Posted by simonebrunozzi 5 hours ago
Also I wonder how long the ODC needs to operate to offset the energy spend on getting it in orbit.
vs Space:
* Can drive a truck out there
* No limit on weight or dimensions (within reason)
* No giant explodey thing transporting it to into where it needs to be
* No constant falling towards the earth that needs to be averted with thrusters
* If building in the middle of nowhere there is also lots of space for solar panels
* Heat can be rejected into the atmosphere/earth/nearby bodies of water etc instead of radiation into the vacuum of space
* De-comissioning it doesn't also involve slamming a DC worth of mass into the atmosphere and burning up otherwise recyclable materials.
* You don't look like a doofus for doing bad math.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode
It's not that far off from a residential router with a bigger antenna.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.
We can't yet know the ultimate cost of Starship payloads. All we have is SpaceX projections of $10-100/kg. Maybe that is realized, maybe not. Given the scale of the LA launch site they're building, they intend to have the launch cadence to deliver lower launch costs than anything achieved with Falcon 9 or any other launch system ever created.
The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
That cooling is already perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
Perhaps you could explain in detail why you think the laws of physics have to be violated for space data centers to work.