The Space-Based Data Center Hype Machine Is Already In Orbit (ieee.org) 195
IEEE Spectrum argues that orbital data centers remain far from economically or technically practical despite Elon Musk's prediction that space will become the cheapest place to run AI within a few years. Deploying SpaceX's proposed million-satellite constellation would require enormous increases in launch and manufacturing capacity, while cooling, radiation, maintenance, latency, orbital debris, and astronomical interference present major unresolved obstacles. Longtime Slashdot reader xetdog shares the report: Consider this: There are roughly 14,500 active satellites in orbit. Musk's Starlink constellation accounts for about two thirds of those. Both the launch cadences and satellite-manufacturing capacity would have to scale up astronomically to deploy a million orbital data center satellites. For context, there have been roughly 7,000 orbital launches in all of human history. To loft 1 million satellites into low Earth orbit on SpaceX's Starship, which is designed to carry up to 60 satellites per vehicle, would require 16,666 launches exclusively devoted to satellite deployments. Considering that SpaceX launched a record 165 orbital missions in 2025, even at 10 times that cadence, it would take a decade. And how long would it take to build 1 million satellites, given Starlink's current pace of around 4,000 per year and a generous tenfold increase in capacity? Short of a manufacturing revolution, try 25 years. Dissipating heat in space also requires enormous radiators. As IEEE Spectrum editor Dina Genkina noted, startup Starcloud has sent only one Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit, and "their radiator was too weak to let the chip run at full power." A single 700-watt H100 would require about 1.4 square meters of radiator area, while a 100-megawatt data center could need 2,500 radiators measuring 80 square meters each.
So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."
So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."
So basically... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not lies, a carefully crafted scheme to defraud investors of their money
Re: So basically... (Score:2)
If that was the intent, it wouldn't really work due to Elon himself having more downside exposure than anybody, including all institutional investors combined.
Besides, some of this argument is over engineering problems that have already been solved.
Re: So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the downside? SpaceX stock got pumped for their IPO. The money is made. As long as the hype keeps going they can raise more any time they want, or Elon could sell some of his shares. If it turns out to be unworkable, SpaceX (and subsidiaries) are back where they started.
There aren't really any unsolved engineering problems. SpaceX can absolutely put a rack of nvidia GPUs into low orbit. We could have done that in the 70s. The argument is whether it's economical or not.
Which is cheaper, putting a thousand square metres of solar panels, a rack of GPUs, a vacuum cooling system and propulsion in low orbit and incinerating and replacing it all every few years, or the panels, GPUs and a convective radiator that is ~50x more efficient on the ground and runs for twenty plus?
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SpaceX made $75 billion actual real dollars. It's in the bank.
Sure, the individual VCs aren't allowed to take their actual cash out of the company until August 6. Want to bet the datacenter hype keeps going until at least then?
Elon Musk, or whoever manages him, already learned not to post speculative tweets about his companies followed up shortly later by "just jokes lol".
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
The scary part is Musk isn't alone. The insanity of the LLM data-centre build out has got far too much money thrown at it already. There's no way it will be recouped. It can only end badly now.
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They have a whole network of things up there [wikipedia.org] processing and communicationg.
I haven't looked much at the architecture, but I suspect it's kludgy, completely lacking elegance.
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If that is the case, then it all makes a whole lot more sense. There is no need for cost-efficiency when dealing with military equipment - the only question to answer is does it do what is needed for the GD system? And if what is needed is processing tracking data and generating firing solutions locally, without multiple trips back and forth to orbit, then making it work is the key, not cost or complexity (to some degree, even the DoD has limited funds).
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I think satellite data centers are colossally stupid, but I suspect the larger problem is the public's gullibility for big lies.
Now, which things ARE lies and which aren't has been delightfully co-opted by politics; what one puts on that list is *instantly* translated into political affiliation.
I can think of 3 big lies that would immediately get me labeled "stupid maga fuck".
I can think of 3 others that would likewise get me labeled "woke fag".
Amusingly, putting all 6 in a list would be cognitively negativ
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Yes. One wonders how this guy got rich. He is probably very persuasive, at least to weaker minds.
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Informative)
... it's just another pack of lies like everything else Musk hypes up.
Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.
Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.
I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.
Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:
Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.
The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.
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I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.
Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitabili
"Yay" (Score:2)
Rax the Tucking Fich! (Score:3)
More evidence we need to tax the rich, they have way too much money and are chasing really stupid shit. After you have 20 yachts then #21 doesn't have the same ego kick, so you look for pie-in-sky investments.
Re: Rax the Tucking Fich! (Score:5, Informative)
So you would rather that we burn millions of tons of methane to hoist disposable data centers into orbit which cannot be serviced, so that they can fall out of the sky someday and we can burn millions of tons of more methane to replace them, because some asshole has a shitload of money to try it, in order to make more money for himself at the cost of whatever simpletons (like yourself) buy his bullshit?
All the other things you talk about were never thought to be stupid, or a solution in search of a problem. They were research for the sake of expanding human understanding, which were then applied by engineers to do useful things. You can't even get that bit right.
Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean you *should* do that thing. This is purely stupid, for purely stupid reasons - the billionaires are tired of doing what jurisdictions say, so they're trying to find somewhere extra-jurisdictiony to put their equipment.
This is a more expensive, less practical "Sealand" with a limited lifetime of operation that disproportionately pollutes. But you think that's a perfectly fine pursuit.
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Things like nuclear magnetic resonance, lasers, quantum mechanics, and the fundamental mathematics we base encryption in today were all thought to be "stupid" or "solution in search of a problem" and yet pretty much everything you rely on today depends on them.
Non sequitur. None of your examples were ever thought to be "stupid." Maybe controversial for a time, but not stupid.
Science advances through speculation followed by verification with experiment/observation. There are no "stupid" ideas in science, just wrong ones. And they get discarded.
We live in a free society. You're free to do whatever you want with your own time and money. If this causes you to lose sleep at night, you might prefer Cuba, North Korea or (as of recently) Russia.
Free to do whatever you want, as long as it does not impact others negatively. And launching a million satellites into earth-orbit space is likely to do just that. It's several orders of magnitude beyond the number of activ
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This isn't even a bubble. This is private equity and billionaires pipe dreaming. And I'm talking about the crack pipe.
SSDs have a measurable lift in failure rates just being installed into aircraft due to cosmic radiation causing bit-shifts in the controller firmware. What is going to happen to this shit when it's even higher up, and harder to replace and service?
These are disposable data centers, with orders of magnitude more complexity for shedding heat. It's never going to make sense until we can get
Some poor sysadmin having to deal with this. (Score:2)
Re: Some poor sysadmin having to deal with this. (Score:2)
We don't build high-density datacenters with plans to EVER touch failing hardware. When a node breaks, it's taken off-line, not repaired. When an upgrade is needed, the datacenter is turned-over/forklift upgrade - no one runs into a google datacenter and talks about adding more RAM.
At one time we talked about dropping watertight datacenters in the ocean - this is kinda the same idea, but it includes rockets! (And, relies on wireless technology and solar panels, ocean-based datacenters could be wired into a
So if you're wondering why such an obvious scam (Score:2)
So this lets them guzzle down all your water and electricity so that you have to start rationing both of them while they go to public and tell the public that they have a solution to the problem.
As an added bonus Elon Musk can pretend SpaceX has a magic new customer that doesn't actually exist in order to justify the phony valuation while he extracts all the money from your 401k.
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The rest of the world is not out to get you.
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That's it, he is doing it to generate fake potential future business for SpaceX. In reality, what will probably happen is others enter the market and undercut Starlink and launching to LEO, and that business dries up. It's already happening with Tesla cars, which are constantly heavily discounted because rivals make better ones at lower prices. They are hanging on in the UK by somehow being a "prestige" badge along side BMW and the like... Actually I can see the connection there.
Oh it's not feasable (Score:2)
And they know it, radiation, heat and cost. Another problem is kessler syndrome and space debris. There is a limit to how much stuff we can put up there.
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Space Data Centers are in the same category as fully autonomous self-driving cars within eighteen months that he 'promised' in 2019.
You can watch the 'Autonomy Day' video on YouTube. People financed Model 3's on the promise of renting them as robotaxis while they were at work.
Physics is a hard stop on false promises.
It's OK to back difficult challenges with no underlying physical impossibilities that's engineering. Radiating heat into space is a physics problem.
I didn't believe the robotaxi promise then an
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That and Russia has suggested destroying the orbit if Starlink doesn't stop enabling terrorist attacks by NATO proxies on its people.
The AI cut-off dive bomb tactic is a blatant warcrime.
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Indeed. Maybe a meaningless stunt can be done that will then become more space-debris within a few months or years. But that is it.
Anticipation! (Score:2)
I look forward to Musk overcoming the limits of insolation in Earth orbit, the latency induced by the speed of light, and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
This is just as good an idea as the submarine he ordered built for cave rescue: it appeals to idiots who don't give any thought to the problem but think the proposed solution is 'cool'.
I don't get the appeal (Score:3)
AI data centers are evolving rapidly. You want to be able to rip and replace gear all the time. That's expensive to do in orbit.
Managing heat in a data center is a huge issue. It's very hard to dissipate heat in space. It's a lot easier to dump waste heat into the air or a river.
Communication between nodes, racks, and rows is a fundamental limit to AI performance. Spacing rows hundreds to thousands of kilometers apart is going to add speed-of-light delays and bandwidth limits. I don't see how you maintain performance in that environment.
All in all, this seems like an incredibly impractical idea. It really screams "I have rockets and want to find uses for them." But Musk is a smart guy, I have no doubt he's thought more about it than I have.
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Building a Chinese Data Center on the Moon (Score:2)
Didn't Heinlein write a novel in which someone built a data center on the Moon, out of off-the-shelf Chinese hardware?
Ah, got it: Temu is a Harsh Mistress.
IEEE is horribly under-informed (Score:2)
The company I work with can easily ramp up satellite production to the scale required. It's one of the reasons I got hired, my extensive manufacturing experience in electronics and solar and power systems pairs perfectly with the requirements.
Perhaps the IEEE should spend some actual time with the companies that already have some of this hardware in orbit, with more going up soon.
Tesla doesn't make solar panels (Score:2)
So Musk's Physics BSc is worthless... (Score:2)
While a BSc is the lowest level of academic Physics, it should be enough to easily determine that data-centers in space are a really dumb idea. Well. I guess he essentially bought that degree.
Something to consider (Score:3)
The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.
So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).
This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.
No, I don't think you can make this workable.
However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.
The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.
You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Interesting)
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The counter argument, is if they've gone to these efforts to develop chips so thermally & energy efficient for their workload they can run in space then why bother launching them into space in the first place?
I think that "why" question is one we should be considering much more closely.
Disclaimer: I'm staunchly anti-space-datacenter. It's asinine. TFS summarizes it well.
Here's a plausible answer to the why: Gobs of money have been dumped into giant terrestrial data centers. If those get taken out (they're huge targets), then what? If someone has a fallback in space, then the plebs will be unable to revolt and burn that datacenter down or take it over. They're ensuring that the working class is unable to seize th
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
A space-based datacenter is far more vulnerable than an earth-based datacenter (an earth-based datacenter can't be de-orbited by rouge control signals, for example), and once size exceeds anything considered 'small' the possibility of space trash corrupting the unit increases.
Of course, this all assumes the insane cost per Kg of lifting anything into space comes down wildly making these space-based datacenters in anyway practical at any meaningful scale.
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A space-based datacenter is far more vulnerable than an earth-based datacenter (an earth-based datacenter can't be de-orbited by rouge control signals, for example), and once size exceeds anything considered 'small' the possibility of space trash corrupting the unit increases.
How many satellites have been de-orbitted by rogue hackers thus far? And if there were a million of them spread across the sky's, you couldn't take them all out (at least not without a much more sophisticated attack, and this would already require a sophisticated attack).
Meanwhile, a mob of angry people with tiki torches could take out any earth based datacenter. That's what I think the mega-wealthy would want to protect against. A distributed super computer in space would be unassailable by your average Jo
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How many satellites have been de-orbitted by rogue hackers thus far?
Your parent poster didn't say rogue, he said rouge.
People are being far too blase about the very real possibility of Color Wars.
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HAHAHAHA The rouge scare is back!
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
"rouge control signals"
I thought he meant a red traffic light.
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Meanwhile, a mob of angry people with tiki torches could take out any earth based datacenter. That's what I think the mega-wealthy would want to protect against. A distributed super computer in space would be unassailable by your average Joe.
No, instead it's the incredibly few launch facilities, downlink facilities, and factories where they make this equipment that are assailable by your average Joe.
Why do you think someone intent on essentially domestic terrorism would give up because the multitude of data centers are out of reach? Do you really think terrorists don't have enough motivation to climb the logistics ladder until they find a chokepoint they can abuse?
Meanwhile, the capacity and serviceability of these "orbital data centers" are a
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I just don't know what problem they are trying to solve.
Any datacenter worth building is going to be cheaper to build on dirt, cheaper to cool on dirt, cheaper to maintain on dirt, cheaper to upgrade on dirt, cheaper to expand on dirt.
There is literally no operational mode that makes operating something in orbit cheaper than terrestrially, unless you need the thing reachable at equal latency from vast swaths of the planet at the same time. And for that, we have "multiple datacenters" which are still cheape
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Conspiracy theories are silly, and unnecessary.
Remember when Elon ruminated about hyperloop and everyone went nuts? Well, this time he ruminated about space datacentres. Oh, and SpaceX investors cashed out for ~$85 billion.
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So instead the revolutionists just destroy the downlink stations?
You can't put 100% of the infrastructure in space, without also putting 100% of what uses the infrastructure in space.
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So instead the revolutionists just destroy the downlink stations?
In this case, we already have a real world example - starlink terminals in Russia and Ukraine. It's nowhere near as straight forward to attempt to identify and disable millions of distributed terminals (google says they sold 3.9 million of them by end of 2024) compared to about 12,000 data centers world wide (and only a small subset of those are new AI ones).
You can't put 100% of the infrastructure in space, without also putting 100% of what uses the infrastructure in space.
But you could put 99% of the infrastructure in space (like everything that's in a data center), while allowing 0.0001% of what uses it to remain on ear
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Your fantasies aside, if he wants to try it despite your and IEEE's points, let him. It's his risk, not yours.
This isn't like letting your neighbor build his own car in his backyard. The risk goes far further than just him. That money wasn't earned, a million satellites would impact us all, and the launches aren't exactly good for the environment (you know, where we must all live). Scale makes this everyones problem.
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Stop trying to come up with reasons to live in a cave. This is how we progress.
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Lick more boots. This isn't progress.
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Why not both? Even if you have chips that are more efficient for *some* workloads, that's unlikely to entirely cancel out the headwinds facing people trying to build datacentres on the ground - training still seems to need as many power-hungry GPUs as you can throw at it. But putting some workloads in space could help. Someone providing AI compute as a service, which SpaceX already does, would need a combination of orbital and ground-based compute, it's not one or the other.
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The cost of putting anything in orbit is hideously expensive and there's little reason to do so in most cases. Musk just wants a reason to sell people the means getting there. If the data center could be put in space because bandwidth or latency aren't an issue, it could be put in northern Alaska, Siberia, etc. for less money.
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Interesting)
Size is free unlike on earth
This is the kind of assumption that people are making which shows how this is wrong
* the bigger it is, the directly proportionally higher chance some part of it it will get hit by something, which has a decent chance of having a cascading effect on the other components
* you've pointed out weight, which obviously comes with size - but you haven't pointed out that size =>weight => fuel needed to maintain orbit. Even with ionic thrusters using electricity and very very low fuel use this will matter.
Guess who has the data to do forward predictions.
people who are working on optimizing the energy needed by AI models - specifically the Chinese AI researchers and probably Google. If model sizes can be reduced with very limited loss of performance then the costs of putting them in space - especially latency as opposed to a local model - will be hugely damaging.
So I am guessing they have a target pricing on lbs that they can hit to make that business viable.
There's one business model which is absolutely crucial and everyone needs to understand that Elon is fundamentally sucking on the government teat, whatever people pretend. Military people need to run AI models in situations of compromised ground communication. Running, for example target identification and data selection in space makes 100% sense. Elon will be doing this in the knowledge that he's got a series of guaranteed government contracts that will pay for all the development he's doing. The risk in this case is that if a non-corrupt government does ever return in the US, they may audit his contracts and punish him for getting them through what they will consider to be illegal influence.
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
If it's not LEO, the orbit maintains itself.
Also if it's not LEO, there's a lot of... uhm... Space :-)
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Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
Yesz but LEO is also crowded, unstable, lacks minerals, and has a very narrow horizon.
It really boils.down to what your application requires.
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
That's where starship comes in.
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And where does "we can't even run a single GPU in orbit at full capacity without overwhelming the heat dissipation the propeller-heads thought would be adequate" come into it?
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It is LEO.
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And there's absolutely no fuel difference, or launch system difference to haul a big heavy chunk of metal and silicone to 700 miles above the Earth instead of 200 miles above it, is there?
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Interesting)
Military people need to run AI models in situations of compromised ground communication. Running, for example target identification and data selection in space makes 100% sense
That seems like a benefit of relying on satellite communication rather than a benefit of putting the data center in space.
What's the benefit over running the computation on the ground in a "normal" data center, beaming the results up to a satellite constellation, and then beaming them back down to those who need it? Starlink/Starshield already enable that.
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
In space, electrons are free.
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In space, heat dissipation is not free.
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Size is not free. Besides having to get the thing up there, which might come down to merely very expensive, there's drag in low Earth orbit, and the bigger the surface area of your satellite the more propulsion you need to keep it up there. The life of Starlink satellites is primarily limited by their propellant.
Even if you ignore launch costs entirely, is it cheaper to put your datacentre in space and replace it and your power plant every few years, or put it in a nice desert or on a floating island somewh
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So you don't see generating massive amounts of heat, with nowhere to dump it besides passive radiation into a vacuum as a problem.
Go on, what's the solution for that?
Radiators [Re: Bet against Elon if you like] (Score:2)
So you don't see generating massive amounts of heat, with nowhere to dump it besides passive radiation into a vacuum as a problem. Go on, what's the solution for that?
Radiators.
Since the heat out at most equals the solar power in, and the two-sided flat-plate equilibrium temperature of a panel receiving solar energy is 331K (58 C), if the solar panels are also the radiators, heat rejection is manageable.
(Completely accurate only far from the Earth. In Low Earth Orbit, you also have to account for albedo and infrared radiation from the Earth.)
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Another counter argument is that Elmo doesn't give fuck about damaging the environment so shoving oodles of his tat into space won't bother him, either the pollution of the launches or filling the skies with his tat. And it isn't clear why we need all them datacenters other than to make him and his buddies richer and more powerful. Their idea is that money = power and with enough of it, they can direct the lives of everyone else. Just like a good little Nazi.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:4, Insightful)
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All the Elon haters
If you don't hate Elon after what he did to USAID, which has killed thousands abroad elsewhere and also resulted in the screwworm showing up here, you're stupid.
You're going to look at what are the most practical workloads for space AI, what are the most efficient chips for those workloads in terms of tokens per Watt.
Fine words from someone who has done neither.
And so on and so forth - it's called engineering.
What you're doing is called simping.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, ad hominem attacks, the sure sign of someone who has a really strong argument.
You don't even know what an ad hominem attack is, since I didn't make one.
Learn what words mean before you use them, kid.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
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When I have mod points I will mod down ad hominem attacks on Slashdot members, attacks on the subject of the post (Elon Musk in this case) are less important as they are usually public figures, these simply don't get modded up.
The "you're stupid" above is indeed a mild ad hominem and could have been rephrased.
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"Taking a chainsaw to USAID" as we did absolutely has and will lead to deaths, however many if we're going by scale here, it's definitely not 0. Now you can just be honest and say "I don't care".
I would say we do have an ethical responsibility as the nation with the most to try and do good for the world. Yes that increases our soft power. Yes chainsawing those programs without debate or legislation reduced our soft power and makes us look like a joke on the world stage.
It's not just what was cut but how it
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Musk wasn't fired 60 days later, there was a legal limit on how long he could serve as an outside advisor, set back when Obama came up with the idea. And it was a good idea; I can't fault him on it.
Oh, and of course I care. This may also surprise you, but I'm a human being fully equipped with emotions and
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No there wasn't, how often did Trump actually mention USAID on the trail or in policy? Also that doesn't matter, Congress passed budgets, you want to remove funding that's how you do it. Just because you all have stopped giving a shit about the laws doesn't mean they don't exist it just means you don't care about them.
I'm a human being fully equipped with emotions and empathy.
Ok
But this is about how we allocate the scarce resources we have for our use.
The budget for USAID is not scarce. Not after the TCJA.
Am I supposed to worry more about the life of someone on the other side of the world, or my own neighbors?
Oh I never presumed you cared about your neighbors either, you support Trump!
funding lesbian theater troops in Ireland
Show me that line item and it's actual cost and goal. E
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So you think that the UN should be solving the US's screw worm problem, while also thinking that the US shouldn't be paying anything for that, when it was the US that figured out how to sterilize the flies that spread screw worm larvae, and have operated the facilities for doing so since the 1960s?
But somehow the US also shouldn't be helping other people with endemic disease that we don't want spreading to the US exactly the way screw worms have come back through US inaction and cuts?
Are you some kind of fu
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I personally don't care who made the space based data center concept. Overall, it is fraught, other than edge computing or a way to create a mesh network.
It still has a lot of issues. Space is an extremely good insulator, so heat has to be dealt with via radiation. Power can be handled via solar, nuclear batteries and betavoltaic panels (assuming that tech has moved since being at best a prototype in the 70s). If something breaks, it isn't like you can send a L1 tech to go yank a hard disk, replace it,
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Assuming Musk knows all this as well, and he would, is there any reason he shouldn't try if he thinks he can do it? It's his money.
It's everybody's sky. You want him to fill it with a million satellites?
Never mind, I know the answer already.
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"It's everyone's sky, do you really want it filled with airplanes?" Yes, yes we did and it made the world a better place.
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Define "we."
People who built railroads and airlines needed the consent of the people who lived on the land and below the sky.
You seem to think Musk should be allowed to just go ahead and do whatever he wants with earth-orbit space because "it's his money."
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:2)
It's another entry in the popular series "The Tragedy of the Commons", titled "It Sucks to be Common!".
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The railroads were a major public good and their construction was in the national interest. Even though it was a private enterprise.
There was also never an
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Thank you for making my case for me. Railroads did not just do whatever they wanted. Sometimes they were challenged in court. Sometimes they won. Sometimes they lost. The point is that they didn't just do whatever they wanted with no push-back.
But you appear to claim Musk is the only one who should decide what to do with space because "it's his money." I disagree. I expect that he will need regulatory approvals, and must comply with space treaties. He may even be challenged in court. And if he is, he'll nee
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it's called engineering.
so what's your suggestion for cooling? dissipating heat in space is a tough problem with very limited options, none of which seem viable for a frigging datacenter operating nonstop.
so you're going to look at which chips can handle running at 80 or 90 Celsius.
running at high temps makes radiation more efficient but you still need to dissipate any excess heat generated over that operating threshold. once you hit that threshold (whatever it is) you either shut it down for the radiator to catch up or it will melt. considering that such cpus would generate a lot of heat (precisely to oper
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The only reason to have data centers in space is if you want to do processing in space, for lower latency or something similar. And in fact, that is what the government wants to do [wikipedia.org].
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The only reason to have data centers in space is if you want to do processing in space, for lower latency or something similar.
Maybe not the only reason. One thing I'm gathering (or reminded of) in the current discussion is that space datacenters obviate the significant sociopolitical and environmental complexities of terrestrial ones. Of course, they introduce a number of new complexities, including sociopolitical and (space-)environmental ones.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Silly assumptions? A matter of Engineering? What about physics? Maybe listen to real engineers for once. They've been showing us the actual numbers that state clearly this AI data centers are not possible. Sure you can get lots of solar power, but that's not the issue. The issue is cooling, requiring huge radiators that are far bigger than each satellite. Besides the impracticality of it, you have other issues like air pollution (already a problem with starlink deorbiting), light pollution (who needs the stars anyway). Apparently no on in Musk's circle is asking, "but should we do this?"
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A vacuum is a terrible place to try and radiate waste heat.
Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
There is literally no hardware advancement that makes sense to operate in space, that doesn't make more sense to operate right here on the dirt.
Why? Servicing and ionizing radiation.
We see elevated failure rates of SSDs in aircraft flying at 36,000 feet from controller firmware getting bit-flipped by passing neutrinos. Do you think that somehow improves by putting the SSDs into even more cosmic radiation exposure, and having less opportunity to service / replace the hardware?
We see hardware using MORE electricity and shedding MORE heat over time, not less. We have an atmosphere and bodies of water to dump heat into here. You don't have anywhere besides passive radiation to dump heat in space, which means building HUGE passive radiators, which are huge targets for micrometeor strikes and space junk. All on hardware that you have a limited fuel tank on before it falls out of the sky, and no way to service.
None of this makes sense, but because you want to fanboi hard on Elon for some reason, you think he has some secret physics-defying sauce right around the corner.
Re-evaluate your critical thinking skills.
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How would you cool a processor without atmosphere? Would you have to create an atmosphere to absorb the dissipated heat, then somehow get rid of that heat?
Black body radiation [wikipedia.org]. The heat is emitted in the form of infrared light (and other wavelengths, but mostly infrared).
Most satellites need to be carefully engineered to maintain their temperature range without getting too hot or too cold.
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Most satellites need to be carefully engineered to maintain their temperature range without getting too hot or too cold.
For example, with radiator panels that are oriented to be in the shade. Of course, that adds mass and structural complexity to the spacecraft, and therefore increases the cost to build, test, and launch it. So, it's only done when heat-management is a significant concern that can't be handled by letting the spacecraft hull radiate the heat.
I'm guessing that orbital datacenters will need radiator panels up the wazoo.
Re: Bet against Elon if you like (Score:5, Interesting)
Giant black-body radiators are required. This is the the number one reason why space data centers are not practical. The radiators would be many times bigger than the satellites themselves. Every watt of energy generated by the solar panels has to be radiated into space. This is not something that can simply be engineered around, as the OP seems to think.
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It's not great, but I don't think that's the least practical part of it. Reasonable people have done the math and you can almost make it work just by making the radiators the same size as, and putting them on the back of, the solar panels. Starlink satellites already generate and dissipate a kilowatt plus.
The impractical part is that the whole thing is going to deorbit and burn up after five years. Sure, maybe you don't want the five year old GPUs, but replacing the panels and radiators every five years is
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People wasting time, money and energy on stupid projects take away resources from other projects. I guess that little detail escaped you.
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