on earth.
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
There is zero benefit, non nada.