Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

Posted by angadh 6/26/2025

Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship(angadh.com)

199 points | 349 commentspage 2

sellmesoap 6/27/2025|

A random thought, having server units spring loaded, when a unit fails eject it and use the stored energy as an orbital boost. Ablative servers!

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6/27/2025||

My facile policies would fix this

> Data centres require tremendous amounts of energy

Set up a pollution tax on losers like coal, oil, methane, and let the market pick winners like solar, wind, nuclear

> A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which contributes to climate change

Pollution tax would fix this

> Real estate for data centres is a massive bottleneck and this land could be used for other purposes

Not really. They're super high density. A land value tax would fix this.

People will really put computers in space before reading Henry George. What has this country come to?

perihelions 6/27/2025||

I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into many, small ones). At fixed areal power density, if the unit heat source is Q, the plate thickness d ∝ Q^{-3/2}. (This is intuitive: the asymptotic limit is a uniform, continuous heat source exactly matched to a uniform radiation heat sink; hence heat conduction is zero). So: could one contemplate an array of very tiny CPU sub-units, grided evenly over a thin Al foil—say at the milliwatt scale with millimeter-scale separation? It'd be mostly empty space (radiator area) and interconnect. It'd be thermally self-sufficient and weigh practically nothing.

api 6/27/2025|

Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute for the life span of the chips powered by the sun.

A lot of these is a supercomputing Dyson swarm.

Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?

perihelions 6/27/2025|||

I understand that the multi-layer insulation idea doesn't accomplish much unless you're trying to reach deep cryogenic temperatures passively (as infrared telescopes do!) It's a difficult structural design which would only cut your heat budget by a small constant factor. Remember that much of that heat on the solar side is making its way over to the cold side by way of electricity—the compute units are a heat "source" of similar magnitude as the solar input itself.

edit: I think the optimal packing could be a simple rolled-up scroll, that unfurls in space into a ribbon. A very lazy design where the ribbon has no orientation control, randomly furls and knots; and only half of it is (randomly) facing the sun at any given time. And the compute units are designed work under those conditions—as they are to be robust against peers randomly disappearing to micrometeorites, to space radiation, and so forth.

Because, you could make up for everything in quantity. A small 3x5 meter cylinder of rolled-up foil stores—at the mm-thickness scale, 10's of gigawatts of compute; at the micron scale, 10's of terawatts. Of course that end is far-future sci-fi stuff!

Sanzig 6/27/2025||||

> Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?

Even in LEO they benefit tremendously from radiation shielding, even a couple millimeters of aluminum greatly reduces the total ionizing dose. Also LEO has the issue of monatomic oxygen in the thermosphere which tends to react aggressively with the surface of anything it touches. An aluminium spacecraft structure isn't really affected, but I don't think it'd be very good for a semiconductor wafer.

dumah 6/27/2025|||

Radiation at desirable operating temperatures is a relatively weak means of heat transport, hence spreaders.

Only a big power-efficient chip like M2 Ultra could survive if it could _only_ radiate from one side of the wafer into CMB.

The rest of the silicon will become molten at 100% TDP: H100, Xeon, Core, EPYC, Ryzen.

Most would be over 400C at 1% TDP.

Conduction and convection are linear or close and are effective at desirable temperatures, whereas thermal radiation is quartic and highly convex.

api 6/28/2025||

Makes space based data centers sound impractical.

I recall some sci fi like The Expanse where it’s mentioned as an aside that big industrial processes happen on asteroids or moons because you can use a big cold rock as a heat sink.

Zigurd 7/2/2025||

Data centers in space are just another example of wishful thinking about space commercialization. What are the odds that a data center in space would be the first successful commercialization of space? With decades of talk about and investment in supposedly viable space commercialization ventures, and no results, maybe that's sending us a message.

6d6b73 6/27/2025||

Let's start by acknowledging that there is no Starship and it's likely that the current iteration of that system is not viable. It will need to be redesigned, and no one even knows if it's possible not to mention economically feasible.

happyopossum 6/27/2025|

That's... bold. Yeah, the development process is different from what we're used to seeing with government-led programs, but so far most stages of starship have proven viable (ie they've worked at least once) and each launch gets closer.

This claim also seems to ignore historical context - people said the same things about Falcon, then Falcon Heavy but those launch every few days now. You're basically saying that either you know more than the single most successful and experienced team of engineers in reusable space launch vehicle world, or they're busy burning their own cash by committing some sort of fraud.

6d6b73 6/28/2025||

There's fraud everywhere where Musk is, so there's that. When it comes to the engineering team Starship is not engineering by the same team as Falcon - some key people left the company. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that the Starship is flawed. SpaceX doesn't hide the fact that it currently can't do 100T as promised - only 50T is likely. Unfortunately they can even get it up when empty so there's that.

strangeloops85 6/27/2025||

To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes, all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland or a cold place. Makes no sense

hotpotatoe 6/27/2025||

This is putting the cart before the horse in the most literal sense, SpaceX can’t even get a Starship into space without it breaking apart.

philosophty 6/27/2025||

"Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time."

This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in constant use.

There are definitely failures but they're very low unless something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad batch of hardware.

LambdaComplex 6/27/2025||

So, hardware lasts for years except in the cases where it doesn't?

meepmorp 6/27/2025|||

> unless something is wrong like ... vibration

so you might have problems if you were to do something that causes a lot of vibration, like launch the entire data center into space?

westpfelia 6/27/2025||

Backblaze is a perfect example of parts failing.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...

Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space as it stands is a nothing burger.

vidarh 6/27/2025||

The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.

Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact cut costs because it allows you to design the space without consideration of humans needing to be able to access and insert/remove servers.

The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance, the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept failures and just disable failed equipment.

Havoc 6/27/2025||

I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I’ve seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible

rob_c 6/27/2025||

> I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding.

The track record here I think explains "moonshot" investments on wild promises by VCs looking to cash out mid-track. It's a financial grift, not a technical challenge to actually be overcome.

mrguyorama 6/27/2025||

But but but they release a "whitepaper"! Surely that's worth at least ten million dollars!

BRB, buying a copy of Microsoft Word so I can retire.

RajT88 6/27/2025|

This is way sillier than putting data centers under water.

https://www.techopedia.com/the-rise-of-underwater-data-cente...

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