- kevinsky@feddit.nlEnglish38 minutes
I don’t know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like resutable rockets, shooting stuff into space is still prohibitively expensive.
- Server clusters are exceptionally heavy.
- Server clusters run hot, cooling is not a triviality considering you can’t just rely on convection in space, so more mass for alternative solutions.
- Datacenters need regular maintenace.
- Logic boards won’t do well with the radiation in space.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like sattelite internet, getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
Not saying this won’t ever be a thing. But not in the lifetime of anybody on earth right now I don’t think.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish5 minutes
Incredibly bad, too lenghty, mostly irrelevant criticisms of the fraud of space datacenters, followed up by the Skynet military justification of being unable to unplug skynet.
Space datacenters from SpaceX are a fraud because they have a 5 year lifecycle with deorbiting of entire unit. The costs compared to 30 year lifecycle of terrestrial solar/battery powered datacenter energy is thus 6x higher (costs of shell/shield, solar, radiators is about the same but 6 replacements). Terrestrial building costs are $20/watt. SpaceX ambitions are to get $30m/launch costs. To be only 2x the terrestrial costs, launch costs need to be $1m (just the fuel costs) with deorbit being to fly off into space instead of a salvage trip.
At 12x the costs, the competitive GPU rental hurdle has to be 12x more expensive than earth. Only military skynet applications would pay for this, and specifically, only permit mechahitler to decide if skynet is doing a good job.
- Phil_in_here@lemmy.caEnglish15 minutes
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
Not just experts but an 11-year-old with a mild interest in space could have explained to these techbros why this wouldn’t work as an idea.
2 hoursEven if it could be made to “work”, the idea that it would somehow be superior to or more economical than a terrestrial facility is madness.
- ammonium@lemmy.worldEnglish30 minutes
It would make sense if there’s no space left on earth to build new datacenters, but the simple solution to that is just to stop building so many datacenters.
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish32 minutes
Basically they’re trying to build a data centre where the most expensive part of the data centre is the building itself which is completely not how it’s supposed to work.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish6 hours
as much as underwater datacenter, extremely high cost despite the ocean being able to cooldown datacenters fast. also these large LLM have never overcome one major flaw, There is no profit generation in the industry.
well atleast its not draining like 3 oceans and half of the power grid right?
- bitfucker@programming.devEnglish2 hours
Damn, what’s the movie name again? With Tom Cruise cloned and all?
Edit: It was oblivion
- 4 hours
Maybe but also maybe they would hire my uncle and then he could go to space which would be pretty cool.
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
It’s easier to teach data centre engineers to be astronauts than teach astronauts to plug in a SATA drive
- Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zipEnglish8 hours
They’re utterly impracticable and inefficient. Things cool very slowly in the vacuum of space.
- Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish9 hours
It’s so expensive. Putting data centers in bunkers or caves is more reasonable. (There actually are data centers like this).
- End-Stage-Ligma@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Proton’s primary servers are stuffed in a cold war bunker in the Alps, for example.
Saturn, they’d fit right in with all the other frozen orbital bodies in the ring.
- 10 hours
And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.
Yes. He unironically promised to build data centers in space. So basically, his company’s stock went up, because he falsely advertised something that is practically impossible to achieve at this time.
- Furbag@pawb.socialEnglish3 minutes
One consumer grade graphics card surrounded by the largest heatsink ever produced.
“That ought to do the trick!” 😆
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
Well that’s investors fault for believing him isn’t it. The biggest thing ever put up in space is the international space station we don’t even have the capability to do that anymore. How did they think he was going to build a data centre in orbit? Which of course is completely ignoring all the other technical reasons wouldn’t work.
It’s like Tesla: Everyone knows it’s a scam. Whenever there’s a panic or a dip then Musk’s army of sock puppets and wash traders will coordinate to purchase more stock and drive the value back up. That’s how TSLA has remained so ridiculously over valued for decades.
It’s an exponential money printer that’s going to break the entire world eventually.
- Echolynx@lemmy.zipEnglish8 hours
It’s comical how finance is the most ‘vibes’ based of any discipline, yet they try so hard to LARP as hard math/science experts. Much projection for such massive insecurity, it seems.
- 9 hours
Hasn’t he said full whee drive automatically driving your car would be availbe a decade ago and it’s still not here
- CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
There are entire websites dedicated to tracking his “promises” and lies.
Basically, if you believe a word that guy says at this point, you deserve to lose all your money.
- 8 hours
The one I heard was a fleet of Tesla self-driving taxis across the US by 2025.
Instead we have news reports of Teslas on autopilot killing people while the driver is distracted.
- GoatSynagogue@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
Self landing rockets were practically impossible not that long ago. Self driving cars were practically impossible not that long ago.
There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about orbital data centres. The main factor against it is the $/kg of payload into space. That’s one of the many issues SpaceX is working to solve, and there’s nothing to suggest they won’t get there.
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish2 hours
Completely different level of difficulty.
And be pedantic self-driving cars are not a solved problem. If you try driving a Tesla in autopilot and don’t intervene when it makes mistakes you’ll be in a wall within about 2 minutes.
Building data centres in space isn’t just a technical problem, although it’s a major technical problem, it’s also an economic problem. Obviously yes it’s physically possible to do it but there’s no way of building a data centre in space for anything close to the price of just doing it on earth and with no other obvious advantage to it being in space there’s no reason to do it.
It’s the same reason we don’t build a transatlantic railroad tunnel. Obviously it’s technically possible it’s just a very long tunnel, but it would be hella expensive.
- Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
The limiting factor for space data centers is absolutely not the cost to build them. The AI industry has already proven that they will burn the GDP of a small country just to have an LLM that shits out slightly better text that has coin flip level odds of being true.
The limiting factor here is one of thermodynamics. A travel mug for coffee works because it has a near vacuum between the inner lining and the outer shell. Vacuums are fantastic insulation because there’s no atoms there to transfer heat away. Very useful if you want hot coffee for a few hours. Space is a big vacuum, and data centers are giant heat generators. You’re basically putting a computer in a perfect insulation medium. It’s really stupid.
Other people have already explained the topic in sufficient detail, so I’ll just leave a quote from a former NASA engineer and a link to their article.
Taking the NVIDIA H200 as a reference, the per-GPU-device power requirements are on the order of 0.7kW per chip. These won’t work on their own, and power conversion isn’t 100% efficient, so in practice 1kW per GPU might be a better baseline. A huge, ISS-sized, array could therefore power roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI’s upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200. To equal this capacity, you’d need to launch 500 ISS-sized satellites. In contrast, a single server rack (as sold by NVIDIA preconfigured) will house 72 GPUs, so each monster satellite is only equivalent to roughly three racks.
Source: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
- CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Self landing rockets were practically impossible not that long ago
Technically, they still are.
Self driving cars were practically impossible not that long ago.
There have been implementations of a sell-driving vehicle since the 1980s, and we’re still far away from “true” full self diving.
Both of these examples demonstrate the adage of “the first 90% of the work takes 10% of the effort, and the last 10% work takes 90% of the effort”.
The main factor against it is the $/kg of payload into space.
Oh my lord no. Although, technically yes but not for the reason you think.
The number one issue is heat dissipation. To radiate the heat from one DC satellite (at the power levels needed to run AI workloads) would need a football sized dissipation array. Even if Space X can invent some magical new physics and cut that down to a quarter of that size (hint: they can’t), we’re still talking about an order of magnitude increase in payload per satellite.
Next on the list is volume. We’re currently at around 14k man-made objects in low earth orbit. As it is, satellites (including the ISS) have to perform collision avoidance maneuvers every so often. The calculated limit of satellites we can put up to low earth orbit before orbital collision maneuvers start to become unmanageable is 100k. Basically after that amount we enter into a state where several corrections for each satellite are made regularly, and a single collision at the 100k limit would result in a cascading series of collisions that will render low earth orbit impossible to use. Basically after that anything you put up will get shredded by the insane amounts of debris.
Space X wants to put up a MILLION massive satellites that will require extremely large structures to dissipate the heat from the very power hungry AI chips.
They fully know the impossibility, and when challenged about the over crowding issue during an interview, an engineer brushed it off as “it’s not a problem”. People who speak that way about science and engineering issues are not serious people.
That’s one of the many issues SpaceX is working to solve, and there’s nothing to suggest they won’t get there.
There are countless engineering and physics reasons why they won’t. Stop sniffing Elon’s farts. They’re not good for your brain.
Edit: all of this is to say: space datacentres are the dumbest idea yet to come out of that idiots face hole. And he’s said a lot of really really dumb things.
- Warehouse@piefed.caEnglish10 hours
For the cost of one orbital data centre you could probably build 10 terrestrial data centres, bribe literally everyone involved in the contrustion to pretend that they built it in space, buy an island, fake your death, and spend the rest of your life off grid.
- nightlily@leminal.spaceEnglish12 hours
No you’re just confident despite your ignorance. Turning waste heat into electromagnetic radiation is not easy or efficient - 100 to 350W per square meter in current space craft. The sheer scale of radiators necessary in a orbital data centre would dwarf the footprint of the servers themselves.
- 10 hours
Thanks but I’d like to not read Billy Madison’s lecture on thermal dynamics based on magic and fairy dust.
- Saledovil@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 hours
Black body radiation is a real, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to get rid of excess heat. So you’d need huge radiators to get enough surface area.
Add to this the fact that terrestrial data centers operate at a loss, and there’s no way to run a space based one profitably.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish6 hours
plus trying to dissipate heat in space, which is mostly a vacumn is a problem too.
- Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish4 hours
“Black body radiation” is the physical process by which you “dissipate” (the correct word here is “radiate”) heat in space.
In space you can’t just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some “substance” that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there’s incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it’s a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that’s part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
- 9 hours
I don’t know if you realize this but losing heat by radiating it away is incredibly slow and inefficient.
- 11 hours
Never said it was. But if you want a solution NASA figured it out almost 3 quarters of a century ago. If the cooling solution is the thread that makes or breaks the concept sure you could justify being this irrational I guess or you could find the next better reason to be against data centers in space. Upto you.
You sound like you think you’re making a point but you’re kinda just saying nonsense in the face of this not being viable.
- 10 hours
You just need something like ~256,000 m² or like 60% the size of vatican city of radiators to dissipate 1mw power at 300k, I calculated it https://crazypeople.online/post/20952535/9448375
- Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish11 hours
Man, you can’t be this pedantic and this incorrect, all at the same time.
- 11 hours
The “there is no air in space therefore datacenters in space are a bad idea” crew is not going away. Are you even human?
- 9 hours
- 11 hours
- jnod4@lemmy.caEnglish10 hours
Check how many square meters of copper radiators per human you need on ISS and then do the math kwh for a datacenter and you will get more tonnes of material than any material on the hole planet earth and now you understand why it’s your idea that’s removed from any intelligent discourse.
Or why would I bother educating you. Go and invest in companies building data centers in space, vote for them, idc
- 9 hours
- 12 hours
Please reconsider your use of the “R” word. It is not harmless. People try to say “it just means stupid” but we all know what people that word refers to. They also know this word, and know it’s used in reference to them.
They don’t deserve it. My wife, for example, used to teach Shakespeare in theatrical classes in the adult day school she worked at. Her student absolutely were capable of learning that and understanding it fully.
Yeah, language evolves over time. But just as I hope you wouldn’t call a Black person “colored” because that term is currently not appreciated (even though it was the preferred in decades past), I hope you would consider removing the “R” word from your vocabulary as well.
- 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish10 hours
They’re arguing in favor of AI. They already don’t care about other people, unfortunately.
- Talcosis@lemmy.zipEnglish14 hours
Could you imagine being in orbit during an AI datacenter kessler collapse, and just getting smoked by an rtx 5070 travelling at mach fuck?
- lando55@lemmy.zipEnglish10 hours
No credit for partial answers, maggot. This is an RTX 5070 Ti with 16G of GDDR7. It was shot out of a grok datacenter in heliosynchronous orbit at 1.3% the speed of light. You know what that means? That means Kevin O’Leary is the most dangerous son of a bitch in space.
There’d be nothing less than gold plated B300s in a space datacenter. If they’re spending billions flying it up there, they’re not going to be putting mid-range consumer GPUs in there. The gold plating probably doesn’t even do anything for radiation shielding, the AI just told them to add it to help prop up the AI bubble.
