Warum Orbital-Rechenzentren schwieriger sind, als das Silicon Valley denkt
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
Warum Orbital-Rechenzentren schwieriger sind, als das Silicon Valley denkt
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
32 Kommentare
„You’re on call, it’s your turn to go into orbit to reboot that server…“
Silicon Valley doesn’t seem too tethered to reality anymore
Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the laws of thermodynamics cannot be lobbied away
[deleted]
How do you cool them if there’s no atmosphere to facilitate heat conduction or convection?
Thermodynamics and maintenance is a b**** also
is as hard as they think, but they are betting it can be done eventually, which is where risk/reward comes in. If everything is known, there’d be no risk
Imo it’s not about power but both legal and physical access to them.
As far as I can tell, there are two particular groups of people most skeptical regarding space-based data centers: experts on satellites, and experts on data centers. The rest are all in.
I just wanna see then try, maybe something else will come out of it.
There is only a single company with experience at puting electornics in space on a large scale. It’s SpaceX, and no one else.
>orienting the spacecraft so the solar panels face the sun and the radiators face the deep vacuum of space, efficiency skyrockets for both. But there’s a catch: Maintaining this perfect three-way alignment—panels to sun, radiator to the void, [antennas](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/antennas) to Earth—requires complex, high-torque attitude [control systems](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/control-systems).
Not in the SSO. You just need to keep the satellite rotating with the orbital frequency. Nothing fancy. And starlinks also need to do this. How hard is this? How expensive if you want to do it at scale? Only SpaceX knows.
>Current space-grade solar panels rely on [germanium](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/germanium) substrates, whose supply is concentrated in [China](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/china).
AFAICT, SpaceX is launching silicon panels. How well do those work in orbit, and how much do they cost vs normal solar? Only SpaceX knows.
> Today’s satellites typically use radiation-hardened processors, which are very reliable but also much more expensive, and they perform poorly compared to commercial off-the-shelf processors.
This is flat out wrong. The vast majority of satellites in orbit use radiation tolerant processors. Starlink uses [AMD Versal XQR chips.](https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-chips-are-powering-newest-starlink-satellites) These SOCs are radiation tolerant not radiation-hardened [source.](https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/versal/space-grade.html) Note they’ve had AI cores launching into orbit since 2024. The AI cores are used for data processing.
The existing Starlink constellation is already a data center in space. It’s possible because it’s already been done. It’s not about doing anything new. It’s about scaling up the existing Starlink constellation. That’s it.
I’m going to guess „because they’re in space“. Now I will read the article.
Every criticism of this so far that I’ve seen assumes that GPUs have to be kept significantly cooler than they actually do. You don’t need to run a H100 at 60c, you can go way up(and as you go up, radiators get exponentially better)
In fairness if they can figure it out, at least the f***ing things won’t be causing environmental issues on the ground.
Orbital data centers are a scam. It’s vaporware that’s only being talked about to bilke money from investors.
They may one day be a reality but anyone thinking that something like this is going to happen in the next decade or so is smoking crack.
Maintenance, launch capacity, assembly, etc etc are all problems
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[ACS](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or3bxse „Last usage“)|Attitude Control System|
|[ARM](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or37qxd „Last usage“)|Asteroid Redirect Mission|
| |Advanced RISC Machines, embedded processor architecture|
|[ASAT](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or3heik „Last usage“)|[Anti-Satellite weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon)|
|[COTS](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or3bus5 „Last usage“)|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)|
| |Commercial/Off The Shelf|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or34e59 „Last usage“)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[MBA](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or2zizu „Last usage“)|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha|
|[NG](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or34o5j „Last usage“)|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin|
| |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)|
| |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer|
|[SSO](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or3gfx0 „Last usage“)|Sun-Synchronous Orbit|
|Jargon|Definition|
|——-|———|—|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1u35fwo/stub/or3fr1r „Last usage“)|SpaceX’s world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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beautiful article as usual. The droplet system is really interesting – but the 3% efficiency loss per year due to radiation is a massive hurdle. Beginning to think our free reservoir of energy below us (heat) is currently more practical than above us (solar).
If you exclude launch costs, a space-based datacenter would cost roughly two to three times what an equivalent Earth bound one would. Then you add in the cost of getting the thing into orbit.
Failure rates would almost certainly be higher owing to less cooling and ongoing radiation damage. Between failure rates and compute hardware obsolescence , effective lifetime would be fairly short. Maybe ten years at the outside.
If you really needed that computing power in space for some reason, it’s not completely unworkable, but it makes no sense otherwise.
I won’t get tired saying this: The only reason you would want to put something in space is if you either want do something from there which you couldn’t do on the ground OR if you want to keep it out of people’s hands.
And I **seriously** doubt you couldn’t build a data center on the ground because data centers already exist on the ground.
IMO the framing is fundamentally wrong. Everyone knows orbital datacenters are possible. They are probably useless, but building them is fundamental cutting-edge research and fundamental cutting-edge research is good, it will probably yield useful applications even if the stated goal (cheaper datacenters) is not actually what comes out of it.
Just because a CEO says he’s doing it for one reason doesn’t mean that he’s stupid and doesn’t understand that that’s a dumb reason. Nobody knows what will happen really. Everyone is (rightly) pretty confident we’re not going to have datacenters moving to space anytime soon. That doesn’t mean there’s not lucrative products that will come out of it and justify the expenditure.
Space elevator to pump water from the ground, to the space data centers, then back down to the ground. Done. Problem solved!
Probably because most of Silicon Valley is deficient in the realm of thinking and everything is harder than they think it is.
Silicon Valley knows very well how stupid the idea of data centers in space is.
The only people speaking about data centers in space are the ones trying to sell shares of their space business.
No one in the data center business is even remotely considering it.
Is this going to be the 4th time Elon wins a bet against the planet that something hard can be made profitable?
It would be easier to construct raft like datacenters in the middle of the ocean or sink them to the floor of the ocean. Have them deep and cold.
How the fuck are they going to cool any data center at all in space? Fucking air conditioners?
For an industry built around math, these folks have a terrible time with basic economics.
Pretty sure most of Silicon Valley knows they’re hard
I also wonder how coronal mass ejections will impact sensitive data lol
It’s because SV Tech CEOs are obsessed with explaining everything with an elevator pitch, and then everyone generalizes this as everyone in SV thinks this way. I can tell you from personal experience that the Engineers and Support staff know that it’s not simple and cringe whenever CEOs use reductive/sales level language.