Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea? Saw a YC company has raised 200 million at a billion dollar valuation. https://www.starcloud.com/starcloud-4. Additionally - with the impending spacex ipo this seems like a big focus. Can someone with a stronger physics background explain why anyone would think this is a good idea? |
What would they be cheaper on? Solar panels are a little bit more effective and they will have a 24/7 coverage if placed in the correct orbit.
However, they would be much harder to cool (space is cold, yes, but heat transfer in vacuum does not work easily and most large structures, such as ISS, require dedicated cooling radiators that take up a large amount of space.) The launch costs would be still very high, maintenance impractical and the large, large surface area of solar panels and radiators would just be primed for being struck by debris.
What orbital data centres are though, is a good dream to sell, a fine way to dismiss environmental concerns of data centres on the ground - “We’re soon going to start putting them in space, but just for now we have to build them on earth. Please approve our requests.”
If you put them in low earth orbit, now you need complex ground stations and/or phased array antennae to track them and move data. And then your cat image generator is on the other side of the planet every 60 minutes unless you have fancy lasers relaying stuff between satellites.
If you put it into geosynchronous orbit, the transmission is easier but now you've introduced a huge delay in your packets.
And I can't even do the first steps on computing what a typical data center needs in network bandwidth. A few terabits per second? A few petabits? More?
How does that introduce a delay?
The cooling problem is vastly exaggerated, you need around 0.5x the area of your solar panels in radiators.
I think AI inference in space is definitely possible, but it's very unlikely we'll get launch costs cheap enough that they make economical sense.
the short answer is no, general-purpose space datacenters are a non-starter. eg, you're never going to open the AWS console and decide whether you want to deploy a VM to us-east-2 or leo-1.
however, there is a narrow use case for wanting to run more powerful hardware on satellites that would be launched anyway.
for example - you have 2 countries, Alicetopia and Bobistan. they border each other, separated by a big desert, and are on unfriendly terms. their militaries want to make sure they never get surprised by an invasion force attacking them.
Bobistan launches a satellite (or several) that flies over their border region once a day (or more, depending on orbital geometry) and takes pictures (visual-spectrum at least, possibly also infrared, SAR, etc).
those pictures get downlinked and analyzed to answer the question "is Alicetopia building up a military presence on our border to prepare for an invasion?"
this used to be done manually, with people actually staring at imagery to try to find rectangles that looked like tanks. back in the early Cold War days, this was done using physical film that was dropped from orbit, looking for ICBMs. obviously now it's all done with machine learning algorithms.
downlinking those daily images isn't cheap, especially when the steady-state behavior is "nothing interesting here, just a big stretch of desert".
as a result, there's a desire to run a relatively lightweight ML model on the satellite itself, to answer the question "is any of this imagery worth downlinking at all? and if so, is any of it high-priority for downlinking immediately and flagging for human attention?"
for flight safety reasons, you'd want that on a separate GPU/TPU-like processor, so that your rad-hardened CPU that runs the mission-critical parts of the flight software won't be affected by anything that happens with the ML processing.
but that relatively narrow use case definitely doesn't justify the magnitude of the current hype cycle.
You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.
Applying standard financial metrics (do they make money? Will they ever? What valuation does that justify?) to certain companies.
Data is faster, power is cheaper, cooling is free. There's no reason for it other than to juice spacex stock. It's just another Elon scam to pump stocks. I don't know why anyone wastes breath talking about anything he says.
Hence they should be treated with the same level of skepticism of a politician making a false promise just to get elected, actually more skepticism because the vaporware announcement starts making money from the CEO/Founder the second after they make it
But sometimes problems get solved, undersea cables faced (and still present) a lot of challenges too.
> power
It still needs power, you’re most likely going to do it with solar if you’re on earth orbit but that isn’t free and you will have periods of no sunlight so a significant amount of batteries will be needed.
> cooling
Cooling off in a vacuum is hard. You’ll need radiators to emit the heat, you’ll need a lot of radiators for data center level heat. This is more mass you need to get into orbit
> location
The location is in space, it’s significantly more expensive to get mass into space than it is to move it someone else on the planet
> environmental
The day to day operations of a space based data center seem like they would be a benefit, but I haven’t seen the math on the environmental cost of the rocket launches vs the lifetime of a terrestrial data center
> staffing
Why would the location in space vs terrestrial change the staffing at all? Any technological change that could/would reduce staffing could be applied to terrestrial data centers as well
> physical security
You’re more secure from people, but now you’ve introduced the physical security risk of space debris where something with the mass of pocket lint could cause serious damage if it impacts your system.
The whole space data center idea is just Musk trying to gin up more demand for his SpaceX IPO with no real benefit behind the idea. He’s been lying like this for years for money like with “Full Self Driving”(lol, don’t take your hands off the wheel because we’ll disengage right before a crash and it’s your problem) or his “robots”(actually remote controlled by humans). I don’t know why anyone listens to him anymore if he doesn’t show up with concrete results first.
It’s like people want to be conned.
SpaceX will be putting them in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning always sunlight.
It’s why satellite internet was usually pretty terrible. A simple TCP handshake becomes a multi-second endeavor.
If you can reach a terrestrial data center in 10 mSec over fiber, the flying data center is 12x slower. And now, like the other replay said, do a TCP handshake and see how long it takes.