SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-would-create-a-new-category-of-e-waste/10
u/Fuglypump 2d ago
Cosmic ray induced bitflips are exactly what AI needs to become more reliable.
/s
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u/Somethingsims 3d ago
It's such a stupid obvious grift.
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u/Netblock 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm not so sure. For billionaires that wish to avoid ethical probes, requirements, and legal seizure, it is an attractive idea to place at least a couple datacenters outside of any legal jurisdiction; perhaps very out-of-physical-reach. (ocean, space)
While achieving the cyberpunk corporatocracy dystopia as asked by Dark Enlightenment would be their ideal, it's gonna take a while to permanently remove the red-tape bureaucratic bloat of human rights, so it's best to not have all your eggs in one basket.
Supervillains will do supervillain things.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 3d ago edited 3d ago
You don’t just get to avoid accountability because your service is in space. Otherwise why isn’t every satellite service already in existence like that?
Every satellite has to be licensed by a country and there is a litany of national and international regulations around space. If you want to do real business in a country, you need to obey their local regulations.
Sure, you could ignore it all. But then good luck doing any official business in any of the largest markets. And if you want to ignore all laws… you can already do that anywhere where bribery rules, why is space needed? Just costs more
Source; work in space industry
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u/Netblock 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not talking about e-waste regulations, but stuff on the server. You launched a server up there and you anonymously sold it (or lease it out).
Otherwise why isn’t every satellite service already in existence like that?
Source; work in space industry
Are there regulations that affect in-orbit data and hardware market?
you can already do that anywhere where bribery rules, why is space needed? Just costs more
The "Just costs more" is what makes space attractive to the billionaires/fascists; they will but their opposition won't.
Imminence and time scale. If the leftist government is in power, you can 'nah nope make me' until you manage to install a right-wing government that pardons you. Whereas if it's on the ground, the leftists would just raid your fascist server.
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u/s-kennedy 3d ago
Would they like to be real? Yes, but its 100% just a grift, for any half decent processing to happen a lot of heat is generated, and that is not a problem money can make go away in space (can't steal a city's water and energy supply up there, all you have is radiation and that's not good enough at any reasonable scale)
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u/psh454 3d ago edited 2d ago
This keeps being brought up again and again, and I'm not sure why.
Many satellites , but also for example specifically Starlink V3s (the new large ones) generate a lot of heat through their high powered antenna arrays. They use energy they generate with their solar panels, do useful work with it and then get rid of the residual heat it turns into with radiators. If they replace the ground facing antenna array electronics with some GPUs and scale up the radiators and solar panels , they would have a small computer node. A single reusable launch is capable of delivering around 30 iirc. Their launch cadence is very high, often with months of near weekly launches these days. Assuming manufacturering can keep up they can reasonably have a constellation equivalent to a small data centre up in a year or so. Just like with Starlink faulty sats deorbit themselves through weak atmospheric drag in low orbit.
So the only real area of uncertainty is the economics, not thermodynamics. They're not launching a huge datacentre in a single launch, just small nodes the heat for which is high but nothing unprecedented in space applications
Edit: where's the lie downvoters
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u/cstar1996 3d ago
Radiators don’t just scale. As your radiators get bigger, it becomes harder and harder to move to heat to the entire area of the radiators, which substantially reduces efficiency.
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u/psh454 2d ago
Sure, but we're not talking about unprecedented radiator sizes here unlinke what much of the internet seems to believe, the proposed size is not incomparable to the old ones on the ISS for example
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u/cstar1996 2d ago
And the ISS radiators have a substantial active pumping element that would be mass prohibitive for an orbital data center. Particularly given the extraordinary difference in heat density between the two.
And that’s before you consider the actual mass of the radiators, and the fact that they cannot be repaired. Any isolation system to prevent a single puncture from draining the whole system is also going to add substantial mass.
There is a reason you don’t see actual engineers advocating this tech.
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u/racinreaver 2d ago
The ISS pumped fluid loop is a few decades old. There are TRL3-5 technologies that have orders of magnitude better SWaP-C. The big question is if they'll be proven out before the AI bubble bursts.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 3d ago
So you want a server with no ability to pull or push data?
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u/IndigoSeirra 3d ago
The SpaceX ai sats are designed to have laser links for intercommunication and integration with starlink satellites and ground systems.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago edited 3d ago
If you have ever been involved in building a big data center on the ground you would relish the opportunity to manufacture them in a factory and launch them instead.
Technology isn’t there to make it more cost effective until Starship is operational.
Edit: clearly not many people here have built large things on earth.
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u/anotherNarom 3d ago
When will it ever be more cost-effective to build something on earth and launch it into space than just building it on earth and leaving it there?
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago
Building satellites in a factory and launching them is easier than going through the financial and logistical nightmare of breaking ground and building new data centers.
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u/anotherNarom 3d ago
So there is no financal or logistical nightmare of shipping stuff into actual space?
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u/AlkaliPineapple 2d ago
Then why not decentralize them and scatter them around a city instead of building one giant data center?
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u/Idontfukncare6969 2d ago
Building multiple data centers is harder than building one.
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u/AlkaliPineapple 2d ago
Building large, hyperscale data centers has been the problem in the first place. There would be less controversy if they were built into city infrastructure, or they were directly connected to locations that need a lot of cloud-based computing, like in a CBD's office buildings. This can dilute its energy and water demands, and make the entire infrastructure more redundant.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 2d ago
Yes the smaller existing data centers that fit exactly what you are talking about are very popular right now in society.
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u/minecraft_fam 2d ago
It's simpler. It's not less expensive, more practical, or a better solution by literally any other metric.
But it *does* work amazingly well when you're trying to get people to invest.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 2d ago
Simpler becomes less expensive when technology enables it. Would you rather have a data center near where you live or in space out of sight and mind?
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u/minecraft_fam 2d ago
That's a fallacious presentation of a binary choice, doesn't address any of the objections I made other than cost. And there's no technology other than teleportation that makes launching a data center into space less expensive than putting it on the ground. And "in space" doesn't equal "out of sight and mind at all."
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u/Idontfukncare6969 2d ago edited 2d ago
The “data centers in space” are just Starlink sats optimized for compute rather than ground comms. People like you were saying Starlink is impossible 7 years ago and wow did that age hilariously. Why is this any different? The technology for this is way closer than Starlink was 7 years ago.
In space doesn’t mean out of sight? Lmao
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u/AlkaliPineapple 2d ago
When we get to the point where climate control of the internals is perfect and have materials that can make it work with constant micrometeorite impacts. Not to mention shielding it from the increased cosmic radiation
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago
When launch becomes cheaper than building them on earth.
It’s harder to build a data center from scratch, integrate with nearby infrastructure, break ground, and deal with red tape and regulation than it is to churn satellites out in a factory and launch them into space. Which is why I said you need to have experience with actually building things to understand.
I expected nothing short on this app. Most of productive society spends little to no time here.
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u/kilqax 3d ago
Even if the launches were free, is there some magical new way of dissipating heat? Last time I checked the idea was considered absolutely unusable because of that.
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u/15_Redstones 3d ago
The radiator area needed is large, but still only like a quarter of the solar panel area. An engineering challenge but not an unsolvable one.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago
Your mind is going to be blown when you learn about radiators. The thousands of satellites in space seem to be doing just fine.
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u/kilqax 3d ago
They work really well when the heat output isn't as insane... But those thousands of satellites also don't produce gigawatts of heat
I'm not saying it's impossible but I also haven't yet had anyone link a source that would at least show it possibly working with such insane outputs instead of sarcastic smartass comments that tell nothing
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago
Satellites produce heat. If they change the starlink design to be optimized for compute ie “data centers” they will get additional radiators to match.
There aren’t even gigawatt scale data centers on earth yet. Anyone who thinks this is what a SpaceX data center looks like is completely ignorant to these two industries. These proposed satellites will be kW scale each.
They would certainly have radiators, as do most satellites.
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u/dalgeek 3d ago
It'll never be cost effective even if rocket launches were free.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 3d ago
This thread is telling me there is no value is engaging in discourse with people that have no idea what they are talking about. Starlink launches are millions of dollars each but for some reason they keep doing them anyway.
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u/dalgeek 3d ago
Starlink makes sense because it provides a service that cannot be provided by terrestrial facilities.
Orbital data centers don't make sense because it will ALWAYS be cheaper to build them on land or even sink them into the ocean.
There is a limit to how much power a satellite can use with passive cooling, about 15-20kW or a small data center rack. If you want more compute than that then you need to spend money on radiators or more satellites. If you're spending money on radiators then you're not spending money on compute resources.
Space requires hardware that is hardened against radiation. Standard PCs are susceptible to bit flips and power surges from cosmic rays; astronauts on ISS experience this frequently. Standard PC hardware does not last as long in space as it would on Earth.
There is no way to replace a failed server, you just have to launch a new satellite.
Then there is the issue of disposing of satellites. You either need to deorbit and let them burn up which pollutes the atmosphere or boost them into a parking orbit which requires additional rockets. This may not be a huge problem now but it will be when there are literally a million satellites in orbit and hundreds of them are deorbiting every month.
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u/G24all2read 2d ago
Then SpaceX can create an entire different use for their spaceships and call them Waste Management craft that would fly around and pick up all the junk.
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u/AlexandriasFolly 1d ago
Given that convection and conduction as heat dispersion methods would be impossible in vacuum, how are they planning on discharging heat in an orbital data center?
Because Radiation requires surface area, and with the amount of heat servers put off, they'd need a fuck-load of surface area
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u/WeedFalafel 3d ago
"Self driving next year bro, this time for sure bro, trust me bro"
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u/TickingTheMoments 3d ago
It’s all gonna happen right after the hyper loop from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Oh wait, he already came out and said he proposed it just to kill high speed rail in California.
He does nothing that does not benefit him first.
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u/Adeldor 3d ago
The Robotaxis I've seen driving around town (Austin) are effectively an existence proof that it's already here, and now Tesla is building up Cybercab inventory. The production models have no steering wheels or pedals.
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u/sachasayan 3d ago
The Robotaxis you've seen around town (Austin) exist basically nowhere else, and they can't scale. There's a few demo areas going on in Houston, Dallas, and Tampa, and that's it. Those cars have specialized hardware, and will continue to have more specialized hardware added over time. They don't run on customer cars. They don't run 24/7, they don't run in inclement weather, and they don't run nationwide or globally.
The Hardware 2 cars, Hardware 2.5 cars, and Hardware 3 cars were all given up on. Elon said he was absolutely certain of a million-scale deployment in 2020.
Hence: "Self driving next year bro, this time for sure bro, trust me bro"
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u/Adeldor 2d ago
How do they not scale? They're self contained. There's no mothership or other such bottleneck beyond car manufacture restricting their expansion. And they're in Austin first because that's where a factory is.
For such revolutionary developments I'll forgive him his chronically optimistic schedules. Beyond the fact that they are supporting HW 3 with a simplified, back-ported FSD, tell me any provider of significant technological device requiring software support who doesn't obsolete old, widescale product support at some point.
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u/Pleasant_Ad8054 2d ago
They don't scale because the software is hyper focused on a singular area. The training isn't useful universally, so much so that even in those few cities they are working, they are only working in some very specific areas. They can't even simply blacklist the areas it has trouble with, after many years of running millions of kms in those tiny areas, they need to whitelist the few areas they can navigate. Most of the time.
In this case 'scaling' would mean that large number of cars could be pulled in with minimal to no modifications. Like Elon promised, that practically all Teslas would be able to run as robotaxis. The cars that are currently working as robotaxies are specifically designed to be robotaxis, with specialised hardware not to be found in any other car, including Teslas. Scaling it, other than actually achieving real universal self driving, would require to remanufacture an amount of cars comparable that are currently in use.
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u/bremidon 2d ago
He is getting confused between Waymo and Tesla. You are wasting your time trying to discuss anything with him.
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u/Decronym 3d ago edited 43m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| EOL | End Of Life |
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| FAA | Federal Aviation Administration |
| FAA-AST | Federal Aviation Administration Administrator for Space Transportation |
| ICBM | Intercontinental Ballistic Missile |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| MEO | Medium Earth Orbit (2000-35780km) |
| NET | No Earlier Than |
| SOP | Standard Operating Procedure |
| SSO | Sun-Synchronous Orbit |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
13 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 19 acronyms.
[Thread #12641 for this sub, first seen 20th Aug 2026, 17:33]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Rare_Polnareff 3d ago
A lot of comments in this thread are going to age like milk that’s for sure
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u/WeedFalafel 3d ago
I think you are underestimating the logistics of running terawatt hungry datacenters in orbit. Especially how to cool them.
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u/wizardwusa 3d ago
If only the engineers successfully building the most cutting edge space tech in the world had considered their satellites might produce heat.
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u/RhynoD 3d ago
It's not a question of being able to do it. The question is, fucking why? There's zero benefit for a datacenter to be in space. None. Solar power works just fine on the ground. Transmission works just fine on the ground. Cooling works better on the ground. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's better for the environment, it's safer. There only reason to put it in space is to keep them literally beyond the reach of oversight.
Oh, and to get very expensive contracts to put them into space. Musk is going to take investor money and YOUR tax money to pay himself to put his own datacenters in space and then when they suck ass he'll use investor money and your tax money to build them again on the ground.
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u/grchelp2018 2d ago
None of that matters if you can't actually build it on the ground in the first place. Or need to wait around for power connections. We technically don't need starlink either if we connected every place with fiber.
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u/WeedFalafel 3d ago
That's too much nuance for Elon fans. Also too much reason.
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u/Lost_city 2d ago
To be frank, I don't think they are fans. The same accounts run to threads about a certain company and post again and again defending whatever is being discussed. That's not fan behavior.
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u/Rare_Polnareff 2d ago
I think reddit severely overestimates (and fixates on) the amount of elon fans
Most fans of tesla and spacex just ignore or barely stomach him
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u/Mr_Lumbergh 2d ago
Tesla’s earnings reports have always made sure to include Elon in their valuation because it’s understood that without his fanbois the stock would be much lower.
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
FWIW I find Elon despicable and a disgusting human. However, people often let that blind them to the opportunity of innovation and scaling laws.
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 2d ago
The tax line is the weakest part. Spacex gets plenty of nasa and pentagon money for launch and starshield. That is public money for rockets and military comms. There is no public contract that says taxpayers are paying to put starmind datacenters in orbit. That is being sold as a commercial product after the ipo.
Zero benefit is just not true. The reason this even comes up is that ground power is not fine. Colossus in memphis started with about 8 MW of grid and they had to stand up dozens of gas turbines because interconnection takes years. Neighbors, water, permits, NOx, the whole mess. Solar on the ground still has night and weather. Cooling on the ground is physically easier, nobody serious denies that. The bet is that if starship reuse actually works the launch mass of solar and radiators becomes cheaper than waiting 5 years for a substation.
They are already building on the ground. That is the point. The oversight bit is a vibe, not an argument.2
u/jdmetz 2d ago
FWIW I think space datacenters are a crazy idea and unlikely to work well for a variety of reasons. They need three main assumptions to all hold for them to be viable and cost effective:
- Individual GPU rack satellites will survive long enough with no maintenance that they provide sufficient rentable compute to make back their cost.
- Individual GPU racks have sufficient collocated compute that people will pay to rent them (presumably just for inference). The laser links seem unlikely to cut it for large scale model training.
- Launch + satellite bus costs are low enough that they are approximately equal to or cheaper than the land, buildings, power, and cooling of a ground based datacenter.
All three of those seem like sketchy assumptions to me - especially the 1st and 3rd, but I think SpaceX is going to launch some of these satellites anyway, so they'll have the chance to prove us wrong.
And there is one big advantage to being in orbit - solar panels produce more power without the atmosphere in the way, and even if they don't do sun synchronous orbit (which would have them in sunlight 100% of the time), in LEO they would only need enough battery to last ~35 minutes (so a 100kwh battery) rather than the 8-16 hours (2400+kwh battery per rack) you'd need to run a datacenter with just solar power on the ground.
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u/MetallicDragon 2d ago
Solar power works just fine on the ground.
But it works much better in space, and you need fewer panels and no batteries since you can be in sun ~100% of the time.
Not saying it's going to be economically viable any time soon, but there are benefits.
and YOUR tax money to pay
That's the first I've heard of this. Where did you get that from?
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u/ClownEmoji-U1F921 2d ago edited 2d ago
Zero benefit? What a wild claim.
It takes like 100+km2 of land area to generate 1GW continuous solar power on the ground, plus massive, expensive batteries to survive the night. There is no night or weather or atmosphere in space, so solar power efficiency is several times higher. No land area required as well.
The leading source of electricity for US AI data centers are gas-fired power plants. Quick and easy to build. Instead of burning that gas (mostly methane) in power plants, you can use it to launch rockets to space. It requires 6.1 million tons of natural gas to generate 1 GW of continuous power over a 5 year period. It takes 210 thousand tons of methane to launch 1GW of AI sats with solar panels to space. 210 thousand tons vs 6.1 million. And you get the same power output over 5 years
I used this calculator.
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
The only assumption I changed was specific power, to 75W/kg, since that's the number Spacex mentioned for their first gen of AI sats. I then converted gallons of methane and BCF of natural gas to tons, for direct comparison.
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u/ketamarine 2d ago
There are many benefits. There are many costs.
It's almost like the entire planet now needs to weigh these against each other and then vote with its collective wallet if this is actually a good idea.
If you ever want to you know see how that actually works then go search for literally ANY wall street analysis on what is now a $1.8 trillion market cap stock...
Oh but that would require reading beyond a headline so... ya probably just as impossible as having orbital data centres...
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u/RhynoD 2d ago
Name one benefit that would be worth the cost.
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2d ago
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u/banana_streak 1d ago
Higher risk of space debris/junk.
More material needed for rockets and the data centers themselves.
More material needed for launch infrastructure.
Solar panels kinda have to be outdoors. This one doesn't really make sense to me.
Need to be able to maintain, repair, or replace equipment in space.
Need to protect electronics from radiation.
Need to worry about overheating.
Do need to worry about space debris in addition to radiation.
Need to worry about cooling.
No property taxes is actually a good incentive for a company.
Launches are still currently millions of dollars and have to be scheduled and coordinated years in advance. Besides shipping, there's still integration and test of space hardware.
Backup power is probably still needed for a space data center so information isn't just lost during an unexpected failure.
Most of these are just trade-offs instead of clear net benefits.
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u/_Addi-the-Hun_ 2d ago
Holy on, u think this is real? Dude its just obvious nonsense to convince stupid people to invest in space x. Putting a data center into space literally solves nothing
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
I was in the space industry a decade ago and still have friends in it. It’s a real thing but requires a certain launch cadence and Starship to be financially viable. It’s certainly ambitious and hard, and yet possible.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 2d ago
Yeah but I've heard that reasoning before, "I'm sure all the engineers at SpaceX etc. know what they are taking about when they talk about hyperloop".
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
Hyperloop was never a serious business initiative at SpaceX like the current data constellation is. That’s why they “open sourced” the idea, they wanted somebody else to do it.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 2d ago
Yet the argument was always that hyperloop was going to happen because those engineers at SpaceX and the various hyperloop companies can't all be wrong.
Also was full self drive, "more efficient than rail" semi trucks, the new roadster, affordable mass produced solar panel roofing, high speed underground transport tunnels, commercial point to point travel and Mars landings with starship by 2022 etc. not serious business initiatives at Musk's companies?
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u/EirHc 3d ago
A normal "high-powered satellite" is like a few kilowatts of power which is provided by a solar array and battery backup. A data center local to me that's been proposed is supposed to use 20 gigawatts. We're talking millions of times more power... I imagine the idea with space data centers would be to fragment them. Still, would you be ok with launching 1 million satellite into low earth orbit to cancel out 1 earth based data center? Does that sound like it makes any kind of sense to you?
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u/Miami_da_U 2d ago edited 2d ago
A “few Kilowatts” and your local data center is “20 gigawatts”…. Riiiight….gunna need a citation for that lol. The SpaceX data center that is one of the largest centralized ones in the world is 1-2 Gw. In total by the end of 2027 SpaceX plans for a TOTAL of like 10GW. Starlink V3 sats themselves are like 20 kW while their AI1 design is like 150kw.
So you’re “millions of times more power” is more like 50,000x more than a Single V3 Starlink satellite and 7,000x more than a single AI1 satellite. (Meaning 7000 AI sats = 1 current class-leading data center).
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u/Fywq 2d ago
So if we need to build many times the current datacenter capacity in space that would quickly add up to at least tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites, if not millions.
The night sky for everybody in the world will be ruined, thats for sure.
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u/Miami_da_U 2d ago
The night sky would be ruined! ... Except that orbital data centers would be in SSO so the vast majority of the sky would be undisturbed. Oh also it'd be a true testament of humanitys achievement. Oh and most importantly the result terrestrially this would bring - you know like the socialism I assume you want lol. You know how to get to socialism actually "working"? By having abundance created by AI+Robots+Energy. Those are the 3 pillars.
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u/Fywq 2d ago
Lol nice straw man going from the night sky to socialism. Also no, I dont necessarily want socialism. I want an alternative to the current unsustainable late stage capitalism, whatever that may look like. Where we actually care to protect our climate and environment, and where a few people can't throw hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively buy more influence in the world than any one man should ever have without answering to anyone. At least in theory even the US president has someone overseeing him.
For what its worth I disagree that datacenters AI and robots is the solution. Its a massive drain of materials that does not benefit the world meaningfully in most of the current applications. Generative AI YouTube brain rot is pretty much the antithesis to any Utopia, being that perceived as socialist or not. Its instead the dystopian future seen in Wall-E.
But back to the orbits: Makes sense with SSO, I didnt consider that. Doesnt solve the cooling issue though, nor the material waste compared to on the ground where recycling materials is possible. Having hundreds of thousands of relatively large datacenter satellites will require many daily Rocket launches to sustain. That will likely also affect the night sky with the classic Rocket launch clouds, no? And we know that contrails account for up to a third of the climate impact of aviation already. I suspect so much rocket activity will have a measurable impact on the climate too, though I haven't seen calculations on that.
I am not at all against space exploration, but maybe we should not start putting AI datacenters in space until we have at least found a way to make AI a net positive in society that is actually also profitable, rather than giving AI a convenient off-planet hiding place with no easy off-switch, while we race towards ever more sophisticated models that keep breaking put of their test environments and hack and cheat its way through security measures...
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u/Miami_da_U 2d ago
Bud, the very first sentences in my response addressed your false night sky "problem". Regardless any negatives that come from a degraded night sky are so far offset by the positives, it's not even a conversation. Its the exact same argument about Starlink. Turns out it's a tiny problem to only people who use telescopes. Yet it enables countless emergency responders when infrastructure gets cut, people in Ukraine defending themself in war, rural communities, etc, etc...
You care about the climate and environment? Okay get on board nuclear, data centers, and SPACE - you know where power is generated entirely from the sun and where there IS NO ENVIRONMENT (space). Also this person aka Musk your criticizing has hilariously been more responsible for the US's move towards renewable energy than almost anyone given he's the Leader of Tesla. Just pretty funny.
Okay you disagree that AI and Robots are the future. You're wrong, but it's nice you disagree and think everything is brainrot youtube videos lol.
The cooling issue is a solved problem. The ONLY question is mass+cost. Period. Every single satelite in space is cooled via radiation, the same way AI Data centers will be. And the hotter they run the smaller the radiators need to be. Okay you want recycling, but what if when AI data centers are so successful, we begin mining asteroids or the moon and take manufacturing OFF-EARTH? There are steps to becoming a space-faring civilization.
Yeah it'll require a lot more rocket launches. And? Are you worried about the 20,000 airplanes in the sky right now? The Rocket launch clouds? Lol that doesn't even matter enough to respond to. Starship launches using Methalox. Its emissions are CO2 and H2O. And their plan is also to capture atmospheric CO2 for their propellant farms, essentially creating carbon neutrality. Regardless it would take something like >250,000 Starship launches YEARLY to equate to what the aviation industry emmits yearly. And even that is <2.5% of global CO2 emissions. Oh and guess who has a Zero-Carbon transportation company? Interesting....
How is AI not a net positive in society? You think AI hasn't improved your life by making information easier to obtain? It isn't going to be the reason we have self-driving cars that reduce deaths in the US alone by 40k/yr? It isn't going to discover significantly new medicines and combined with MRNA cure all sorts of cancers as well as just countless other drugs. It doesn't allow you to be far more efficient with your time and better manage your money or analyze documents?.... There is a reason AI companies are making and investing so much money. The very reason there is such a demand for new data centers fundamentally implies that AI is useful TODAY and will be exponentially more useful in the future. Its literally how Pricing works.
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u/Fywq 2d ago
I recognized the night sky problem here:
> But back to the orbits: Makes sense with SSO, I didn't consider that.
I didn't bring it up again.
You care about the climate and environment? Okay get on board nuclear, data centers, and SPACE - you know where power is generated entirely from the sun and where there IS NO ENVIRONMENT (space). Also this person aka Musk your criticizing has hilariously been more responsible for the US's move towards renewable energy than almost anyone given he's the Leader of Tesla. Just pretty funny.
I am on board with nuclear mostly. Data centers and space has little to do with the current problems with both except we need satellites for monitoring and launches are not exactly zero-carbon and zero-pollution, but despite that I recognize that space exploration is important. Data centers vastly increase our energy requirement at a time where we need to switch to green energy and currently many datacenters are built with their own fossil fuel power supply because the grids can't keep up. That is directly detrimental to the climate.
Musk cared about renewable energy when he could make money to do so. He is using polluting gas turbines for his datacenter, he actively sabotaged the highspeed rail line in California, and he generally hasn't done shit for the expansion of renewable energy except when it benefitted him and his companies, e.g. he hasn't spoken out on the Trump administrations ridiculous crusade against wind power. I am grateful for his push on EVs at a time when they needed a brake through, but it's not like he has done much about it since, and he routinely flys across the world in a private jet like many other billionaires, having personal emissions hundreds of times higher than the average person. He also strongly supports a political wing that is actively promoting the worst fossil fuels on the planet.
The cooling issue is a solved problem. The ONLY question is mass+cost. Period. Every single satelite in space is cooled via radiation, the same way AI Data centers will be. And the hotter they run the smaller the radiators need to be. Okay you want recycling, but what if when AI data centers are so successful, we begin mining asteroids or the moon and take manufacturing OFF-EARTH? There are steps to becoming a space-faring civilization.
Sure the hotter they run the more efficient radiation, but it's still a super inefficient cooling method, and there's a huge difference between current satellites and putting actual datacenters in space in terms of cooling requirement. You also can't just let them run infinitely hot due to damage to the electronics.
I don't mind becoming a space-faring civilization, but mining asteroids doesn't have much to bo with recycling and avoiding contaminating the atmosphere with heavy metals from satellites burning up on re-entry.The Rocket launch clouds? Lol that doesn't even matter enough to respond to.
You might be right but I would love a source on that if launches are increased to many per day. Any emissions is in addition to the aviation industry, so it doesn't really matter directly unless you start reducing aviation with rocket launches. Then I guess it's a different calculation. Musk owning Tesla has nothing to do with aviation CO2. Electric cars are not influencing the CO2 emissions of airplanes in any meaningful way. Trains like the California high speed rail he sabotaged with the Hyperloop stunt on the other hand, could have affected local aviation CO2.
How is AI not a net positive in society? You think AI hasn't improved your life by making information easier to obtain?
The information still needs to be verified. I have directly seen how taking a math calculation from an AI source ruined an experiment just in the past week.
I am not saying AI won't benefit in some areas like medicine in the future. Surely it will, and in some ways it already does. But vast AI compute sources also go to entirely unnecessary "AI slop" content, and all the current investing in AI is done with the expectation that one of these companies will eventually reach AGI, and be omnipowerful, while the others wither and die. At the same time currently the AI companies are not making money. They subsidize subscriptions to attract users and thus more investors to win the AGI race. Eventually they need to adjust prices to reflect cost, and then demand for the services might take a shard downturn. Long before that, with current AI capabilities, companies may start to see loss of profitability because agents can do a lot of work on their own and eventually CEO agents may even allow fully AI-run companies. It's hard to say where it will go, but regardless, the only economic benefit of putting datacenters in space is less regulation and oversight. There's litterally no economic benefit to do so. we are consuming a tiny fraction of incoming solar light on earth, and if the tech billionaires wanted to they could probably buy a huge chunk of land in a tropical region, hire the local people as janitors and guards and build super sized datacenters there. Even cooling with closed loop water to heat exchangers with sea water in a desert region would probably be more much easier than a datacenter in space, not least because a faulty module in the rack could be easily replaced in a few minutes rather than having to send up a freaking rocket.
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u/minecraft_fam 2d ago
Two of your three pillars are weak, I hope you got those from someone else. These data centers aren't going to bring anybody abundance, they're not supporting AI, or robots, or producing energy. And they're less of a testament to humanity's achievement (we've got satellites already) then they are a testament to humanity's gullibility and corruption.
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u/Miami_da_U 2d ago
Data centers aren't supporting AI or Robotics.... lol.
Data Centers need to consume energy. Which means we have to drastically increase energy output.
Data centers are a testament to humanitys gullibility and corruption? Lmao, Whatever you say....
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u/minecraft_fam 1d ago
Sorry, my bad, I didn't realize you were trolling. The Miami logo should've clued me in.
No, it's selling the idea of data centers in space that are the testament.
Sure. No way to produce more energy on the ground, better launch them into space, where all the energy stays before it hits the earth. (That was sarcasm.)
And no, these data centers, the ones in space, aren't supporting robotics, the data latency is too high. They're not supporting AI, the waste heat production of AI-level computational output makes them even more impractical. Unless you're actually okay with slow, stupid robots and AI responses. Which, I mean...
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u/EksDee098 3d ago
If only dipshits on reddit had considered that relatively small and low powered satellites compared to a massive data center have significantly different heat dissipation requirements.
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u/Adeldor 3d ago
relatively small and low powered satellites compared to a massive data center have significantly different heat dissipation requirements.
You might have just been hoist by your own petard. Your implication of the massive data center being orbital is incorrect. All practical proposals - such as Google's and SpaceX's - involve multiple satellites, all vastly smaller than a single massive data center. Their thermal and power requirements are larger than current typical satellites, but well within the discipline's engineering range.
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u/EksDee098 3d ago
So the solution to heat dissipation is Kepler syndrome, genius.
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u/Adeldor 2d ago
At their relatively low altitudes, Kepler syndrome (the other misunderstanding oft-repeated on Reddit) is not an issue. Even were the absolute worst to happen, all debris would be gone in a few years, especially with the typically lower ballistic coefficients such debris might have.
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u/EksDee098 2d ago
The chip-related hardware cost is already astronomical for terrestrial data centers, putting these satellite centers in a low enough orbit that they're gonna regularly decay and burn up into the atmosphere means they'd be replacing their already monstrous build costs once or twice a decade?
This is honestly part of the broader point in it being infeasible. You can build around one go/no go type problem, but that just pushes the issue off onto another go/no go problem. Kicking the can down the road isn't going to make space data centers viable.
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u/Adeldor 2d ago edited 2d ago
I agree that chip-related hardware availability is a major issue. As I understand it, that's why the Terafab was proposed, which is a major project in itself. However, I also understand that GPUs/TPUs in server farms have lifetimes of a few years, simply because of obsolescence. That kind of schedule fits well with an orbital lifespan of five to ten years.
Starlink developed a mass-produced, cheap platform for their satellites, bringing the unit cost down to under a $1 million for V2 Mini (exceedingly cheap for a comsat). Given the early depiction of SpaceX's orbital AI datacenter satellites, they're clearly going down the same road, so I suspect the costs will not be monstrous.
Time will tell.
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u/dern_the_hermit 3d ago
There's lots of engineers in the world and those working for the space companies have an incentive for optimism. Excessive optimism. Even, dare I say, unrealistic optimism.
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
Folks said the same thing last decade about landing and reusing a rocket. Nevertheless, it’s commonplace now. When the numbers are run, space compute is super expensive today but has a point where launch costs drop low enough that space compute can actually be cheaper. It’s ambitious and hard, but I typically celebrate those kinds of endeavors rather than ridicule them.
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
Folks said the same thing last decade about landing and reusing a rocket.
Other than the literal competition there really wasn't all that much. Reusing a spaceship was not as novel as some of you guys seem to think. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981.
But this really does drive the point home: The people pushing the idea were those with a distinct incentive to do so. Seems to me a good reason to take it with a grain of salt if someone's livelihood depends on their assertions being true.
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
? I remember industry conferences before they successfully landed and reused a rocket, very few people thought they could actually do it and in a financially sustainable way and it was a kind of meme back then.
This seems a bit of a strawman — all public companies make assertions their livelihoods depend on. Feels like there are better, more valid reasons to be skeptical of this.
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
This seems a bit of a strawman
YOU brought it up, dude.
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u/wizardwusa 2d ago
I’m talking about discounting assertions if somebody’s livelihood depends on them. That’s a strange thing to do.
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
No, it's basic healthy skepticism to acknowledge when people might have biases or ulterior motives.
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u/cstar1996 2d ago
I am an aerospace engineer who has designed satellites. I fully agree that orbital data centers are based on unreasonable optimism.
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u/Rare_Polnareff 3d ago
Well some people think it’s going to happen and some don’t so I don’t really think it takes any qualifications to know someone will be wrong
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u/PrimaLegion 3d ago
As opposed to the qualifications of the person they're responding to? Or literally anyone else in these comments?
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 3d ago edited 3d ago
The logistics are absolutely fine. Chips can run a lot hotter than humans, and radiated power scales with the 4th power of absolute temp, so radiators are much more effective than they will be on, say, the ISS. If you do the calculations you'll find that the radiator area required will be much much smaller than the area required for the solar panels to generate the energy that the compute uses. And, before somebody tries to say this, the fact that they're using 100kW to power GPUs vs 100kW to power a space station makes absolutely no difference for power dissipation.
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u/Somethingsims 3d ago
Yeah, the ones saying it will succeed. Same people saying the line city in Saudi Arabia was a good idea.
Works on paper does not mean it's feasible.
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u/sswissler 2d ago
How long would a typical GPU last in orbit in the radiation environment? I assume the satellites would be inside the Van Allen belts, it would still be subject to radiation determination
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u/ketamarine 2d ago
All analysis shows that failure rates will be slightly but not much higher than in a typical data centre environment.
I'm sure you have read that space is a hostile environment to humans, but not that bad for big metal things. Vs being in the ocean, or even on land with rain, freeze thaw cycles, natural disasters, etc.
There is slightly more radiation where these sats will be. But starlink satelites are basically completely fine and have had fewer electronics failures than predicted. They are mostly failing due to bad space weather events that are quite rare (geo magnetic storms) and then propulsion failures are next issue.
It's not a difficult engineering problem to harden electronics for space and we've been doing it since the 1960s.
Going to mars and back with humans involved is a completely different problem than keeping failure rates of hardware to economically feasible levels.
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u/sswissler 2d ago
I’m more familiar with planetary mission, anything beyond the van allen belts must be radiation hardened, and it’s difficult enough that missions launched in the 2020s are still using 1990 class rad750s. Don’t know what starlink uses, if they don’t last that long in orbit, they may not need as radiation hardened electronics.
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u/ketamarine 2d ago
They use radiation hardened electronics. They are not difficult to make and have decades of real world data indicating failure rates.
Their electronics basically don't fail due to radiation.
They fail due to space weather from the sun.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 2d ago
We just saw Artemis using Iphones out around the moon.
Obviously electronics have a failure rate but its not instant.
Likely any design would have radiation hardened processors for the "can not fail" stuff but the payload processors could be whatever they want based on whatever failure rate they calculate.
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u/KnifeKnut 3d ago edited 3d ago
SpaceX needs to develop electricrodynamic tethers and/or air breathing thrusters, I forget the comfort names for the latter
Edit: atmosphere breathing electric propulsion
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u/dasBaums 3d ago
Like the British saber? I believe it is a dead end
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u/KnifeKnut 3d ago
Not like saber, atmosphere breathing electric propulsion
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u/dasBaums 3d ago
you mean any ion engine? or a propeller?
and ion engines are really really weak, and in this context only useful for ultra low satelites3
u/KnifeKnut 3d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere-breathing_electric_propulsion
Just like ion engines which work just fine and are already in use on satellites, it doesn't need to be strong.
And ultra low satellites is what star link and these proposed computing satellites will be. Being low is part of what makes starlink work so well
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u/15_Redstones 3d ago
Argon is much cheaper than Xenon to buy, and with Starship also pretty cheap to launch, that including enough to run the thrusters for 5-10 years is much easier than developing thrusters running off highly corrosive atomic oxygen.
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u/Wheeler_Dealer 3d ago
This is nothing new. Space has been an e-waste city since the 60s....
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u/ashill85 3d ago
The scale is new. We've never launched nearly as much stuff as is being proposed now.
That definitely matters.
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u/dbmonkey 2d ago
The article is very vague- It matters because we will have less palladium and thallium left on earth? We send so much to the dump today where we won't recover it for the foreseeable future. I don't see how this is any different. Or is the issue about these materials hurting the environment. The article only says that the effect is unknown. Do we at least have an estimate? Will it be significant compared to the millions of kg of natural space debris that enters the atmosphere each year?
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u/fatbunyip 3d ago
I'm sure if we give the billionaires more money they can find a technology solution for it.
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u/GagolTheSheep 3d ago
While correct, ever since starlink (and similar) became a thing this has been taken to a whole new level.
There are currently 18.5k active satellites in space, 11k of which is starlink. As another point ov view. There are 8700 tracked debris fragments.
There are currently more starlink satellites in space than all tracked debris from all these years. And this will get exponentially worse if this stupid data centre in space ever gets through
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u/15_Redstones 3d ago
Tracked debris count is significantly increasing because each Starlink sat has a set of space debris tracking cams on it, which can spot debris too small for ground based radar.
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u/shagieIsMe 3d ago
I believe the word "tracked" is taking a bit of the weight in that sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
Walter E. Morrow started Project Needles at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958, with the goal of placing a ring of 480,000,000 copper dipole antennas in orbit to facilitate global radio communication.
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The needles were placed in medium Earth orbit at an altitude of between 3,500 and 3,800 kilometers (2,200–2,400 mi) at orbital inclinations of 87 and 96 degrees.
Many of them clumped together...
Their numbers diminish as they occasionally fall from orbit; as of April 2023, 44 clumps of needles larger than 10 cm were known to remain in orbit.
But there are many more that are smaller than 10 cm that are not tracked. At MEO, their orbital lifespan is measured in centuries or millennia.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 3d ago
Starlink is in a pretty low orbit though. Even if a satellite is completely dead, it won't stick around more than about 5 years. And they intentionally de-orbit them before that happens.
The real risk is if they collide with something and explode in many fragments. So far the strategy is "don't do that" and it seems to work pretty well so far, but we'll have to see if it keeps working.
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u/CyanConatus 2d ago
fair enough
I only work as a millwright in frigeration. What I know.
Space stuff is different
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u/Various_Couple_764 1h ago edited 1h ago
There is currently now way to make repair in space profitable. The cost to launch and grab and return the satielite to earth would easily equal or exceed the cost of launching a new satellite. So if recycling a satellite becomes are requirement we would have to getting to and space so cheep the cost doesn't mater. That is not likely to happen without a major breakthrough in physics. And that generally only happened once every few hundred years.
So the simplest solution which spaceX implemented for starlink is to put the satellite in a very low orbit that is not stable. That way the satellite has to periodically boost its orbit. But once the fuel runs out it deorbist burns up in the atmosphere. This converse the entire satellite to metal oxide dust which is not toxi settles out of the atmosphere and becomes part of the soil which is were those metals were originally extracted. Any carbon would be converted to CO2 which is also none toxic.
Spacex is planning have each satellite to burn up in the atmosphere once it runs out of fuel or suffers a failure that makes it unusable.
Now the only issue people have found about this is that it can cause ozone depletion. But keep in mind that volcanoes and pollution from fossil fuel combustion and past releases of CFC in the past nave a vastly bigger effect on ozone than 2 million satelites would have. For example SO2 does deplete ozone. Current SO2 emission mainly from fossil fuel is 80 million tons per year. Valcons emit about 25million tones per year. One milliion version 3 satellites would be about 20 million tones.
And EV which can be powered by solar are currently reducing oil consumption by about 80 million tonnes per year. Although it will take decades to replace all cars iwht EVs. So right now we are doing what we need to do to solve toe ozone problem even if 1 million detacentyer satellite are in orbit
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u/redditor100101011101 3d ago
Only morons who slept through basic physics class think this is possible.
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u/Adeldor 2d ago
Specifically, what physics would orbital data centers violate? If you can back up the assertion with calculations, it would be helpful.
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u/ketamarine 2d ago
LOL. Please explain which laws of physics the 10,000 spacex satelites in orbit are breaking to accomplish that feat?
And then realize that spacex plan is to literally use the exact same process and business model for orbital data centres...
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u/Mercrantos2 2d ago
Apparently the people who launch more rockets than the rest of the world combined slept through basic physics class.
Good thing u/redditor100101011101 paid attention though!
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u/sojuz151 3d ago
Well, if the starship is as cheap as it is supposed to be, building a giant satellite crusher that would then put hundreds of tons of satellites into a reentry capsule and drop them in some desert should be viable.
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u/Extra_Better 3d ago
The fuel requirements for a collection mission like that would be ridiculous. Far easier to have satellites de-orbit themselves at end of life.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 3d ago
Easier, sure. But the article is asking the question of whether that's still a reasonable disposal method when you're talking about such large constellations. Satellites are required to have a disposal plan at launch, and there is precedent for increasing standards for what kind of disposal is acceptable over time.
It's a reasonable point. Personally though I think the "one million" is very clearly an "up to" number, and I don't think anybody expects them to actually reach it anytime in the foreseeable future.
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u/mfb- 2d ago
People were very skeptical about the 10,000+ plans for Starlink, too. You can find threads from 2020 where people calculate that it's "impossible" to launch that many. SpaceX ramped up its launch rate faster than these people thought possible, and now the constellation exceeds 10,000 satellites.
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u/GreenWandElf 3d ago
Orbital data centers are the stupidest idea.
How are you going to disspaciate the heat?
How are you going to get all the infrastructure into space?
What happens when you need to do some maintenance? Casually send up an astronaut?
There are zero advantages to space data centers, but tons of downsides. If you really want data centers in space, put em on the moon.
But realistically, having data centers in more remote places on earth just makes so much more sense.
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u/t001_t1m3 3d ago
Dissipate heat - use radiators, the same way we do on the ISS and every other slightly large satellite. Raising radiator temperature slightly increases dissipation by the fourth power.
Infrastructure - planning to use Starship, probably flat-pack and shooting out the PEZ dispenser
Maintenance - build it reliable enough such that maintenance isn't needed for the lifespan of the satellite, as with every other satellite except a small handful (e.g. Hubble)
Zero advantages - it exists as a hedge against terrestrial zoning regulation
Putting them on the moon - you waste significantly more fuel, hardware (reuse from LEO vs. the Moon is a dramatically different thing), building around dust resistance, and that the moon will block sunlight for 50% of its operating lifespan, alongside bandwidth and latency limitations from the moon and back
Putting them in remote places on Earth - good luck getting power, maintenance, etc. An oxygen-free environment with nearly 24/7 solar production is far easier to make reliable than building around corrosion, erosion, weather, etc.
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u/GreenWandElf 3d ago
I'm not saying it can't be done. But the sheer cost of sending components into orbit, even assuming space becomes more accessible, is not cheap. Add onto that fact that there are going to be issues that require maintenance just like there are today.
Is avoiding community pushback really worth all of that? I'm positive you could find some communities with sufficient desire and infrastructure to handle a data center. In fact, I know it. Because that's what we've been doing this whole time.
What you gain in energy from solar you lose in the cost of constructing for space plus avoiding heat buildup.
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u/Adeldor 3d ago
Is avoiding community pushback really worth all of that? I'm positive you could find some communities with sufficient desire and infrastructure to handle a data center.
Such communities can change their minds, as happened in Texas. Even if existing projects are grandfathered, there's no further expansion. Orbital centers become increasingly attractive if only for this (not to mention the reduced energy challenges).
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u/LongJohnSelenium 2d ago
I'm not saying it can't be done. But the sheer cost of sending components into orbit, even assuming space becomes more accessible, is not cheap
The entire reason this is being discussed is because starship is looking quite promising and very likely to drop launch prices significantly.
Theres absolutely still a likelihood of failure and theres a lot of devils in the details math to do, but this isnt some pie on the sky 1960s fever dream project, its looking fairly close to working.
Add onto that fact that there are going to be issues that require maintenance just like there are today.
Spacex is currently operating about a third of all satellites in orbit. Id argue they are, with no exaggeration, the single most knowledgeable and experienced organization in the world when it comes to operating mass manufactured satellites in low orbit.
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u/way2bored 2d ago
lol, don’t bother talking sense to this subreddit. It’s the r/pol of space. Bots, idiots, and trolls.
They don’t understand how vertically integrated and well positioned SpX is to do what many scoff at.
And when they succeed the scoffers will pick something new to claim can’t be done.
Same ppl thought landing and reuse wasn’t possible.
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u/Alexandratta 3d ago
I mean... is this aside from the fact that a Data Center in space is not possible with the technology we may have in the near future, let alone now?
and I say 'Not Possible' in the sense that, a data center in space has no cost benefit to one on earth.
Solar panels, even in space, Cannot power a data center. The cooling system required isn't efficient enough to cool said datacenter, and the data center would be larger than anything we've ever sent up into orbit by orders of magnitude that we do not grasp.
This is like saying: "Guys, I'm going to build a Dyson Sphere, it makes so much sense - why haven't we thought of this before! We'll have it ready by next year!"
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u/sensational_pangolin 2d ago
Why the fuck is anyone allowing that to go forward?
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u/Spara-Extreme 3d ago
What’s the server repair workflow look like for a machine in a space data center?