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by sulam 21 days ago
Tl;dr — but it’s too heavy

You’re making some decent points here, but you’re either forgetting or ignoring the major thing that people usually neglect to mention when they want to make a case for this (crazy) idea — weight. Unless SpaceX is going to completely redesign hardware such that it is optimized entirely for its mass, it requires many (many) launches to even get a small set of racks into space. I don’t normally get up in arms about the CO2 emissions of data centers, I think there is offsetting value created by their use, but I would absolutely protest trying to put data centers in space and do my best to shut down the hundreds, if not thousands of launches it would take to achieve even a tiny fraction of an AI data center.
1 comments
jpadkins 21 days ago
Have you calculated the CO2 output of Terran datacenters run on natural gas vs. space datacenters run on solar? The launch CO2 usage is one time, the datacenter energy is for the life of the equipment.
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sulam 21 days ago
A Falcony Heavy probably generates 1 kiloton of CO2 per launch. Data centers on the planet are highly variable depending on their energy mix. It's true that a large a datacenter running on natural gas or coal power is significantly more in a year, but the sheer number of launches required to get that same data center into space is actually comparable, and there's no saying that this is the end of it. Oh and we should also have questions about how you safely de-orbit these things.
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vel0city 20 days ago
If solar+batteries are so cheap and viable to power giant 100 megawatt datacenters in space, why not do the same on Earth instead of using natural gas generators?
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jpadkins 20 days ago
Solar panels on surface get ~70% less energy than in space once you factor in atmosphere absorption, day/night, weather, etc. Solar + battery on the surface is not economically viable versus nat gas generators (excluding externalities)
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vel0city 20 days ago
Sounds like the solution is to actually price the externalities of running on-site natural gas generation and suddenly we don't actually need to go to orbit.
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