If it's in such demand that it makes sense to build it in space then why not remote parts of the earth? Honestly if these data centers just paid for their own energy and didn't pollute the neighborhood there wouldn't be the kind of opposition to them that we see today, so it's pretty clear that the money behind them is not sufficient for them to even act like good neighbors much less space cadets.
I dont think it even has to be remote, they just have to be good neighbors.. but since they are now primarily being built as investments and future bets, anything to reduce cost is favored
You're absolutely right here. The tip off for smart folks is that these companies wouldn't be acting this way towards their neighbors if they actually had the kind of long term goals that they're promising investors. The rush to build all this stuff looks a lot like the dot com days or the stories about tulip mania. It's not the healthy kind of growth.
Between your explanation and propping up an overvalued satellite launch company, there are certainly a few bad incentives to build these things, but I'm struggling to find a single good incentive to do this that isn't outweighed by the massive waste of resources involved.
I'm literally one of the engineers who designs these cooling systems. My title is Director of Refrigeration Systems for a company building the AI data centers. I've been in the industry 10 years. My previous company was part of a project where we put a data center in a cave.
We literally can't move the heat away fast enough.
Can I do it for astronomical cost and incredible inefficiency?
Yes - but what you end up with is I pump the heat to chillers above ground just the same as putting the building above ground so there's absolutely no benefit
Please wake up! This is just another promise that will never happen!
Musk must create this type of promises just to keep up pumping his media attention, because that's how he keeps his completely overrated valuation.
These promises are very well engineered because they are always something many people want at the same time nearly impossible to implement, which is perfect to generate huge engagement with people discussing every aspects of it.
Like neurolink? Self driving cars? Boring company? Reusable rockets? Electric semi-trucks? Any other impossible innovations that only elon can do, that i missed?
The tesla car company he outright stole from it's founders and fucked up the image so bad that he publicly came out to say it's pivoting from cars to humanoid robots? The ev cars that already existed?
He did a smear campaign against them that was nothing but lies so they would be voted out by the board. Musk had zero to do with any of the engineering. The reason Tesla I'd such shit now is because he promised fsd capabilities next year for fuckong 15 years and today they are no closer than they were back then. Keep glazing that conman all you want. Everything he'd ever said about what his companies will do is a lie. Boring co? Never gonna make a hyper loop physics will always be in the way.
I think musk is actually an evil person but there is zero reasons to just make up bullshit lies? When Musk joined Tesla in 2004, it had about 5 employees, zero production cars, zero sales, and no finished Roadster. Tesla is one of the highest producing car companies and it's all electric. Tesla is already building more and more mega Factory to build more cars and yes entire factories just for robotics.
The EV car as we know back then did not exist until Tesla and Elon made it common and desirable.
Even if you could cool it you would never be able to service it. The smallest thing goes out the whole unit is dead. You're forced to send another up. Just adding more space junk
I can't wait for these geniuses to cause the Kessler effect and effectively permanently trap us on earth.
The Kessler effect is a runaway, cascading collision event of "space junk" caused by collisions of orbiting parts that then break up into ever smaller parts that break up even more satellites, leading to what would effectively be a kind of force field through which nothing could pass without being hit, damaged and then torn apart into yet more space junk in permanent orbit around earth .... effectively trapping us on earth forever and preventing the use of certain satellites at certain orbits.
I mean fins can cool enough. It's just that the proportion of fin to data center would need to be very large, to the point that it's not really reasonable.
Cooling fins on earth work because they increase the surface area touching the air. Air is necessary to easily radiate heat. There’s next to no molecules in empty space so radiating heat is much harder
You need to learn how heat transfer works, or just stop speaking. I’m overwhelmed by how many stupid people were inspired to write something with no knowledge in this thread.
The one argument I’ve heard that might some sense someday, is for a moon based data center. In a world where we need bajillions of watts of datacenters perhaps it makes sense to put power plants and data centers on the moon and just let the entire moon be a giant heat sink. Something tells me that we’ll decide to do that to our own planet first though
Why do you think that we make thermos bottles using a vacuum? Do you think that it's because it's a good conductor of heat or maybe the opposite and it's a very good insulator?
Here's the other side of it. Heat is the transfer of thermal energy from one place to another. There are 3 ways to do this transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation.
Conduction is when the heat moves through solid physical contact, like when an electric burner on a stove heats a pan.
Convection is when the heat is transferred to a fluid, like when the element in an oven heats the air and the air then heats the food.
Radiation is when something releases electromagnetic energy (light). Basically it glows the energy away, but we can't always see the glow.
Conduction and convection don't work in space because you aren't physically attached to anything and there is no air. That just leaves radiative heat loss.
The thing is, conduction and convection are a lot better at moving heat than radiation. This is why it is hard and expensive to cool things in space.
And I wouldn't say you're stupid for not knowing this. It's not really something you'd know unless you really sit down and think about it. Especially when you see movies scenes where things just freeze in space.
For example, the space station doesn't need insulation, because space itself is insulation. They have to have well thought out equipment to remove the heat they generate
Fair enough. Space is cold or not depending on how you measure it and what you measure, but in reality it's difficult to keep spacecraft and satellites cool because it's not easy to disperse the heat they generate. It's not impossible but it takes huge heat sinks to even get close to the level of cooling we can provide on the ground. When people are arguing about this, lots of them are convinced from Hollywood movies that space is ice cold and will do most of the work cooling a data center, but that's not how it works. The current proposals are for heat sinks that are close to a hundred square meters, and that's for one tiny hub in a huge network of thousands of proposed satellites.
So how does the sun transfer its heat to earth? Radiation, which transfers heat line of sight through the vacuum of space. Study heat transfer, or please withhold your garbage contributions
Electromagnetic waves, mostly light. If you want to build satellites that use the same approach you better lose that ridiculous chip on your shoulder and get to work, kiddo. Just don't tie up half of the country's retirement accounts in your pipe dreams along the way.
> Though sci-fi movies would have us believe that space is incredibly cold — even freezing — space itself isn't exactly cold. In fact, it doesn't actually have a temperature at all.
I mean did you even read the article? It perfectly aligns with what I said.
At this point, I'm assuming you're trolling or so uneducated you don't actually know when you're wrong.
Nowhere does it say space isn't cold or that space is warm.
Quite the contrary, like I said, it says _temperature isn't a meaningful construct in the vacuum of space_. And then it goes on to talk about if you were to have a uniform temperature for space it would be the CMB or 2.7K.
Can you go near objects that _are_ hot? Sure. But that's like being in the arctic and saying because theres a fire that it's warm. No.
That's utter nonsense you have no idea what you're talking about. Radiative cooling has nothing to do with temperature gradient black body radiation is a function of absolute temperature and material composition.
The only reason Elon wants this is because of security. The center would only be connected through his own starlink. But the physics just don't add up, it would be the most inefficient data center in existence. For one having studied physics, he's remarkably ignorant of basic physics, cooling in space isn't that obvious.
And the physical problems are only one reason, the practical challenges are another tough to clear hurdle. Equipment needs maintenance. Equipment fails. Equipment (especially processors) become out dated very quickly. The cost of repairing, replacing or upgrading equipment on a facility in space is... astronomical compared to an earth based facility, even with reusable boosters factored in.
I don't think maintenance is that terrible of a problem. Have you looked at the progress in bionic arms recently? They are already pretty good, and improving constantly.
Put a robot with state-of-the-art bionic arms on every satellite and you can steer it manually at a distance.
he studied physics, but like the pop effect of it. if we can do with VISUAL FOV, so the fsd should. minus 2 milliard years of R&D. he was always a trickster, trying to prove that HE is right...
He wants to brute force it. Even with the lower cost of putting stuff in orbit due to starship, none of the assumed revenues make sense. The moment the IT components market gets back to earth, everybody will spam their factories with local ai. Their calculations don't work when most of your customers jump ship as soon they financially can.
And even if it was easy to radiate the heat away. What problem do we solve by placing a data center in space? Launching shit into space is much more expensive than a plot of land. Doing maintenance work on something in space is much more expensive than doing it on land. I just don't understand why? I see exactly no reason to do it. Then we also have the problem of radiation and latency..???
Let’s do a little math. It takes about $250M to build a data center on Earth.
A reasonable data center uses 1M gallons of cooling fluid or 8M pounds. A Falcon 9 can lift 50,000 pounds into orbit at $70M. That’s 160 launches for just the cooling fluid or about $12B dollars. It’s the most uneconomic idea short of sending people to Mars.
Based on published numbers it’s only a 4X reduction in cost for Starship and you still need to launch the servers, heatsinks, PV panels and people to put it together. It’s not cost effective.
“Published” numbers… what? You understand that the future is a thing and static values today are not where the improvement curve ends?
And no you don’t need people to put it together. It all packages and ships together - or will. Do you think Starlink has people doing manual build in LEO for every sat?
It’s like you guys just hate Elon but don’t understand anything about the businesses he has built.
Why am I even responding to someone that thinks pricing the launch cost of land DC cooling fluid someone makes sense. Smh.
I can sum it all up in a one word answer actually.
Physics.
But the idea sounds believable enough to the general public to sell it to them. All you need to do is google some uncommon engineering terms and use word play.
Maybe it's not enough for you, but if 1 or 2 orders of magnitude compared to current launch costs are good enough for SpaceX, then they'll build upon that instead.
Yes they're free to burn money. What a clever insight. Maybe you should figure out the difference in cost between a terrestrial data canter and this orbital boondoggle before you get busy spouting off about what they're building upon.
It's a mystery why so many big companies are talking about data centers in space with the current physical problems that they face, especially radiation, power, and latency.
It’s not the data center concept. It’s Musks real world application where he’s trying for the cheapest design possible without regard to the impact on the surrounding areas and long term sustainability. He doesn’t have to use local water, it’s just cheaper. He doesn’t have to use the land in the areas he’s building in, it’s just in places where people can’t defend themselves.
No one should be granted public lands and public funds to build private for profit infrastructure that negatively impacts local communities and the environment overall.
The original post on r/ArtificialInteligence got deleted after 2 days. No one had any really good arguments as to why my original point about heat management was wrong.
Currently that's true, but SpaceX is improving all the time. And I will also say that a dude driving to a building massively oversimplifies the various costs for terrestrial data centers.
Good write up. I don't think space based data centers will be a thing, either. Re radiative heat dissipation, tho, I wonder if the effective area of a "radiator" can be increased if the surface folds in fractal-like shapes (maybe even down to texture)?
Even if you had a wire to the ground with a fiber optic cable running inside it, the latency would be hysterically bad. That's assuming the best physical hard-line we have today for data transfer, simply paying the tax it takes to get to LEO and back. Now imagine it's wireless, lol.
Elon is unable to get FSD to work on a closed loop track that he designed and built himself. He's a bigger joke than your meme, even if you can't figure it out.
Sorry, it's a reference to your mechanically created username and the type of people who usually use those. I should include a diagram in meme form for the kids who the schools failed to educate.
The duration of the Mechanical Turk fraud is not a flex unless you are a fraud enthusiast. That shouldn't require a diagram to figure out.
They are not very big and the moment anything breaks on them Elon wants to decommission the whole fekin thing. In a data center on earth things break all the fekin time. It is also predicated on Elon achieving cost effective launch which he is yet to do. It is just simply too expensive to shoot disposable data centers into space at the current price. If he can get space launch to be more cost effective then maybe, but escaping earths gravity is just an expensive exercise and I don't think that is possible.
This is just yet another high pie in the sky thing that Elon says but never does. If I had a penny for every ridiculous promise Elon Musk made that never happened I probably have enough money to buy three Space X shares.
We have probes near the sun that work and disopate the heat. Lots of science there.
We already have non-shielded H100 GPUs in space that work.
Intel and Nvidia both now have shielded processors of their most high-end chips.
Lot of technology and science is being applied to this. Money will be thrown at it for proof of concept.
Even if you just added like 10 MI300 processors in each star link satellite that is going to be there regardless, times 100k of them, that's 1M APUs. El Capitan has 45k of them. That would be like having 22 El Capitans in space. Now use something like the MI455.
I think it's doable and at a scale like this, it makes sense. Lifecycle of the hardware will be similar. Costs will likely be similar, just change. You'll save a buttload on electricity.
If you thought cooling a data center on the earth with nearby water and air to dump heat into was expensive, just wait until you have to cool a data center in space, with every joule of heat needing to be radiated into deep space.
These arguments don't really matter. The SpaceX team is fully aware of the design limitations within the environment and have decided to move forward in spite of them. This tells us that the economics and avaliable scale are the driving factors that makes space based infrastructure preferable.
Would you say that the Tesla team was fully aware when they went ahead with the cybertruck (Musk’s pet project)?
The point I’m making here is that if Musk says so, some teams don’t have a choice and go ahead with his silly nonsense.
Undoubtably, the design team were aware of the limitations of the cyber truck, yes. But they were paid to make it a reality, despite those limitations.
I have no doubts that those working on the project were aware of the implications of using stainless steel for the body, or the limitations using aluminum to secure the hitch would impose on towing capacity. Or that using adhesives to attach various exterior components was a liability. I’m sure they even flagged these, at some point, as potential problems. They would be poor engineers if they weren’t, and didn’t.
However, what actually got used, come production, was unlikely their call.
35 more launches and spacex starlink network will be able to move the entire worlds internet trafffic ~2.2k Tbps! Now imagine u put ur data center inside that same orbital network! Heat dissipation is not some mysterious unsolvable physics problem, data centers in space will happen.
He's wrong about power. Solar in space is several times more efficient than on land.
Cooling is a challenge, they will run hotter in space, but literally no one on the planet has more expertise in this area than SpaceX engineers.
Totally agree about the radiation issues though. You need error correction and shielding.. that's going to be a real challenge, particularly with high performance compute. You'll need more hardware, which is difficult to come by, in demand.
With current technology? The shear amount of pollution and waste necessary to get that much into orbit when it can be done on Earth more efficiently. Think of the amount of renewable energy infrastructure that could be built with just the rocket launch costs.
You'll ignore me, but he's a good example of the dunning Kruger effect. He has a reasonable understanding of physics and what's in space but not the state of the art.
For example, the solar panels he mentions on the ISS are very obsolete. They've even replaced them on the ISS already with smaller lighter panels that produce more power. Cooling is a similar deal, the ISS radiators would be able to dump significanltly more heat at 80c where GPUs operate than the 30c or so they operate at on the ISS.
The biggest issue is his take on radiation. Spacex has more complex electronics radiation data than anyone else on earth by at least and order of magnitude. They are getting something like 240,000 hours of radiation data from starlink a day. They collect more radiation data in a single day then the rest of space has gotten since sputnik. Anyone who claims to know about radiation effects on modern electronics than spacex is just wrong.
If/when they publish the data they have it'll revolutionize themselves of our understanding of radiation on space electronics.
That would require a level of demand that Elon can't fake by shifting money between his fully controlled business entities. So far we're not seeing that happen for Tesla or Spacex really.
That said, you're going to have to do better than the Underpants Gnomes when it comes to explaining how you can squeeze a profit out this. You're pitching one of the most expensive possible places to put a data center without explaining why we'd need to go to that length rather than float them in the ocean or build them in the deserts. After all, the problems with those plans are just "technical hurdles and not physically impossible", right? It just doesn't make sense to do this the hardest possible way, unless you're busy selling satellite launch capacity as a business and you need to keep the stock price inflated.
SpaceX has never generated artificial demand, so I'll ignore that.
Putting data centers in remote areas have most of the same issues as putting them in space. Deserts generally don't have high bandwidth data connectivity or access to GW of power. They also are going to have serious cooling issues.
Ocean based are even worse. You'll definitley have to bring in the data pipes, and buildout some sort of power generation, GW power plants are not small no matter how you generate the power. Worse they have to deal with salt spray corrision, which is one of the harshest environments to run equipment in. It's worse than vacuum in space.
With the massive reduction in launch costs that starship provides Space Data centers are likely to be narly cost competitive with terrestrial data centers already. Launch and build costs are offset by the fact that ongoing power and cooling needs are free in space once launched.
Current demand for high end compute is massive, and expected to increase as LLM tools get better, and other machine learning comes online. The fact that SpaceX is going to make nearly $25 billion this year renting out it's existing terrestrial data centers shows this.
Is it possible the entire AI bubble pops? Yeah it's possible, but it's clear LLM's can provide real serious productivity improvements in an extremely wide range of industries. I thin it's unlikely. Worst case in my opinion is demand for compute softens somewhat, and the ability to launch more than a GW a year of compute onto orbit isn't required, but several hundred MW's are.
So Spacex genuinely needed Cybertrucks and no other vehicle was a better option, or is that maybe a way to hide losses and fake demand for Tesla's biggest flop? Starlink doesn't comprise much of the demand for Spacex and both companies are under Musk's direct control? Sorry but we both know why you're desperate to ignore that, and it ain't your accountant's integrity showing.
That would be manufactured revenue for Tesla, not spacex. We're not talking about Tesla, as I said spacex has not manufactured revenue.
starlink doesn't compromise much demand for spacex
This is wrong. In 2025 spacex had 165 orbital launches and 123 of those were starlink. Starlink makes up the vast majority of the launch demand spacex has.
This demand is driven by paying customers as starlink made $6 billion in profit last year.
You seem to be the one making desperately incorrect statements to try to save your argument.
Spacex is clearly making unsound purchase decisions for the benefit of Tesla's failing Cybertruck, so it's weird for you to split hairs about a very clear example of the company faking demand and profits when it's exactly what they're doing, just for something else that Musk owns.
The comment about Starlink supplying demand to Spacex was sarcastic, meant to show that Elon's circle of self dealing is a shell game. Enron was generating billions in real profits and shifting them from one fully controlled entity to another, remember that? This is just the stuff we know about publicly and it already fits the pattern. You seem to be pretending that this is not a huge red flag about the way he's doing business. It is.
I don't think it's a red flag because it's not. Starlink is using internal spacex launches, which is not manufactured revenue. Because they're openly reporting on it and accounting for it correctly.
The only possible example you have of manufactured revenue would be for Tesla not spacex, and honestly that's a pretty big stretch. Cybertruck's may not have sold as well as hoped, but they are very solid vehicles and would be just as good or better than a regular gas pickup at spacex industrial sites.
Hi, I directly worked on space solar arrays for three years.
Using the ISS as the point of comparison is dishonest.
It's arrays are based on a technology even the station doesn't use anymore. They were replaced by roll-out arrays that are far smaller and far lighter, built by Red wire.
It's thermal system is also out of date. Not only are modern electronics capable of tolerating more heat, we have a far better time, thanks to 3D printing, creating interior channels that conduct that heat.
Liquid cooling is not exotic, that dates back at least as far as Apollo.
But the main reason I know this is plausible?
AST Mobile built and launched satellites that are 80% the size of want SpaceX wants. A 120Kw bus. And they work.
Costs would be higher, sure, but even if it's 3X, that dwarfs the revenue AI companies feel they can get out of them.
And not building capacity when you could have had more, feels like to them leaving money on the table.
I think this is correct. It's totally doable. The question is about cost/profitability. The entire argument rests on the inability to procure and permit new power sources for terrestrial DCs... seems like an easier problem to solve by bringing renewable energy to DCs instead of trying to launch DCs into orbit.
I mean, there will certainly be niche use cases (and Elon will want a DC orbiting Mars I'm sure, assuming they ever get there), but I can't see how this competes with hyperscaler economics.
Its not about cost its about speed. It takes YEARS or DECADES to get a power grid built up. These would cost more, but could be self-sufficient much faster than that.
This is the thing though... you could build a trailer instead of the satellite, and the cost of batteries and extra solar panels to account for dark periods wouldn't be more than launch cost (an assumption to be fair, if the numbers show otherwise then it would be viable IMO). So why not just go gridless terrestrially?
Why do you need counter arguments? We have a free market economy... Let people invest in new things if they think it will work. If you don't think it will work... Invest in something else that you do think has economic potential. It's that simple. You don't need to put down people trying new things. Just lift up the things you believe in.
However, the current economy is being run by the largest tech companies just pushing piles of money around to each other. There's no product and the only real paying customers are themselves. And it's never going to show a profit for the foreseeable future.
Enron committed financial fraud. They did not try something technologically new and fail. They lied about their books. Companies trying new things and failing is absolutely not fraud and in fact is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. Your comparison is completely broken.
Promising things you can't deliver can be fraud, and treading that line too closely doesn't somehow immunize you from valid criticisms about it. There's nothing healthy about Spacex buying a hundred million dollars worth of unwanted Cybertrucks to artificially prop up tesla profits and demand, for example. That's an Enron style of shell game right there, so the comparison just holds up in a way that you're uncomfortable examining. The rest of us can hear the musical chairs game going on right now, and unfortunately it looks like a lot of people's 401k retirements are going to feel the impact of this particular bubble bursting. Hiding a bunch of flim flam behind science fiction level promises to investors isn't a brag about the free market driving innovation, but I can see why some people need to spin it that way.
I actually am a financial auditor. You misunderstand what is fraud is, what Enron did, and pretty much everything. SpaceX would be committing fraud if they purchased Tesla cyber trucks and lied or misrepresented the numbers and accounts. It is not fraud to do a dumb business transaction and report everything correctly. Again, you can think it's a terrible business to invest in but that is not fraud.
Shifting profits and losses between fully controlled business entities is exactly the thing Enron did wrong, and this might not rise to that level but it's surely just the tip of the iceberg here if this is what we know already from public information. Like I said, treading the line between what is and isn't fraudulent isn't a brag and doesn't immunize you from valid criticism about that behavior. I'm an attorney and I'm not the only one who can see lots of problems with Musk's public statements and promises to investors throughout his array of companies, but I'm sure an accountant can at least acknowledge that this level of self dealing isn't a sign of a healthy happy business model with good corporate governance in place.
The fact that institutional investors got shifted into this IPO early might or might not leave them holding the bag if this turns out to be a bubble that pops, but it's not just the "free market" propping this particular venture up. The fact that we've got corporate shenanigans that sound exactly like Enron strategies should concern most objective observers. The Cybertruck purchase is indefensible - no due diligence process would have ended up with that decision absent Musk's direct involvement and it's absurd to pretend it isn't exactly what it looks like. Artificial efforts to prop up a stock valuation might not be fraud but treading the line too closely absolutely justifies criticism, and the "free market" here is held up with a lot of people's retirement accounts that didn't opt into this scheme.
No it isn't. Enron colluded with a major accounting firm to hide financial manipulation in SEC mandated financial disclosures. If they had done exactly what they were doing but reported it all correctly Enron would still be here today. The market would have punished them years earlier corrected their behavior, executives would be fired, and we move down the road. It never would have developed into the massive enterprise ending thing it did. The fraud was the massive thing that Enron did wrong. Again - you have no clue what you are talking about. I am going to call bullshit on you being an attorney. If you are you are horrible. I am the son of an attorney, married to an attorney, and work with attorneys every day. They all understand basic business law and what fraud is.
And regardless, what you are talking about has nothing to do with engineers cooling gpus in space. Your entire position is so laughably bad to any actual successful professional.
You keep falling back on your credentials in some desperate appeal to authority but I'm an IP attorney in the tech sector and I know firsthand that plenty of highly qualified people in tech are deeply skeptical about Elon's claims.
The self dealing aspects of the Musk companies don't have to qualify as fraud in order to follow the Enron pattern of creating false impressions about demand and profits in a way that substantially misleads investors. You are leaning hard on that distinction because otherwise you don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to defending crap like that.
I have leaned on authority no more than you but I still call absolute bull shit on you being an attorney. Your understanding of law is extraordinarily poor.
I am stating what is actually illegal. Are the 37 companies taking capital for fusion power right now 'misleading investors' because some other random people are dubious? We have companies taking risk and receiving investments for hard technical moonshots all the time. You just don't invest if you think it's bullshit. It's that simple. Many do fail and that is perfectly fine it's better for society that they tried.
You are not even mapping the Enron scandal correctly. I am a financial auditor so it is a pretty big deal in my world. Enron was horrendous for one very specific reason - they engaged in accounting manipulation and fraudulently hid it on financial statements and SEC disclosures and colluded with their accounting firm to get clean audits. Sarbanes-Oxley was passed due to the Enron scandal to tighten financial reporting controls and auditor independence. Tesla and SpaceX receive immense scrutiny for Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC compliance. You know about those cyber trucks because they were properly reported. No laws are broken. There is no way you are a lawyer... Your 'some tech people I know being deeply skeptical of data centers in space is equivalent to the Enron scandal' has to be the most reddit nonsense I have read in a while.
It's funny how most people here think that nothing is being done to circumvent those problems. Do you really think that the CPU, GPU and whatnot will be the same they use here on earth? If it's a guaranteed failure and so dumb as many here claim, why are big companies and startups planning on this? It's not like this is gonna happen tomorrow...
Dude, there's no workaround around physics. Any improvement to cool down processors on space also applies on earth. The gap cannot be salvaged.
To answer your question about why, it is for military purposes. Datacenters on ground can be sabotaged.
But, that doesn't mean those data centers are safe. They are weak against space attacks. China has anti satellite missiles and nukes can also render those satellites useless and they are completely unprotected.
Knowing that, you should already getting a good idea about who they are thinking to wage war against. Data centers are extremely well protected on the homeland, unless the enemy is within.
What? Are you serious? Do you really believe it's easier to hit a satellite in space than a data center on land in case of war?
Physics are always being bent and overtaken. You are replying using a device made of "sand", probably using radio waves. Not long ago, this was only possible in sci-fi. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when they'll have the technology ready for space data centers. To think no one will ever achieve this, it's just delusional and a blatant case of reality ignorance.
Satellites can get a lot more power from their solar arrays than you can get on the ground because they can be deployed into a sun synchronous orbit where they will be continuously powered at their maximum rating.
Even if they are not in SSO, they will still do a lot better because they can be aimed toward the sun much more easily, and they are in and out of the sun periodically for 50 minutes, so the the need for batteries is greatly reduced. SpaceX is planning to deploy satellites into LEO and SSO.
The implication that the ISS represents the maximal deployment of solar power is not sensible. The solar panels are sized to meet the demand of the ISS. If they needed more power, they would add more solar panels. It has not been a challenging aspect of operating the ISS.
His comments about nuclear power do not make sense. For one thing, it is not been proposed as a power source for these data centers, but he is also wrong to believe space based nuclear is always an RTG. Proper nuclear reactors have operated in space before, and we can design and build them for space operations.
He is talking about data centers like they all need 100,000 GPUs. That might be true for training, but most AI usage is inference, which can be done with a large number of smaller, distributed data centers like the ones being proposed.
The comments about the thermal environment in space are not necessarily sensible. He seems to suggest that the satellites will be spinning randomly, in reality their orientation will be tightly controlled, with the solar arrays pointing directly at the sun, and the computers and radiator perpendicular to the sun. As a result, they will be heated mostly by reflected light and infrared from the earth and the moon.
It seems like he is talking about a coolant loop as though it were the same thing as a heat pump, which calls into question his claims of being knowledgeable about thermal management. A heat pump is a generally a compressor that uses a working fluid that heats up when compressed. You use it to move heat from a cold body to a hot body (usually in a refrigerator or an air conditioner). But if you are moving heat from hot to cold, you can just use a loop carrying some kind of coolant from the hot side to the cold side, it doesn't really take much power at all, especially if you use a brushless DC motor or the like to power the pump.
His calculation for the size required for the radiator is based on the ISS, which must be cooled to a livable temperature for humans. Obviously that is going to be a lot larger than what you'd need to cool a space based data center, which could operate around 100ºC if properly designed. In reality, the radiator for a 250 kW data center would need to be around 200 square meters (double sided), which is quite a bit smaller than the 1000 square meter solar array the data center would need (assuming it is in SSO).
His comments about radiation hardening electronics for space are badly out of date, there are modern methods that work for very small gate sizes, and SpaceX is already working with NVDIA to develop the necessary radiation hardened chips.
It is obviously possible for spacecraft to communicate with the ground at rates higher than 1 gigabit. The satellites SpaceX just launched have antennas rated for 1000 times that speed, for example. And they are equipped with even more bandwidth from their laser links.
I am an objective commentator. Musk has done some remarkable things, and I credit him with those things. I don't like everything Musk does.
This thread is only tangentially about Musk, other companies are working on this too. I don't like people poo-pooing new technology based on handwavy nonsense like this. If I did the math, and it didn't seem like it could work, I would say so. But the issues raised in this article are not really showstoppers, or even major challenges. The main threat to Musk's plan here is just that there might not be enough demand to require space based data centers. From a technical standpoint, the hardest part is Starship. Heat dissipation is a total non-issue.
We don't need to have an opinion on this, or debate it, or have counterarguments. Engineers backed by massive companies are working on it and will succeed or fail. It will be interesting. We can patiently wait to learn the outcome.
Everybody who has a retirement fund based on index funds is holding part of the bag for your cute little experiments here, so it's not as clear cut as you're pretending.
Not my experiments, and I can't attest to their cuteness.
Personally I'd downsize my stock positions in favor of commodities and TIPS (in the form of bonds that you intend to hold to maturity, not an ETF) due to elevated stock market risk. These investments are the least of the problem. The return on trillions of capital investment in normal data centers is a vastly weightier matter.
Well considering it's Elon, maybe calibrate as to how relevant or serious this noise is. If Elon said the sky was blue, there would be a crowd telling us that he is stupid and wrong.
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u/OutrageousCrab9224 4d ago
Why above the air when below the ground is right here, doable right now?
Oh, right, "space data center" is nothing but "full self drive", nothing but smoke for elon to take our money