Comment by cladopa

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.

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.

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.

I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.

To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.

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.