Comment by cuuupid

It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.

It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.

From: https://engine.xyz/resident-companies/northwood-space

> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.

if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.

Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps

What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?

There are things which are difficult and have unsolved problems, and there are things that just fundamentally make no sense.

Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.

Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?

This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.

Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.

That's not the argument though. The argument is "it can be done, the methods to do it are known, but the claims about space being an optimal location to locate our AI datacenters are false and the tradeoffs and unit economics of doing it makes no sense compared with building a data centre on earth somewhere with power and water, preferably not too hot.

But for a more nuanced and optimistic take, this one is good and highlights all the same issues and more https://www.peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/

(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)

Cooling data centers in space effectively can't be done right now … or ever.