[AntiUSAbah]

He again mentions data center in space.

He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.

It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...

But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?

Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?

Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...

[signatoremo]

So you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]?

Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments?

I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection.

[0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-am...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...

[2] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...

[3] https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constel...

[AntiUSAbah]

For china its a future investment. Its R&D, an image topic and its the job of a state anyway to do fundamental R&D.

Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.

Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.

[lossolo]

From the links you shared, it seems they are first trying to determine whether it's economically feasible at all.

[j_w]

I think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.

[Yossarrian22]

CASC yes Google yes Blue Origin yes

But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons.

I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date

[whamlastxmas]

What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid

[halfmatthalfcat]

Heat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.

[nomel]

> maintenance

I suspect it would be maintained at the same quantization that it's delivered: pods. Pod has some unresolvable issue (things would have to go real bad), then eject it.

What maintenance do you have in mind, specifically, in a modular system like this would necessarily be?

If the argument is that off the shelf systems, designed within a context where humans are a Jira ticket away, won't work well in space, then I can agree with that. But, I don't think anyone is attempting that. Datacenter in space doesn't necessarily mean "standard rack computer in space". Keep in mind that redundant and self-correcting systems already exist in modern GPUs, with active rerouting around dead cores, detected with a BIST, at boot! These kinds of things are standard in financial systems.

[panick21_]

And you are right that is possible. But the question is not, 'can you build a data-center in space', but rather is it cheaper to build it in space?

A data-center no matter where has 100'000s of connections, each connection is a failure point. And things that go on rockets that shake to an insane degree need to have lots of special attention paid to each such connection.

Heating again is 10-100x more difficult in space, again, it could be solved, but again, is it cheaper.

Same for transport, transporting stuff into space is 10-100x more expensive.

Same for lifecycle management, 10-100x more expensive in space. You need fuel and move around avoiding collisions and so on.

Same for mechanical complexity overall, a standard server rack on earth is complex (see Oxide) a 'space server rack' is likely 10x100x more complex.

So basically you have to re-engineer literally everything from the ground up for a new environment.

So the question is what is the argument for why you should bare this cost. The only argument seem to be constant sunlight, and maybe regulatory. Regulatory is not looking like it will be much easier in space, launch alone is a huge regulatory burden.

So really we are comparing setting up enough batteries to survive for a night or getting another constant source of power with all the cost mentioned above. I know what side I would be on.

> active rerouting around dead cores

That still means you have a dead core in your system. All you are saying is 'lets pay even more to launch extra capacity in case part of it fails'. And that goes for every part from the smallest core all the way up to the largest subsystems on the sat.

Or you can just order a replacement when you actually need it, like when you have a data-center on earth.

[svantana]

I dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!

[panick21_]

So you are comparing putting up slightly more solar panels and some batteries, both things that are mass produced commodity with re-engineering the whole computing ecosystem and how data-centers have been done for decades, transporting them on the most expensive known transportation system and then operating it in a way where you need specially educated experts.

So my bet would be that just ordering a bunch of sodium batteries and a bunch of solar panels (or you know using a source of energy that is constant) is cheaper then going threw all the effort of putting things into space.

I have been following everything space for decades, and not once have I thought, wow putting super complex engineering things into space so easy and you should do it for things that have an easy alternative on earth.

[sidewndr46]

while there may not be atmospheric weather, low earth orbit has its own "weather". Before you even reach LEO you start getting bombarded by all forms of energetic particles. None of these are things you want your computers saturated with

[sschueller]

You can only cool by radiation in space. You may get more energy from the sun but how are you going to get rid of all the heat fast enough?

[svantana]

How hot do you think black objects in space get? Something like 10°C. Look up thermal equilibrium of an ideal black body.

[adastra22]

In the vicinity of the Earth, they get to about the temperature of the Earth. That’s not a coincidence. Hotter if they are actively generating heat.

[Symmetry]

Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move some of the solar energy they absorb to a central location which presents problems in moving the waste heat back out so that spot doesn't get too hot. But that doesn't change the overall equilibrium temperature.

[adastra22]

Running a data center generates heat.

[Geof25]

So you can have datacenters in space, you are just not allowed to use them

[jeltz]

Not using them would also solve all issues with cosmic radiation.

[philipallstar]

But are they doing work internally that generates heat? Genuine question.

[Schiendelman]

They are. But only as much heat as they get from the solar radiation that's hitting them anyway. Exactly that amount.

[philipallstar]

I didn't think of it like that. Does that mean all solar radiation is heat from when it hits a solar panel? I thought it would be something like solar -> chemical -> electrical -> heat.

[saalweachter]

Except you aren't leaving that heat in place.

You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.

If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.

It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.

[db48x]

If you gather 1kW of power from the sun then you have to reject 1kW of heat once you are done with whatever computation you are doing. There’s a bit more heat absorbed from the environment since some sunlight strikes parts of your satellite that are not solar panels, but it’s not too bad. Starlink satellites, just to pick a relevant example, do not need a radiator at all because they stay mostly edge–on to the sun and they can radiate all the heat through their own surface area. The ISS needs big radiators because they want it to be comfortable for humans, but electronics can run significantly hotter than that.

[lukan]

Yes, you get much more radiation from the sun and other sources. How do you do cooling? Radiators the size of small moons?

Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.

[svantana]

The joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.

[AntiUSAbah]

Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.

You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.

One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.

The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.

Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.

250.000 * 5 square meter of area.

This alone increases the potential debris in space.

And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.

[db48x]

It’s very easy to overestimate the difficulty of cooling things in space, unless you actually run the numbers. So please follow along as Scott Manley runs the numbers: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.

Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you’ll find that it must reject about 22kW of heat. That’s a fair amount, but at 65°C it can radiate it all away just using it’s own surface area! No radiator required at all!

Of course the power density of computer racks has been going up over the years. If you want to reach 100kW per satellite then they will need a modest radiator, but nothing extravagant. It would still be smaller than the solar panels, and far smaller than the ones on the ISS. And don’t forget that because radiated heat goes up as the fourth power of temperature, raising the temperature of the system by even a small amount raises the radiation emitted by a lot. If you design the system to run hotter you can minimize the size of the radiator. Most chips these days are designed to max out at 100°C to 110°C without lasting damage, although running them at that temperature 24/7 may reduce their lifespan. There will be some sweet spot in the middle.

And it turns out that a Starlink v3 already has a volume somewhat larger than a 48U rack. You talk about launching 250k satellites in order to have 250k GPUs in orbit, but that’s ridiculous. A real compute swarm will be hundreds or thousands of satellites each equivalent to a whole rack of GPUs.

But you’re not wrong to be skeptical. The economics might not work out even if the cooling is easy enough. It’s just that rejecting the idea takes a lot more than back–of–the–envelope calculations.

[causal]

What doesn't make sense to me here is that even on Earth, where we have an atmosphere to disperse heat into, we find that closed-loop cooling is too expensive and so use evaporative cooling.

If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.

[AntiUSAbah]

I'm not rejecting the basic idea in itself. There is nothing in this idea which we as humans can't do today. No issues here. Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.

The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.

A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.

I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.

In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.

[kamaal]

Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable. None of this is purely in the territory of 'known' impossible(like FTL travel).

Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard.

This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to continue climbing, or give up and quit.

Your mileage may vary.

[AntiUSAbah]

My problem is not the doing thing but the economy of it.

We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.

Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.

Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.

His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable

The first line of the post that you are supposedly replying to is:

> Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.

Unless is cost-comparable to a data centre on Earth, and I am told that it very much is not, then there is no financial feasibility for space datacentres.

[orbisvicis]

More energy will be required than radiation absorbed by a spherical (ish) data center. You'll have massive solar panels piping energy in, and so the temperature would by higher than thermal equilibrium at that distance.

[lukan]

Starlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.

[svantana]

I don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.

[lukan]

Well I was talking about heat. But regarding radiation, there is a long history of transistors in space dealing with radiation. But ... there is also a whole science how to deal with making it reliable: answer, expensive redundancy.

And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.

If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.

[AntiUSAbah]

Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.

The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?

And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.

You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.

Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous

The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive

[geertj]

The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.

This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.

[adrian_b]

But the slots on such Sun-synchronous orbits are limited and many applications want them.

A few datacenters could occupy some slots, but it would be difficult to accept a large number of datacenters obstructing such orbits.

[saalweachter]

Aren't dusk-dawn orbits already the most crowded orbital space with the most orbital debris?

[geertj]

Yes they are crowded. There are engineering solutions to that, including formation flying based on absolute positioning and space tethers. It is a great time to be an engineer.

[svantana]

A polar low earth orbit can be always-on (no earth shadow). Each satellite will be in thermal equilibrium, around 10°C. Catastrophic destruction from micrometeoroids is rare. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I don't see any dealbreakers in the math/science.

[mapt]

Kessler Syndrome is the biggest dealbreaker. We're already fairly far advanced in that scenario from Starlink, and competitors/scaleouts to Starlink promise to be worse.

If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately.

Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a physically-enforced type of commons, inextricably tied to tragedy if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.

[m4rtink]

Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.

Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.

Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.

[mapt]

A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.

SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.

When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.

Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.

[AntiUSAbah]

5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.

This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.

[sschueller]

Nobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either.

In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.

[AntiUSAbah]

Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD

[kbelder]

They tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea.

We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.

[mapt]

On the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A and specifically for the economics of AI vs surveillance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4

[jeltz]

Pretty sure this is just a lie to increase the value of Space X before the IPO. Not sure why people still trust Elon after all his hype and lies.

[logancbrown]

Solar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.

[damnitbuilds]

Elon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know.

I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.

[sschueller]

Like the hyperloop?...

[damnitbuilds]

The problem with that was not based on physics, like the thermodynamics of datacenters in space.

[Geof25]

Like point to point rocket travel?

[damnitbuilds]

That works, the physics is proven.

It has not been tried commercially yet, so has not failed there, but that is not relevant to my point.

[AntiUSAbah]

The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.

Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:

xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.

I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.

his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.

If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.

He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker

[whamlastxmas]

That's a lot of alleged failure for one of the richest people in history. Maybe you should go start a car company and launch company and show us how it's done

[jeltz]

So your comment is just appeal to authority?

[whamlastxmas]

it's an appeal to net worth and the argument that you don't become the richest person on the planet by being a massive idiot that everyone likes to paint him out as. he's problematic and sucks but he's not an idiot (in business)

[panick21_]

I agree with you but he has also made many claims that are false. About hyperloop (where he also said it was validated by SpaceX engineers) but it turns out the original paper doesn't actually work. But Musk didn't try to do hyperloop of course so its kind of irrelevant.

The thing is, this is a massive expansion of AI investment. And AI has been the thing where Musk has failed consistently the most. Nothing he has done around AI indicates he has some special genius or insight.

The thing he had success with were things that were known to be good ideas, reusable rockets, electric cars and space based LEO communications. What he did is he brought together the finances and build a and lead a team to execute on them.

However, we are far away from that with xAI and Space data-centers.

[damnitbuilds]

This is not relevant to the comment is a reply to.

Go start yet another "Elon is an idiot because I hate his politics" thread.

[le-mark]

Just shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?

[db48x]

The radiators would be a lot smaller than you’d think: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.

[m4rtink]

Radiators need to be flat and thin - not really good for radiation shielding.

But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.

[u8080]

Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.

[philipallstar]

This sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.

[jeltz]

Why? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.

[u8080]

But there are cheap drone swarms on earth which could destroy it.

[UltraSane]

Musk isn't an idiot, he is an utterly shameless conman who will tell any lie however often he needs to to keep share prices high.