Datacenters in space aren't going to work
(taranis.ie)495 points by mindracer 4 days ago
495 points by mindracer 4 days ago
It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.
Classic misaligned incentives - pretendgineering is far more profitable than building stuff that works reliably and is useful.
We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")
I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.
Google "atoms for peace." You will find an entire multidimensional cluster of hype ranging from Rickover maneuvering to get a nuclear navy, which seems to work pretty well, but on the way there it created a subsidized nuclear reactor business which was never in the money but for subsidies, loss leaders, and underbids. There was no Golden Age of nuclear power. There were fixed bid contracts that masked cost overruns until they didn't anymore. There was FOMO about Soviet gigantism and (subsidized) European nuclear projects.
Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.
Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.
The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.
At the point, it's beginning to feel a bit like the 419 scam (where you make the details deliberately absurd so as to ward off people inclined to be sceptical early, leaving you with only the easiest marks.) SMRs! Data centres in space! "phD level AIs".
It's basically nuclear preparedness research.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
Is the answer slavery? Once you've been taken to Mars and given your underground living quarters, you're going to be stuck there and not have any option but to carry on working or be thrown out to die on the surface.
You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight.
Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.
The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.
For 24/7 solar... you are either in a sun synchronous orbit or in a very high orbit.
The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work.
A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k / kg to a polar orbit.
The next option is being far enough out of the way that the earth's shadow isn't an issue. For that, instead of a 500 km sun synchronous orbit, you'd be going to 36,000 km orbit. This is a lot further from the surface, takes a lot more fuel... and it's a geostationary orbit.
However, as a geostationary orbit, these spots are valuable. Slots in this orbit are divided into slots.
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/wealthy-nations-...
> There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.
> Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.
Furthermore, the "out of a nations control" - those slots are owned by nations. Countries would likely be very annoyed for someone to be putting satellites there without authorization. Furthermore, they only work with the countries on those areas. They also require spacing to ensure that you can properly point an antenna to that satellite.
Furthermore, geosynchronous orbits have a 0.5 second round trip lag. This could be a problem for data centers.
Misbehaving satellites in the geosynchronous orbit are also of concern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_15 ).
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Putting things in these orbits is pricy. For LEO, you'd need a lot of them. For geosynchronous, the idea of servicing them is pretty much a "you can't do that" (in 10 - 20 years they use their last fuel and get pushed to a higher orbit and pretty much get forgotten about).
Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are things that need to be especially well behaved because any orbital debris in that area could really ruin everyone's day.
Compute in space doesn't make sense.
I think a prerequisite to doing any really big stuff in space would be fully and rapidly reusable launch rockets, which could get costs down by a couple orders of magnitude.
And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.
That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.
That seems like it would make the most sense on the "last mile". So, adding caches to the LEO satellite ISP birds would be a good idea. I wonder if Kupiter, StarLink, et. al. do that. (And if not, their reasoning against it since they've surely considered it.)
Geosynchronous orbits do not pass through the Earth's shadow as much as you might think. These orbits sit in the same plane as the equator, which is tilted 23.5 degrees when compared to a line from the sun to the earth.
They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow.
That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
The article covers why this doesn’t work in detail.
Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.
> Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
Not sure what you're trying to say
If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-...
And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative
Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.
Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way.
He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai)
Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.
Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?
I am skeptical as well BUT on the cooling question, which is one of the main concerns we all seem to have, the article is doing a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between the ISS and a cluster of small satellites.
It cites the ISS's centralized 16kW cooling system which is for a big space station that needs to collect and shunt heat over a relatively large area. The Suncatcher prototype is puny in comparison: just 4 TPUs and a total power budget of ballpark 2kW.
Suncatcher imagines a large cluster of small satellites separated by optical links, not little datacenter space stations in the sky. They would not be pulling heat from multiple systems tens of meters away like on the ISS, which bodes well for simpler passive cooling systems. And while the combined panel surface area of a large satellite cluster would be substantial, the footprint of any individual satellite, the more important metric, would likely be reasonable.
Personally I am more concerned with the climate impact of launches and the relatively short envisioned mission life of 5 years. If the whole point is better sustainability, you can't just look at the dollar cost of launches that don't internalize the environmental externalities of stuff like polluting the stratosphere.
In theory rocket launches sound bad, with burning fuels all the way up to the top layers of the atmosphere, but it's not clear right away that we're significantly increasing the "burnt up stuff" vs say, the ~100 tons of meteorites that hit every night.
Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?
What's the actual atmospheric burden here?
This essentially says "We dont know"
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/04/rockets-affect-...
Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?
That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.
Some of the proposals are much much bigger than this. Five GW, and 16 square kilometres.
It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.
There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.
So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:
1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic
If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.
I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue.
Communication might be a bit rough.
Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.
The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...
I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.
Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.
Though it lacks in the headlines, my preference is to send the robots first to bootstrap local production. Unless we really screw up the worst case would be some extra garbage to clean up for future missions, and the best case is any sort of increase in local production capacity.
> The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
Very true..
Here's a recent HN link to a chilling documentary about one of the most isolated settlements in the world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040459
>"A City on Mars" (2024)
https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.
> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.
So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.
I find it hard to believe that launching and operating data centers in space would turn out to be cheaper than solar, wind, and batteries down here on the ground.
From the rebuttal: "We are at the start of an upward curve of technology development that if allowed to continue for another 50 years, will make it as easy to reach space as to fly to Australia."
People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.
This rebuttal is... poor, I guess? Not disingenuous or anything, but lots of wishful thinking and (for lack of a better term) "inside baseball"-objections.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.
"One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."
Hmmm.
> "One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."
Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/why-arent-the...
> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.
> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i... - page 14 shows them extended and testing at Lockheed.
As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.
On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.
As someone with only a basic knowledge of space technology, my first thought when I read the idea was "how the hell are they going to cool it".
Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.
The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.
I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.
It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.
It strikes me that neutral network inference loads are probably pretty resilient to these kinds of problems (as we see the bits per activation steadily decreasing), and where they aren't, you can add them as augmentations at training time and they will essentially act as regularization.
The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"
Strictly speaking, the thermosphere is actually much warmer than the atmosphere we experience--on the order of 100's or even a 1000 degrees Celsius, if you're measuring by temperature (the average kinetic energy of molecules). However, since particle density is so low, the number of molecules is quite low, and so total heat content of the thermosphere is low. But since particle count is low, conduction and convection are essentially nonexistent, which means cooling needs to rely entirely on radiation, which is much less efficient than other modes at cooling.
In other words, a) background temperature (to the extent it's even meaningful) is much warmer than Earth's surface and b) cooling is much, much more difficult than on Earth.
Technically radiation cooling is 100% efficient. And remarkably effective, you can cool an inert object to the temperature of the CMBR (4K) without doing anything at all. However it is rather slow and works best if there's no nearby planets or stars.
Fun fact though, make your radiator hotter and you can dump just as much if not more energy then you would typically via convective cooling. At 1400C (just below the melting point of steel) you can shed 450kW of heat per square meter, all you need is a really fancy heat pump!
Is it an advantage though ? One of the main objections in the article is exactly that.
There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.
I think it is an advantage, the question is just how big, and assume we look only at ongoing operation cost.
- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night
- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation
- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps
But the cooling cost wouldn’t be smaller. There’s no good way to eliminate the waste heat into space. It’s actually far far harder to radiate the waste heat into space directly than it would be to get rid of it on Earth.
I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.
This question is thoroughly covered in the linked article.
Pardon, but the question of "could the operational cost be smaller in space" is almost not touched at all in the article. The article mostly argues that designing thermal management systems for space applications is hard, and that the radiators required would be big, which speaks to the upfront investment cost, not ongoing opex.
Cooling is more difficult in space, yes it's colder, but transferring heat is more difficult.
Things on earth also have access to that coldness for about half of each day. How many data centers use radiative cooling into the night sky to supplement their regular cooling? The fact that the answer is “zero” should tell you all you need to know about how useful this is.
The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC (PUE almost 1 instead of run-of-the mill 1.5 or as low as 1.1 for hyperscalers). But yeah the upfront cost would be immense.
Look up Tech Ingredients episode on Radiative Paint.
The fact that people aren’t using something isn’t evidence that it’s not possible or even a great idea, it could be that a practical application didn’t exist before or someone enterprising enough hasn’t come along yet.
When something has been known for millennia and hasn’t been put to a particular use even after decades where it could have been used, that is pretty good evidence that this use isn’t a good idea. Especially when it’s something really simple.
Radiative cooling is great for achieving temperature a bit below ambient at night when you don’t have any modern refrigeration equipment. That’s about all. It’s used in space applications because it’s literally the only option.
How would the radiators be useful if the electronics no longer are? Unless you can repurpose the radiators once the electronics are useless, which you can't in space, then the radiators' useful lifetime is hard limited by the electronics' lifetime.
Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power.
Follow the rationale:
1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three and basically negate any use of crypto.
2. So, if you have data centers that no longer rely on power derived from a nation state, land controller by a nation state or connectivity provided by the nation state's cabling infra, then you can always access your currency and assets.
That’s ridiculous. Space is the least nation-state-dependent place to do computing in existence.
All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).
Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.
Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.
Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.
Recently the USA blew out some some boats in international waters and came back to finish off the survivors, despite thin evidence and no due process, while maintaining that it was legal. If those data centers on ships ever become declared as a 'threat to national security' then they might get the same treatment.
I think GP's point is that an advanced nation-state could just as easily shoot down an orbiting data center as an oceanic data center and that "international space" offers an equally flimsy defense as "international waters" but a much larger price.
If those ships chose to not fly a flag, they'd even have justification to do so. And if they did choose to fly a flag, then that country would have the responsibility to police them, and is the US complained to that country, that country might just withdraw protection anyway. Data center ships just want to loiter where convenient, they're not cigarette boats flying along at 100mph... no way to evade a navy that wants to blow them out of the water.
They've always been able to do this.
Microsoft was talking about submarine data centers powered by tidal forces in the early 2000s.
There have been talks of data centers on Sealand-like nation states.
Geothermal ...
Exotic data center builds will always be hyped. Always be within the realm of feasibility when cost is no object, but probably outside of practicality or need.
Next it'll be fusion-powered data centers.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
My favorite F-15 kill:
The military have developed other ways to bring down satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater
Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.
Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
This is one of the early tipping points in the background of the game "Eclipse Phase", which I always found interesting:
--- >8 ---
The power of nation states is rooted in control of land and safety, as well as resources, which is an extension of the control of land. But once mining asteroids became economically viable, the connection between land and resources disappeared. Once space habitation in space and secretly developed weapon systems from space became viable, the connection between safety, habitation and land disappeared.
This allowed corporations and new organizations to rise to power large enough to challenge nation states. Those in power did feared to lose their power, which caused the great war which gave rise to the grey mass and destroyed earth.
--- 8< ---
It's a very cool back story, which gives rise to a rogue nanite swarm (the gray mass), which forces an evacuation of earth within days. The only way this was even possible was by uploading human minds onto storage and planting them in robots later on. Naturally, most humans are then forced to work for these corporations. Other humans are still biological and they don't like robots, to say the least.
I'm sorry, but this is stupid. It's the same dumb thinking behind Sealand: "we're outside state borders! nobody can touch us!", which was only true as long as nobody cared what they were doing. Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that. "Datacenters in space" wouldn't fare any better: multiple nations have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons.
> Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that.
What did the royal navy do? There is no mention of the UK using force against sealand in either the Wikipedia page or this BBC article about sealand. (Though obviously the royal navy could retake sealand if they wanted)
If you can control satellites from the ground, then so can the government governing that ground location. An armed 10-person strike team could force SpaceX to access or even de-orbit the entire Starlink constellation. They don’t because doing so would be illegal and dangerous, not because it is somehow technically difficult.
If a company were to go on its own and build data centers in space only to avoid nation state jurisdiction, they better be prepares to defend that hardware in space.
If a country doesn't like what is happening they can shoot it down, and with no humans onboard or nations claiming jurisdiction there really isn't much to stop them or to answer for.
corporations will use their knowledge in tax dodging to avoid that too.
If they're already well versed in dodging fiscal rules, why do they need a space computer?
By the same argument Google could start literal star wars by blowing up AWS data centres. Because it is the wild west up there right? No pesky laws.
Data centers in space is about leading investors to circumvent their brains and jump on the hype train at worst, and developing technology around data center infrastructure at best.
Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.
This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.
Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.
In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time. Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on.
So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines. Have everything fail in place? Have robots do it? What about the regular supply missions to keep replacing all the failing hardware (there's only so many spare HDDs you can have on hand).
The whole thing is farcical.
Plus, in space, their electronic components would experience much more radiation (and the effects on components). They could build with rad-hardened components but those are both more expensive and several generations older than SOTA found in the habitable zone.
Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.
It is far easier to build them at remote places and bunkers (or both). Even at the middle of the ocean will make more sense and provide better cooling (See Microsoft attempt at that).
Not exactly at the middle but close to shore is pretty good too, a lot of solar and wind around to feed the compute.
One of these projects is bonkers IMO: china-has-an-underwater-data-center-the-us-will-build-them-in-space
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suwannagauntlett/2025/10/20/chi...
it is not far easier to distribute content from a bunker than from the space.
The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb
What makes an orbital facility at less risk of getting bombed?
Nah, they are pretty similar in difficulty for interception - the first US ASAT program used essentially the same Nike Zeus missiles used for ABM duty during the late 50s
not really. Suborbital vehicles achieve orbital heights. It's actually probably easier since you don't need a payload. The velocity alone will do the trick.
So many ideas involving AI just seems to be built off of sci-fi (not in a good way), including this one. Like sci-fi, there are little practical considerations made.
Sci-fi isn't even really about the tech. It's about what happens to us, humans, when the tech changes in dramatic ways. Sci-fi authors dream up types of technology that create new social orders, factions, rifts, types of interpersonal relationships, types of fascism, where the unforseen consequences of human ingenuity hoist us upon our collective petard.
But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.
There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things.
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.
2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.
3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.
5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.
In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.
Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse.
Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.
Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)
Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.
1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology.
Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.
> 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.
Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.
You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.
That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)
> 5) Learning effects
Great, but it gets us nothing.
There is one. It is the sun synchronous dawn/dusk orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.
The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.
Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.
Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology.
Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.
Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.
There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.
The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.
All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.
And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).
Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).
> The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).
So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.
Starlink cost maybe $10 billion. A 100,000 gpu data center costs between $20 and $40 billion to build.
Also remember that data centers last for about 5 years; after that the gpus are obsolete. That’s no different than the lifetime of a Starlink satellite.
Starlink solar panels generate at best 200 W/sqm on average. Even with 2.5 million square metres, that is a total of half a gigawatt. And the cost is not to be ignored! Most of the cost of these data centres is in the GPUs themselves, so you need to add that to the cost of building out the constellation. Unless you are arguing that the cost of supporting infrastructure (cooling, power, etc) costs $10bn to support half a gigawatt of GPUs in the typical data centre, then your numbers are simply way off.
Starlink solves for a problem where there is not a good alternative: high-speed Internet access for rural environments. Land-based solutions for this are potentially even more expensive than putting satellites in space.
But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.
An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.
There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)
The facts you quoted just made me even more convinced that space-based datacenters will not be cost effective any time soon. If an entire generation of satellites costing many billions of dollars can't power more GPUs than a single terrestrial datacenter, how could it possibly be cost effective?
A data center costs $20 to $40 billion! And launch costs keep dropping.
Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.
Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
It needs to be scaled up, but there is no obstacle to that (at least none that the article mentions).
The only valid objection is cost, but space prices keep dropping and earth prices keep rising.
> Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
It is not. This is like saying your phone is already a small data centre. While technically true, we're not talking about the same scale here. StarLink's compute power is a tiny fraction of a modern data centre GPU/TPU. Most of the power budget goes into communication (i.e. its purpose!).
The Starlink constellation cost $10 billion. That’s comparable to a small data center (maybe 50,000 gpus).
If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.
Comparable in cost or capacity? Small datacenter is maybe around 20MW of compute.
I'd be most curious to see what type of processing power they would put on such a data center.
For example, the JWST uses a RAD750 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 ) which is based on a PowerPC 750 running at 110 MHz to 200 MHz.
Its successor is the RAD5500 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 )... which runs at between 66 MHz and 462 MHz.
> The RAD5545 processor employs four RAD5500 cores, achieving performance characteristics of up to 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and over 3.7 GFLOPS. Power consumption is 20 watts with all peripherals operating.
That's kind of neat... but not exactly data center performance.
Back to the older RAD750...
> The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $349,639 in 2024).
That isn't exactly price performance. Well, unless you're constrained by "it costs millions to replace it."
So... I'm not really sure what devices they'd be putting up there.
The "data centers in space" is much more a "space launch is a hot technology, AI and data centers are a hot technology... put the two together and its too the moon!" (Or at least that's what we tell the investors before we try to spend all their money)
I think the last time they put commodity hardware in orbit was via the HPE[1] project and the results were quite mixed with failure rates for components that were quite high. In addition to running the system in a twin config to get any meaningful work done.
Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.
Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/updated_hpe_spaceborn...
If you think about it, all the existing data centers are in space already. They're just attached to a big ball of rock, water, and air that acts as a support system for them, simplifying cooling and radiation protection.
If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.
- Costs to keep it in orbit.
- More junk whizzing around Earth.
- Inaccessibility for maintenance.
- Power costs.
- Susceptibility to solar storms and cosmic rays.
Risky/untried things aren't dumb because they're hard, they're dumb when they're more expensive/harder than cheaper/easier alternatives that already exist that do the same thing.
And they've already at least tried datacenters in the ocean.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
Google’s paper [1] does talk about radiation hardening and thermal management. Maybe their ideas are naive and it’s a bad paper? I’m not an expert so I couldn’t tell from a brief skim.
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
The only sentence in the whole "paper" about cooling is
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures
Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.
Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.
Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it?
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because you need thicker and more expensive vessels the bigger it gets. The problems go on and on.
Orbital data centers are very hard but this isn't a good explanation of why. There really is more light in space since certain orbits are always in daylight. Radiators are no larger than the solar panels so if you can build multi square kilometer solar arrays you can probably also build massive radiators.
>The first reason for doing this that seems to come up is abundant access to power in space. This really isn't the case. You basically have two options: solar and nuclear.
I guess that rules our any funding from US govt or Saudi money. Unless someone figures out a way to use fossil fuels to run the data centers! It has to be private equity or a new data center coin offering. Offered to the public and take away the pain and suffering of carrying their current paper currency. We need a new messiah (SBF + Musk + WeWork guy) to craft this narrative.
When SpaceX came about, they said it was impossible for the rocket to come back from space and get reused. They said it wasn't going to work to combine multiple thrusters to form a big thruster and be reliable enough. When Starlink was introduced, they said it was stupid because the bandwidth is too small to be useful. Where are we now? 10 years ago, AI couldn't even beat a high-rank amateur Go player, let alone the best of pros. Everyone takes the excuse of dimensionality curse. Now what?
People who only look at the past/present and conclude impossibility are never going to be the ones who invent the future. Even math and science evolve, let alone engineering. The problems described in this article don't even remotely feel like the kind of barriers we faced when Go was solved, when protein fold was predicted and when LLM was solving problems with one prompt. If there is a strong NEED for datacenters to be up in the space, there will eventually be datacenters in the space.
Only legit thing I can see this being used for is redundant archival storage or just general research into hardening equipment to radiation or micrograv (eg for liquid cooling). But anything that generates significant amounts of heat seems like it'd be a huge problem.
Then again there's lots of space in space, perhaps it's possible to isolate racks/aisles into their own individual satellites, each with massive radiant heatshedding panels? It's an interesting problem space that would be very interesting to try to solve, but ultimately I agree with OP when we come back around to "But, why?" Research for the sake of research is a valid answer, but "For prod"? I don't see it.
It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.
The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.
E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.
You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.
The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.
Selection bias.
Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.
The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”.
This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.
It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.
Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.
I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.
Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.
I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.
Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.
Even diffusion into air is too slow for some use cases. The whole complaint of datacentres "consuming" water is due to heating it and dumping it back or evaporating it for cooling. This is done because mass air cooling is much less efficient and requires lots of energy to run the fans to force the air through the heat exchangers, which is also extremely loud. And that is, in turn, much more effective than passive radiation, even if you have a ~3K background.
The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.
So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.
The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
Depending on how hot/dense/clocked you run your compute, the Radiators take _less_ surface area than the solar panels, so you can have them back to back and the radiators will take less space.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.
Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
Counterpoint: oceangate
Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.
Please don't propagate the myth that Einstein couldn't wrap his head about Heisenberg.
The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).
Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.
Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).
When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.
So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.
You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
Thank you for saying this. It's almost like others are saying we should stop trying things because they are hard and challenging.
I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.
Worth sharing Starcloud’s paper in this post:
It’s not about putting data centers into orbit. It’s about the cost-yield inversion to data centers cooling infrastructure that happens at terawatt scale. All things being equal - a chilled circuit performs better and produces less heat than a hot one. There is a high up front cost to pre-cooling but if you can get in the -60C range, and stay there, you can increase performance and cut energy costs.
When they say data centers in space - they mean data centers you can’t get to because they are flooded with ultra cold dielectric fluid and it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring them back up to human temperatures.
Right now it’s not worth the hassle. At terawatt scale it’s almost mandatory.
When you walk down that line it’s pretty close to putting them in space. No access. Super cold. No air. Tiny, insulated capsule. Thermal management hell. They’ll be buried in mines though, not launched into orbit.
It’s just corporate propaganda to simplify an otherwise insane situation.
This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.
Power:
It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.
The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.
Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...
Cooling:
Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.
A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.
Cosmic radiation:
The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.
Communications:
Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...
This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.
Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.
Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
Not if you bury it in regolith. That’s an idea for a Lunar base too. The design is called “Hobbit holes.” Bury the occupied structures in piles of basically any local mass you can bury them in.
It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
Lunar regolith is so abrasive that digging holes or tunnels isn't going to be cost effective.
We will need to develop very robust, space-worthy electronics eventually. We can't rely on natural magnetic fields forever.
We have them. The RAD750 for example (on the JWST and Curiosity rovers https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/08/mars_probe_cpu/ ) costs about $350k, has the architecture of a PowerPC 750 (the blue and white PowerMac G3), and runs at up to 200 MHz.
It's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).
Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.
You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.
I had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true.
That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
Really the only potential upside to this, and it's a niche one, is for time or security sensitive compute tasks where the raw data originates in orbit. Every happens over inter satellite link and there's no downlink to Earth until the end of the process (downlink is still a problem as Earth is mostly ocean and wilderness)
E.g. one satellite's wide area sensor payload is processed and "potential wildfire detected". The result is passed to another satellite with finer grained sensing capabilities which is due to pass over in the next X minutes which then tees up a capture.
So if the big idea is to have a data center outside of legal jurisdictions why not build a floating data center in the Southern Pacific Ocean? You can power it with floating solar panels provide data via Starlink or a regular communication satellite and still be outside of the law. You might say that it will be vulnerable to pirates, but practically speaking nobody is going down there. Sure you will have to deal with weather, but overall the problems are way easier to solve than building an orbital data center.
But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.
You don't need massive datacenters in space.
You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs.
So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations.
If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica (research focused, still disputed but not armed, probably not lots of shady stuff happening there, costly but still pays off to be there).
This makes no sense. The company will still be on the ground in some country and it has to connect to the Earth internet on the ground in some country. Unless you are talking about actual space pirate station, but in that case it better come equipped with missile defense because it will be attacked sooo fast.
> The company will still be on the ground in some country
But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot.
> it has to connect to the Earth internet
Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be serving React apps or anything like that. Those will be weird, non-typical servers.
Want some zero internet use cases?
- Training a cyber-ops LLM without poking eyes and reduced risk of leaks.
- Illegal data-heavy research (bio, weaponry).
- Storing data for surveillance satellites.
All of those can use private links, can be built by private companies under classified contracts, and you would not dare attack an NRO-launched satellite.
There are wayyyy easier ways to just get some private calculations. You can spin up an encrypted memory VM or wire up an eager physical kill switch. Launching satellites would bring a lot of attention and requires skills, money, multiple people with access. But I can do the former just fine by myself.
>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there.
That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.
Related (posted just 2hours before this article) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086833 "Blimps lifting quantum data centers to the stratosphere? (newatlas.com)" "... blimps, to lift quantum computers to the stratosphere. There, at an altitude of about 20 km (12.4 miles), temperatures are in the -50 °C range (about -58 °F) and would be cold enough to allow the qubits to function correctly."
I think it's important to be distinct here... These "Space DC" companies are not showing up on some Techy-Shark-Tank (or walking into VC meetings) with a promise to investors that they have an established strategy which will pay off.
IMO, they are just answering the question: "If we pour 100B into R&D, could it have a reasonable chance at succeeding?".
For Nvidia (or these other massive companies) the investment is chump change.
The current incarnation of direct to cell is a partnership with cell carriers. I expect that to continue. It’s really hard to get the frequencies you need without that, and you really need a conventional terrestrial network for populated areas. I don’t expect that to change. The bandwidth needed to cover a populated area from space fundamentally requires more size and power than a cell phone can provide.
Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.
To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.