An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit
An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit
Me too. I'll even make them full AI.
Please send me $2 billion by Tuesday. My salary as yetAnotherUser CEO & CTO is a modest 20 million/year. Results are expected to appear by 2030.
Data centers in the ocean didn't work out. This doesn't seem smarter
The Chinese have done it apparently.
Wasn't the Mocrosoft test run very successful?
What should that babble even mean?
In a data center, you have 4 main problems:
Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked....
So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??
I'm talking out of my ass. So I'm not arguing with you but I'd think
Space isn't cold, it's nothing. It's a vacuum and vacuum is terrible at heat transfer by convection. It's why thermos bottles have a vacuum layer to prevent heat transfer. You can try to lose some heat by radiant cooling, but that's slow and if you're using solar for power then any radiators become heat sinks picking up more heat from the sun. Then there's conduction, and again, there's really nowhere to conduct any heat to, what with the large distance between objects and the vacuum and all. Thermal management in space is kind of a hard problem.
Re: 4
Very, very common misconception, because of how often you see things/people in movies instantly freeze in space. But it's just not remotely true.
The analogy the previous user gave is perfect; space is a thermos flask. It's a perfect insulator.
To break that down a little more, you have to understand that heat moves in two basic ways; conduction and radiation. Conduction is when molecules agitate the molecules next to them. Radiation is when molecules give off electromagnetic energy.
The way a thermal camera works is that it sees the otherwise invisible infra-red light that hot things give off. That's the radiation part of heat transfer. Radiation is, on the whole, a really slow, really bad way of moving heat.
Conduction is much faster, especially when there's a big difference in temperature between the two mediums. That's why you (average temp around 37C) can stand in a 21C room and feel really comfortable. You're losing thermal energy, because the air touching your skin is colder, but you're losing it at about the same rate your body naturally makes it.
But if you step outside into air that's -20C, your temperature is going to start dropping very fast. There's a much, much bigger difference in temperature now, so the heat transfer is faster. Also that air is probably moving because of the wind, which means the parts of the air getting warmed by the transfer from your skin are instantly replaced by fresh, cold air.
In space you have none of that. Just vacuum. There's no molecules in vacuum to agitate. So aside from the very small amount you lose from radiation, heat just builds up. This is a huge problem for spaceships and satellites. They have to build in massive fins to help radiate heat away faster.
But it gets worse, because you know what radiates heat really, really well? The Sun. Which you are now exposed to, whenever you're not directly in Earth's shadow, with no atmosphere to absorb any of that incoming radiation. So the biggest problem for objects in space is rarely getting too cold, and far more often it's getting too hot.
Introducing something that already has massive cooling requirements into that environment would be a total fucking nightmare.
So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??
$$$. The casino economy is for gamblers and grifters.
Yeah I don't know why anyone entertains the idea.
Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you'd have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can't keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that's more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.
Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.
The energy I don't know about really, but at least it doesn't sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You'd have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don't see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.
Isn’t it incredibly difficult to shed heat in space since the only real way to move heat is radiation?
In the (fiction) novel Artemis by Andy Weir, which takes place in a city on the moon, they have a heat management system that seemed pretty cool. They convert heat to light, and radiate the light out into space. Not sure how feasible/scalable that is, but I thought the concept was cool.
If they can turn it into light why not turn it into energy to be used?
That's already how they do it. They pass heat onto radiators which radiate away the excess heat in infrared. It should be noted however that this is far less efficient than it is in an atmosphere.
Doesn’t that already happen with infrared radiation?
There are some various ways. Radiators can be large and thin, and as long as the heat-sensitive part of the thing is kept cool it doesn't really matter how hot the rest of it gets.
Imagine getting sent up because a pos rj45 cable got hit by a micrometeorite
In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.
Yeah me too! Give me money.
Welp, that's a fuckin stupid idea. Next!
The only thing better than grifting is grifting on an astronomical scale.
Come on now, people can't actually be humoring this fever dream, can they? It's just so fucking stupid...
Why not on mars? It's even farther away and too cold anyway.
News headline in the future: "Orbital Data Center Crashes Into Los Angeles in a Mass Casualty Event"
Isn’t this how Skynet started?
No, it started when a scriptwriter came up with an idea for a movie that would sell a lot of tickets.
FUCK OFF Thank you
Do you want furries in space??
Bcs that is how you get furries in space.
Even if this was an economically sound proposal, the next X45 magnitude solar flare might be a nasty surprise for reliability metrics...
Edit: at some point, this would also likely contribute to Kessler Syndrome, but at least we'd have chat bots.
Now Elon can have his own death star!
Getting rid of the heat is going to be an issue for that... along with the massive pollution from the many launches required to get this in orbit.
The heat will just dissipate in the air, and they can launch it at night when it's colder. Science!
/s in case, there are a few mouth breathers out today
They could build them so that they stay in perpetual dawn or dusk. One edge with the solar panels in the su, the other edge with the cooling fins in the night’s cool breeze.
Oh! Oh! Attach it to a meteorite! Almost infinite heatsink in space!
I'm pretty sure they're aware of the need for radiators. They've probably designed satellites before.
Nobody thinks they're incapable of working this out; we think theyre deliberately advertising something dumb that lay people won't necessarily understand is dumb. Replying that they have smart engineers is stupid because no-one denied it - we just don't think they used those engineers to come up with the idea.
yes but they're not trying to dissipate megawatts usually
Kessler syndrome goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr