Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.
1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites
For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth
Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
that may have been the case before but it is not anymore. I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree house. also see provisions in OBBB
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space.
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.
So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.
Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
Amazon’s new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for compute.
Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things.
They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices.
Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
We can tell because it’s not being treated as a serious goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part that’s really exciting to kids who get particularly excited by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus is on developing all the less glamorous but equally essential components of a successful Mars mission, like making sure the crew stays healthy.
Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
A significant number of AI companies and investors are hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but I suppose it might be possible. Which wouldn't make it any more sane.
But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the machine god first." Make of this what you will.
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
Be careful with the math there. While a 4th power is awesome you got the Stefan-Boltzman constant to consider and that's on the order of 10^-8
Radiative power is really efficient for hot things but not so great when you're trying to keep things down to normal levels. Efficient for shedding heat from a sun but not so much for keeping a cpu from overheating...
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a specific source of latent demand that is large enough to soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver, then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a business plan that’s been thought through as clearly as a $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.
“Defense” is not nearly specific enough to count as an answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in particular come to mind:
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.
Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again? A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing through it?
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
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?
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
Why are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
> Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach?
My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
Shedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive for lots of reasons.
> it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC
This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60 satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per year of today's Falcon 9...
The argument about problems of dissipating heat still stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically, out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on LEO.
Even the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.
So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.
The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing density on communication satellites, if we could dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue they would have like triple the capacity and could just drop everything back to the US (like their fans think they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to a ground station usually in the same country as the source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.
I have actually argued this from the other side, and I reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.
IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its heavy again, and several space engineering types want to slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems to be preferred.
I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then other, better people step in to actually do it. Also triple the time he says it will take to solve the problem.
And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.
Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.
> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS
It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.
And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
The ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data centers in space in the GW range.
Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200 metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?
plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.
Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
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Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must be factoring in something else-
Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR controlled countries and/or sanctioned countries/individuals.
Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can REALLY verify system behavior once its up there. So NSA/CIA etc sure are chomping at the bit to allow it.
I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less outlandish/tinfoily as well.
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others.
Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system
A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.
Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.
> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led
You to believe that itself.
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and reality will stop changing.
Everything dies. Deal with it.
Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will never know. You do that by improving things, not burning limited resources on a conman.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load.
The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
It does not have to sound reasonable to us, but to Musk.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
1. Inference
2. Training
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...
Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.
There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
Right. You build your computers out of superconductors, and they don't get hot.
Sadly, they also don't compute.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold? Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's shadow and the sun hits you.
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.
I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.
It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
> There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP.
For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping.
There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
> I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out.
I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.
It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.
It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.
1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites
For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth
Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
that may have been the case before but it is not anymore. I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree house. also see provisions in OBBB
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people
> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve
no he won't
So freedom from law and regulation?
Well let's face it. Not all law and regulation is created equal. Look at Europe.
But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space.
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
> is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments
Source? I can't immediately find anything like that.
What counts towards a bullshit budget? Permitting is a drop in the bucket compared to construction costs.
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961
>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
> will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer
And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.
So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.
Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
Amazon’s new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for compute.
> 10th (or worse) best AI company
You might only care about coding models, but text is dominating the market share right now and Grok is the #2 model for that in arena rankings.
Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things.
They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices.
Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
Plus government backstop. The federal government (especially the current one) is not going to let SpaceX fail.
Maybe not, but they might force it to sell at fire sale prices to another aerospace company that doesn't have the baggage.
The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
I think he has rocket company that needs more work.
Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company.
The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project.
I really think it's that simple.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
Going to Mars is not a serious goal.
We can tell because it’s not being treated as a serious goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part that’s really exciting to kids who get particularly excited by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus is on developing all the less glamorous but equally essential components of a successful Mars mission, like making sure the crew stays healthy.
> colonize mars
Oh, that crap again.
Nobody colonizing Mars. Get real. The most likely outcome, is him landing on a cell when the full Epstein files come out.
Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution
> win the AI race
I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean?
Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.
It’s a graft to keep people distracted and allow for positioning as we fall off the end of the fossil energy boom.
Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
Being too far ahead for competitors to catch up, similar to how google won browsers, amazon won distribution, etc
A significant number of AI companies and investors are hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but I suppose it might be possible. Which wouldn't make it any more sane.
But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the machine god first." Make of this what you will.
It’s a framing device to justify the money, the idea being the first company (to what?) will own the market.
Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs?
Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.
Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.
> xAI needs money to win the AI race
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
Can’t you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and dissipates.
This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
Be careful with the math there. While a 4th power is awesome you got the Stefan-Boltzman constant to consider and that's on the order of 10^-8
Radiative power is really efficient for hot things but not so great when you're trying to keep things down to normal levels. Efficient for shedding heat from a sun but not so much for keeping a cpu from overheating...
Good intuition, that is generally how radiators work in space.
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
yeah if you want a heat thruster
You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.
Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out the back.
Where will they go, nobody knows!
Depending on where they land, you can double the service you offer. AI computations coupled with rods from God.
When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
There might be a lot of induced demand from starship. I’m sure defense is a big one.
No, but really, where will it come from?
If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a specific source of latent demand that is large enough to soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver, then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a business plan that’s been thought through as clearly as a $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.
“Defense” is not nearly specific enough to count as an answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
That's wise.
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
musk is always up to something but remarkably people still eat this stuff up - remarkable to watch!
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
> aka fancy air conditioning pumps
Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more radiators.
Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's not plainly not viable.
> getting quite good here with nanotechnology
Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.
My dude, heat pipes were invented for satellites and there’s people walking around with piezo pumps in their phones these days. We’re getting close.
Peltiers generate a lot of heat to get the job done so even though electricity is pretty much free, probably not a sure bet.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
> And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
So your hot thing is radiating directly onto the next hot thing over, the one that also needs to cool down?
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.
Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
This makes zero sense.
> Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does yours?
Engine bays have a lot of design go into where to keep heat and where to get rid of it. You can look up thermal coatings and ceramics etc.
Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again? A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing through it?
Seems like quite a massive difference to ignore.
Let's just hope the person you are responding to isn't Elon Musk!
I wouldn't say that roadster isn't doing much driving but dang is it drifting!
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
[0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
The ISS is designed to emit 126kW of heat radiation between the active cooking systems and the solar array cooling system.
Which is less than a single rack of GPUs.
I agree, all the good papers definitely talk about custom designed radiators being used on the dark sides of data center in space.
Let me google that for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has MASSIVE radiators. Most of its volume is radiator. 900 cubic meters of space 2500 square meters of radiator.
The TL;DR is they radiate it into space via large, high surface area arms that stick out of the station.
apocalyptic space twitter with satellites shaped like whales that drop from the sky would have been cooler.
quantum computers on the sun!
It will be the communications, not the compute part.
One man able to put a data center worth of mass in orbit is one man able to crash a datacenter worth of mass into Earth anywhere he wants.
Not a given. Re enter the atmosphere. Sure. Avoid vaporization? Much harder problem.
There is some evidence to suggest that spacex knows how to reenter an object without burning it up.
The engineering overlap between between a small object designed for reentry and a flying (crashing...) warehouse is not a circle.
Once upon a time there was a bonkers "rods from god" mass bomb idea, but that didn't work either.
Sometimes without even meaning to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/spacex-cbc-debris-s...
A glaring lack of oceans to boil
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
and then talks about some of those other issues.
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
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?
There is zero benefit, non nada.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?
Wow, now you say it, that finally makes sense. Especially given it looked stupid and all the other VR chat solutions could already do legs.
It also gave us Mechanical Turk and microdrones!
I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this.
It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
Can you smoke ketamine?
> Can you smoke ketamine?
Apparently [1]. But "when ketamine is heated, its chemical structure degrades, reducing its potency."
[1] https://innervoyagerecovery.com/can-you-smoke-ketamine/
(Going to go ahead and VPN to my home connection from this airport Wi-fi.)
In space, ketamine smokes you.
This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.
Yeah, if he gets more SpaceX shares in exchange for the xAI garbage shares then he wins, because the SpaceX shares will sell well.
Also he can launder government funding for his AI company now
Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.
More likely, stole grok from nerds who learned grok from Heinlein.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
[checks today's bitcoin price]
Oh.
Is it below the level where mining and blockchain updates become uneconomic yet?
well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a datahaven for less-reputable banks!
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.
Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building the Torment Nexus.
[delayed]
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and seize or block?
They make no sense otherwise.
The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a scheme to get investment and they’re never going to actually go through with it.
At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
yes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any day now
[delayed]
That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
Just ask this scientician.
Uhhhh
Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
Why are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
> Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
Shedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
Bill Gates was also pretty good
Or you are actively trying to have the meetings when you are sure he cannot be present because he keeps derailing them.
I have heard similar things
Very confused by this plan.
How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive for lots of reasons.
> it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC
This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60 satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per year of today's Falcon 9...
The argument about problems of dissipating heat still stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically, out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on LEO.
Even the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.
So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.
I mean you have this around the wrong way.
The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing density on communication satellites, if we could dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue they would have like triple the capacity and could just drop everything back to the US (like their fans think they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to a ground station usually in the same country as the source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.
I have actually argued this from the other side, and I reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.
IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its heavy again, and several space engineering types want to slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems to be preferred.
I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then other, better people step in to actually do it. Also triple the time he says it will take to solve the problem.
And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.
Are there many of those current satellites running gpus and actually generating lots of heat?
Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.
> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS
It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.
And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
The ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data centers in space in the GW range.
Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200 metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.
It’s a vacuum
Vacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we use it to keep our coffee hot
which is why the whole idea of data centers in space is ridiculous.
I'm glad to realize we're in violent agreement, I thought you were implying cooling would be easy due to the vacuum!
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.
Space is cold because there isn't anything there.
There is also no matter to wick the heat away.
but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
There is no matter.
It's cold there because there isn't anything there.
So there is nothing to conduct or convect the heat away.
It's like a giant vacuum insulated thermos.
Is putting data centers in thermos' a good idea?
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?
plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
what thermometer would you use to measure the temperature of space?
I'm not a scientist but i am also sure it will be fucking hard to dissipate heat in a vacuum
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
If you believe that, you’re Musks target investor group.
I was skeptical until you mentioned this. Now I'm onboard
This is your brain on Factorio
They’re going to have to deal with the moon nazis first. Oh no wait a minute.
Makes sense. I hope their plasma coolant supplies last long enough to get self sustained.
They'll just mine up Hemium-3 for that.
Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?
Mars which is literally covered in poisonous perchlorate soil
I would, it would be an adventure.
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
We can't keep our already perfect planet livable, but we're going to terraform a totally new one. Yeah right buddy.
It'd probably be easier to terraform than convince everyone it's possible.
I can't even tell what's sarcasm anymore lol.
The comment you are replying to is definitely sarcasm… I hope?
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal
take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel
at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space
seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space
perhaps I'm missing something?
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
> But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.
Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
Human organs manage to grow pretty well in 1G. In fact, they're almost certainly going to be terrible at it in zero g.
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.
Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
Well said.
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
-------------------
Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
This is the correct analysis.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must be factoring in something else-
Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR controlled countries and/or sanctioned countries/individuals.
Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can REALLY verify system behavior once its up there. So NSA/CIA etc sure are chomping at the bit to allow it.
I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less outlandish/tinfoily as well.
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la... (and this is two years ago!) [2] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
This is the thing I don’t get. Everyone talking about the “how” but nobody talking about the “why”? It makes literally no sense.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
Snake oil, like bitcoin.
A lot of people will invest in this because "it's the future" and a few will make a lot of money on that.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others. Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
> Particularly at high altitudes.
Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.
The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less time it will last.
There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way lower than things like GEO.
Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.
And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not going to be fast.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
Isn't Starlink already basically a distributed datacenter in space? they have like ~9k+ satellites up there already at least according to: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html.
what am I missing here?
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more practical. Several companies working on it: https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
This looks like it depends on the outside air to cool the coolant. "Radiative" can mean that too, not just IR radiation.
I don't quite believe this.
Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a heat pump?
> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system
A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.
Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.
> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.
So if you’re area constrained maybe.
We had one. It was that sulphur used in shipping fuel.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
But it never had an orbital launch capability.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
presumably the UK could figure out how to remove the top of a trident missile and replace it with a load of ball bearings
Tridents can reach mach 19. Orbital velocity is more like mach 100.
Not that the UK manufactures trident missiles anyway.
if only you could put some sort of explosive charge on the top
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
LEO is big, really big. Even at the smaller radius of ground level, large volcanos, forest fires, etc. Don't affect the whole earth.
No?
Isn't the eventual plan to park these data centers out by the Lagrange points?
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
Like there isn’t enough stuff floating up there already.
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
A month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286645
Related, around the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
> Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and reality will stop changing.
Everything dies. Deal with it.
Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will never know. You do that by improving things, not burning limited resources on a conman.
If this outcome is guaranteed, why hasn't it already happened ?
Because we exist inside time, not outside it.
How do you know it hasn't?
The whole point of the space stuff is not accepting all life dying out on any timescale.
A data center in space is probably toast after some years of space radiation.
High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere. Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you don't need on earth.
It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are trying to find any justification.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load.
The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
(Yes, I know what steel manning is)
Couldn’t deliver on anything?
Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space
Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here on earth
A more reasonable project would be repurposing portions of the ISS for a data center and using that as a POC for larger scale stations.
What data centers in space enable is protection for the compute of near-superintelligent AIs from the interference of humans.
As an alleged human, I'd like to preserve my option to interfere.
No, no, no - Villa Starlight was the prison the Tessier-Ashpool AI needed help to escape from!
I don't get the point at all of these. You:
- have very non-deterministic latency
- are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China could disrupt your space data center)
- have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
You’re also located outside of any country that could regulate
A country will definitely still be able to regulate you. Also under what regulations they'd be afraid of other than local building laws
and : kessler syndrome
where do you put things, so that no one will be able to warrant thier way into access?
entirely out of jurisdiction, where it is prohibitively expensive to travel, and impractical for any physical seizure.
you dont need to compute, just store it and P2P amongst satellites.
essentially an orbital NAS.
I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they made up an interesting story to give it some context
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
It seems quite telling we are even discussing this.
What if you just took some ketamine and tried again? Does it make sense?
you know you're looking at some hard analysis when they use the number "gazillion". can I get that one in scientific notation?
I just purchased a sandwich I made from myself in a deal that values me a $1tn. I plan to make toasties in space.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Abolish_The_First_Lady - arguing that the FLOTUS role shouldn't exist
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Upward_Mobility,_Downward_So... - perhaps a less original idea that economic mobility leads to poorly performing lower-paying services.
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis - an example of one way that factoids get upgraded to facts
A pie in the sky
Comments full of EDS. Everyone is a rocket scientist in here also.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more compute.
And 1 ML rack uses the power of like 10 regular racks
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
Don't let common sense stop you from a good time.
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
What is this website?
The website insists that you let it record your voice in order to show you the dangers of AI. Is it trolling the visitor? https://civai.org/talk
If we won't stop what he is doing with grok and ai-generated CSAM, he will be completely free from oversight up there.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
It does not have to sound reasonable to us, but to Musk.
But it's absolutely amazing hype and memevestors love it.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
It's lala land nonsense.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
> - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I bet you can sell this service to the DoD!
Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the highest bidder.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for underground datacenters, is now valued at $500B.
Nah. They get contract for mining on Mars, valued north of $1T.
there was an article recently about a company wanting to put nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km deep).
I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical, because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.
not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl
Interesting idea. 2km deep could work. I'm not sure how cooling or maintenance would work.
Depth below surface | Typical temperature (°C) | Indicative cost to drill 1.2 m diameter hole
500 m | 15–25 | $5–10 million
1 km | 25–40 | $10–20 million
2 km | 50–70 | $25–45 million
3 km | 75–100 | $50–80 million
4 km | 100–130 | $90–140 million
5 km | 130–160 | $150–250 million
How else would you secure skynet against Sarah Connor?
how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?
With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.
Admiral Grace Hopper is famous for using a length of wire to explain to others what a nanosecond was.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-embraces-musks-g...
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
We were supposed to be on Mars right now, but I guess data centers in space are nice too. Kinda disappointed they aren't on the moon.
Facts.
Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
Like I’ve always said love him or hate him Elon Musk is a SPACE OIL SALESMAN!
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
You mean physical reality
Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816
(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
Why is it hard requirement?
You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won’t decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay faster.
If you put stuff underground it is much harder to communicate.
And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused temporary amnesia.
To say so I am not a Musk fan - I am sci-fi fan and I make imaginary/silly stuff up on my own.
I also like reading how people argue with not what I wrote but with what they imagined I wrote.
It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.
There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.
After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
If you read these comments carefully, you see that they can all be summed up as:
"That Musk guy is so naive to think you can put data centers in space, what a doof".
Similar comments were probably made regarding electric cars, reusable rockets, buying Twitter, and so on.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
> No cooling necessary.
This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
3 are ways to cool things (lose energy):
In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.Superconductors.
Magnets.
(We're just saying random physics things right?)
No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
Right. You build your computers out of superconductors, and they don't get hot.
Sadly, they also don't compute.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold? Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's shadow and the sun hits you.
If/when we get high-performance superconducting computers, we wouldn't need to put the computers in space in the first place.
You've invented a room-temperature superconducting material? No?
Didn't think so.
Currently available superconductors still need liquid nitrogen cooling, meaning they're not feasible for in-orbit installations.
Could we use a constant stream of micro-asteroids as a heatsink?
i think so, next is Quantum right?
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
The computer hardware only needs to run enough AI compute to be smart enough to convince Musk that it's working. It should be fine.
Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.
I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.
It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
> There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP.
For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping.
There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
> I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out.
I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
you do know about the Sun? Earth? and the Moon? where would you get this 4 kelvin?
Why is there no cooling necessary?
Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.
I don’t care about convincing anyone. A question was asked and I answered the best I could with the time I had at hand.
Also read by comment above that discusses WHY superconductors could be the key to cooler electronics in space.
Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?
Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.