Elon should do I it. Really. Either we get to see what noone understands yet: How economically viable server cooling at scale in space looks like or we see Elon faceplant financially yet again.
Either way, we win.
Vacuum does not vent heat.
This has been a PSA.
Vacuum does not vent heat.
my Dyson gets pretty warm.
No but hot things will just radiate it away, regardless of vacuum.
Apparently there are a lot of concerns, of which, one is venting heat. Also the change of heat as a satellite dips in and out of sunlight.
I didn’t think about radiation, which I should have since it’s a not-small problem for human astronauts.
Heavy CMEs are going to be the AI equivalent of Purple Haze LSD.
Still kinda blows my mind that a ship could accelerate to 1c and still not be able to use cooling fins, aircraft on earth use it as part of the design process
no worries about the temperature if the ship collides with a spec of spacedust :)
Democrats immediately win three of the four seats on the Moon and sweep the Sky Council.
We can also launch Elmo into space and… Well, just forget about him, good riddance
Please, waste your money on something that needs several football fields big heat radiators per gigawatt. And cannot replace a hard drive without launching a technician into space.
Just confirming what I’ve suspected: the point of the space datacenter thing is to keep the tools of oppression out of reach of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
I want Elon Musk in space, aimlessly drifting around.
He will do absolutely anything to not spend money on making the world he lives in a better place for all. So build a data center in space, just add a little apartment for yourself. Imagine looking down on the whole world! What power!
Is there somewhere we can donate to help make sure he
fries in a coronal mess ejectionlives the dream he’s always wanted?With our current tech, a Mars mission pretty much 100% certain a one-way trip.
Common elon, wheres your “move fast and break stuff” spirit? Lets get you suited up and on a rocket asap!
Imagine how rapidly he could innovate on a constant acceleration vector out of the solar system!
Keeping one rack of GPU running needs basically all the uninhabited parts of the international space station. That’s roughly 100 kilowatt. That’s 10.000 ISS sized installations, man’s most expensive object ever made, for a gigawatt datacenter. I just hope he’s forced to bankroll this personally
It’s stupid on so many levels… yeah first and foremost basically everything about space is terrible for data centers.
What are the 3 things a data center needs.
Power, cooling, good internet connection. Obviously power is complicated as heck, yeah solar is a bit more direct, but also hits total blackouts when it winds up in the shadow of things… and shielding etc… from all the radiation is a pain and a half, solar pannels will need to be drastically bigger and heavier than their earth counterparts, which is expensive as hell to send up there.
but the harder part… cooling. People think of space as cold, but that’s innacurate… there’s no air to be cold… things stay at the temperature they are… if you have something constantly pumping out heat… it’s insanely difficult to get the heat to radiate out.
Just read a comment about exactly this a few days ago. Anyone working on space components know that a very hat problem to work on is how to keep things cool because, well - having the fucking sun shine on things most of the time directly without the ozone layer and air to dissipate heat in and way does make things go hot.
Also, you forgot a very important thing a data center needs: people that work there. That is one of the reasons we currently build data centers so close to urban sprawls in Arizona instead of somewhere in the middle of Alaska or in polar regions. There must be personnel working onsite all the time.
Also it will need repairs. And probably more often than not due to the radiation.
It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.
But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.
Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.
The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.
I’m not sure the moon makes a lot of sense.
I mean, the two weeks of darkness is the real killer.
I mean look, let’s say our datacenter requires 100 kw of power. That means about an 800 square m solar array. If you need to store enough power to run the system through a two week night, you’ll need a lot of batteries and a much larger array. You’ll only be collecting power half the time, so the array needs to be twice as large. But there are about 30% losses in transferring energy to the battery, drain over time, and then transferring back, so some quick math says you now need somewhere around 230kw, for a 1800 square m solar array.
Currently, an array large enough to generate 100kw weighs between 1-2 tons. If we’re optimistic and say 1 ton, that’s 2.25 tons for our equivalent moon array
Now the batteries. The capacity needs to be enough to store 130kw over the course of two weeks. 130kw x 24hours x 14days = 43,680 kw hours of storage. Lithium ion batteries weigh about 5kg per kwh of storage. 43,680 kwh of storage would weigh 218 tons. And that’s just the base weight of the batteries, I didn’t factor in whatever structures or systems the batteries would need to be usable in space.
Here’s where I point out that it costs about $5 mil per ton sent to orbit. It costs somewhere between $100 mil and $1 bil to send 1 ton to the moon. Personally, I think it’s a lot easier to send 1 ton to low earth orbit, than to send 220 tons all the way to the moon. I think the only way to make data centers on the moon make sense, would be if you’re already living and working on the moon in a functioning settlement.
As crazy as orbital data centers are, if your counting in dollars, lunar data centers are literally 10,000 times crazier.
Well, you’re thinking about the right things for sure! Power, cooling, Internet connection, all super important.
But as it turns out, terrestrial solar panels are actually heavier than space solar panels, like a lot heavier. Shielding against radiation is actually less of a challenge than shielding against weather and acorns. The ISS updated it’s solar array a while back and its new ones were deployed by rolling them out, they were a thin enough film to actually roll up for launch and then roll out once attached to the ISS.
Also, these solar panels won’t have blackouts. With a sun synchronous orbit, these panels simply won’t be in shadow basically ever. The one exception would be during solar eclipses.
As for cooling, you do probably need radiators with active cooling systems. Generally you need radiator panels at a ratio of about 1/5 of the area of your solar panels, but this can vary with different designs. But that’s a linear relationship, cooling doesn’t become unfeasible at some point it just remains a design concern. The more power you generate, the more radiators you need. It’s just part of the cost of power and it scales linearly with the area of your solar array.
Sun synchronous orbits, for those who aren’t aware, essentially mean that you would see these giant fucking satellites glinting in the sky literally every single dawn and dusk. They’d ruin sunset and sunrise for all of humanity in order to make more money for the dragons sitting on their hoards of gold.
you would see these giant fucking satellites glinting in the sky literally every single dawn and dusk.
Well, I mean only if you’re looking straight up at dawn and dusk. It won’t be like a ring just over the horizon, it would be more like a ring that touches the horizon on one side, perpendicular to the horizon, stretches across the top of the sky, and then touches the horizon on the other side.
If you’re watching the sunrise, there would still be too much light to see satellites, you’d really only be able to see them after dark, assuming you don’t live in/near a city (in which case you just can’t ever see satellites).
Elmo will have to move to Floriderp.
kinda hard to do that when he invested so much time and money on blexas
lol let him waste his money on an impossible technology
He doesn’t waste his money on his companies. He wastes tax payer funding on them. And when that started drying up, he took it to the stock market, convinced the exchange to fast track adding his company to being eligible for indexes, and then wasted our 401ks on it. He’s the ultimate con man.
Yes but that only lasted weeks before collapsing. The end is coming, he is now trying to roll Twitter into spacex. It’s where his real riches are. When it eventually goes, so does his money
That’s what he does. When one company starts having issues, his other company will bail it out or outright buy it. It’s a constant shell game.
I think my point is that his wealth is based on the game and like anyone who passes bad checks between accounts, the reckoning eventually catches up. He’s going to lose big over the next few years.
I’m hoping for a push by the people to pressure the Democrats to defund Musk. All his tech is shit and hurts people.
With Trump, he got no-bids.
Unfortunately there are still a ton of people that think he is some genius engineer and visionary. I would love for him to get cut off, I just don’t have high hopes for it. Ideally he is cut off and sent to prison or sent back to South Africa.
Yes. The investment market is based entirely on vibes, which means Trump/Musk shysters thrive. That might be a good use for AI that doesn’t hallucinate: create a data-driven investment advisor that works.
While we’re at it, a data-driven c-suite manager that actually cares about productivity will make workplaces much less toxic. One can dream.
And kill us all by destroying the ozone layer again? No thank you.
I’m not sure what it has to do with the ozone, please explain.
One of the major environmental issues with launching mega-constellations is the environmental impact of their end-of-life deorbiting. As satellites reenter the atmosphere, they create aluminum oxide particulate that has a negative impact on the ozone layer.
Thanks
Because, of course they do. We always have to find ways to destroy our beautiful planet, as if a new Earth-like planet is just a skip away.
Don’t you worry your poor little mind…the same folks destroying everything for their wealth are working on magic space ships to get us to earth 2, environmental bugaloo.
Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don’t have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.
Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?
I read somewhere recently that they found out Martian soil (regolith) is chalk full (0.5 to 1%) of pechlorates. So I don’t know why this Martian terraform thing is even still talked about. The dust is literally toxic, any food you grow there would also be full of pechlorates as the roots will suck them up with their nitrate transport systems.
Just look at the daily temperatures on Mars. It’s all stupid.
and no, we not mining in space.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought. As much as I would appreciate him investing the kind of money that would be required to orbit a viable data center into things humanity actually needs, I would also be perfectly happy witnessing him blow hundreds of billions on a fruitless project. Dumb shit doesn’t even understand basic physics and thermodynamics. It just demonstrates how he is an “ideas man” while actual smart people carry him on their shoulders. Wish he would just fuck off to mars already.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought.
no, his shareholders are dumb.
While he’s not smart enough to understand what a tough problem cooling servers in space would be, at least some of the engineers working on it might invent some interesting technology while failing to build a datacenter in space. Which is more than I can say about his other expenses like failing to buy elections, or failing to only have sons.
For a man who keeps talking about colonizing Mars, Musk seems remarkably surprised that you can’t permanently colonize a state’s politics. Spending hundreds of millions on campaigns didn’t come with a warranty, and moving SpaceX again won’t change how voting works.
I doubt voting would be allowed on Mars if Musk gets his way.
oh no it would be allowed. but it would be designed similar to spaceX’s share policy. Voting is allowed as long as he personally either is indifferent or wants the change, but the second he doesn’t want the change his single vote will override the majority.
Skynet, the clue is in the name.
