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I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution

[delayed]

You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute

If you believe that, you’re Musks target investor group.

This is your brain on Factorio

I was skeptical until you mentioned this. Now I'm onboard

Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?

I can't even tell what's sarcasm anymore lol.

Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.

It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.

That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.

Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.

Just ask this scientician.

Uhhhh

Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.

> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.

Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.

The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.

The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.

Or you are actively trying to have the meetings when you are sure he cannot be present because he keeps derailing them.

Very confused by this plan.

How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo

Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.

What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?

It’s a vacuum

Vacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we use it to keep our coffee hot

Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:

The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...

Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.

Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.

Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.

but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun

There is no matter.

It's cold there because there isn't anything there.

So there is nothing to conduct or convect the heat away.

It's like a giant vacuum insulated thermos.

Is putting data centers in thermos' a good idea?

what thermometer would you use to measure the temperature of space?

I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.

Space is cold because there isn't anything there.

There is also no matter to wick the heat away.

I'm not a scientist but i am also sure it will be fucking hard to dissipate heat in a vacuum

I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)

Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.

That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.

Wait is that why they did put legs on anyone?

I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.

That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.

That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.

A month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286645

AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?

If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.

I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la... (and this is two years ago!) [2] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...

This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.

How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.

Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more practical. Several companies working on it: https://www.skycoolsystems.com/

I don't quite believe this.

Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a heat pump?

It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.

Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.

Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.

South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

But it never had an orbital launch capability.

Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.

Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.

At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.

They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.

Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.

You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.

I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they made up an interesting story to give it some context

It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"

The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.

The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.

So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.

The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.

You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!

This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.

Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.

Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more compute.

I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?

I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?

To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.

To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.

When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.

The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.

After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.

Heres hoping you have a similar moment.

> Heres hoping you have a similar moment.

I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.

I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.

If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.

The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.

Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.

Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.

We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.

Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.

If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?

Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?

I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.

I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.

No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and reality will stop changing.

Everything dies. Deal with it.

Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will never know. You do that by improving things, not burning limited resources on a conman.

If this outcome is guaranteed, why hasn't it already happened ?

The whole point of the space stuff is not accepting all life dying out on any timescale.

A data center in space is probably toast after some years of space radiation.

High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere. Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you don't need on earth.

It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are trying to find any justification.

I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…

Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.

Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load.

The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.

Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space

Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here on earth

Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.

(Yes, I know what steel manning is)

Couldn’t deliver on anything?

Facts.

Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.

Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816

(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)

That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit

This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.

It's lala land nonsense.

- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels

- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need

- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass

- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive

- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space

Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.

Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!

> - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive

Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I bet you can sell this service to the DoD!

Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the highest bidder.

how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?

With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.

Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for underground datacenters, is now valued at $500B.

there was an article recently about a company wanting to put nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km deep).

I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical, because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.

not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl

I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?

I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.

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Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.

You mean physical reality

*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.

Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.

Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.

Why is it hard requirement?

You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won’t decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay faster.

If you put stuff underground it is much harder to communicate.

And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused temporary amnesia.

To say so I am not a Musk fan - I am sci-fi fan and I make imaginary/silly stuff up on my own.

I also like reading how people argue with not what I wrote but with what they imagined I wrote.

It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.

There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.

After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.

If you read these comments carefully, you see that they can all be summed up as:

"That Musk guy is so naive to think you can put data centers in space, what a doof".

Similar comments were probably made regarding electric cars, reusable rockets, buying Twitter, and so on.

Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.

i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?

What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.

Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.

But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.

> No cooling necessary.

This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator.

3 are ways to cool things (lose energy):

  - Conduction
  - Convection
  - Radiation

Superconductors.

Magnets.

(We're just saying random physics things right?)

No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).

Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.

Could we use a constant stream of micro-asteroids as a heatsink?

i think so, next is Quantum right?

[dead]

Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.

Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.

Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.

There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.

Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.

I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.

It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.

you do know about the Sun? Earth? and the Moon? where would you get this 4 kelvin?

Why is there no cooling necessary?

Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.

Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.

I don’t care about convincing anyone. A question was asked and I answered the best I could with the time I had at hand.

Also read by comment above that discusses WHY superconductors could be the key to cooler electronics in space.

[dead]

Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?

Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?

Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense?

Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?

Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.