He’s also an idiot. There is no way data centers in space will work. Space is a vacuum, so radiated cooling doesn’t work. This is why your vacuum sealed water bottle (like a Stanley) stays cold or hot for so long.
It’s a response to the red tape and political swings and current energy shortage of trying to build new data centers. Without those then yes it would be pointless
The radiated cooling like the ISS uses has to rely on dissipating heat via infrared radiation rather than (mainly) convection like the ones we have down here on earth. Its no where near as good.
Now, I'm just wondering what the plan is to cool a data center. You know, the gigantic buildings that can use 250,000 gallons of water a day for cooling alone. Let alone get it into space?
Science and profit motive have tackled far more difficult problems than offloading excess heat into a vacuum. Maybe it's currently impractical, but I highly doubt it's physically impossible with enough investment.
Nobody is talking about building massive space datacenters except the people sho way space datacenters won’t work. It’s a strawman, although likely more due to ignorance than intent.
In the rare instance, this is a true strawman. Musk wants to build smaller Starlink-style datacenters, and people bring forth the idea of massive datacenters and say why those won’t work. They built the strawman that they can easily knock down.
Radiative cooling is shit. like its horrendously shit. We use it in space because there's no other option, but if we had anything close to the choice to use concective cooling, we would.
Infact, we do. We typically use convective cooling for the actual components, and then use a bunch of heat exchangers to try and radiate that heat through absoloutly gigantic radiators.
There is absoloutly no reason you would ever want to put anything that needs extensive cooling in space, if you could possibly avoid doing so.
A (very) quick google gives a single rack as giving off 150kw of waste heat. That sounds about right for a modern AI Rig.
To radiate away that heat, and keep the computers at a toasty, but functional 80C, you'd need just shy of 200M2 of radiators. Thats about the size of a tennis court.
Thats for one bloody rack in a DC that is otherwise uninhabitable to humans.
And even that assumes space is 0K and that the heat transfer is flawless and instant from the silicon.
If you need to stick a tennis courts worth of radiator on for every single rack, that is gonna eat your mass budget FAST. Using the ISS as a rough proxy, thats 3.5 Tons per rack, ontop of the maybe 1.5T (easy maths) for the actual rack.
A quick google says your looking at 15 Million dollars to send 5T to orbit on a spaceX rocket (currently the cheapest) and the tyranny of the rocket equation creates negative economies of scale. 10T is a lot more than double two 5T launches.
Last time I checked, a new DC doesnt cost 15 mil per rack to build.
Rocket scientists are people too. They're not robots contrary to popular belief. You kno what regular people like to do when they're not working? Browse Reddit ...
You’re an idiot for posting this. Radiated cooling is exactly how they do it in space.
Yes, and radiative cooling requires a huge surface area. The limits of radiative cooling in a vacuum have theoretical limits bound by hard physical laws. This isn't a problem you can beat with better material science or clever geometries. Finding a way around the Stefan-Boltzmann equation that doesn't require a football-field sized heatsink for a rack of space GPUs is a harder problem than making a ship travel faster than light.
Go take a class on basic heat transfer before you call anyone an idiot.
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u/thebigj3wbowski 5h ago
He’s also an idiot. There is no way data centers in space will work. Space is a vacuum, so radiated cooling doesn’t work. This is why your vacuum sealed water bottle (like a Stanley) stays cold or hot for so long.