Starcloud

Not sure if I follow really. Cooling from it's own generated heat? Are we even sure the system would get that hot in the first place? The temperatures can plunge up to -200 degrees. If needed, they'd cool it just like they keep the James Webb Telescope cool.

My initial thought was "cooling is going to be a fun challenge, in addition to data transfer, latency, hardware maintenance and all that other fun stuff". It truly feels like one of those, you-have-too-much-money moments.

You've also got the problem of cosmic radiation flipping bits. Your fault tolerant architecture probably mitigates this with redundancy, with the extra servers again eating into the purported advantages of extra solar power. Dealing with the PITA of single event upsets is something developers of edge data processing software in space put up with to avoid the latency issues that data clouds in space introduce

By my back of the envelope calculations, the radiators would be comparable to the solar arrays, probably somewhat smaller and not massively bigger at least.

Their white paper touches on the issue, which seems slightly hand-wavy without much detail on quantification. They could potentially take advantage of heat gradients from deep space and dissipate heat to explore the Seeback effect.

If the Mass Effect games have taught me anything, it's that heat dissipation in outer space is hard.

This is a big thing never shown in sci-fi. For example, those huge torch ships in The Expanse would need gigantic radiators. Even if the drive were upwards of 90% efficient the waste heat would melt the engine and the rest of the ship.

Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.

Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.

There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.

I learned something interesting here, thanks. I've never really thought about it so I'd always assumed space = cold so that would be fine.

I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally.

Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"

Yeah, who throws out these sort of timeframe in earnest? We haven't built anything in space since the ISS (which is in LEO mind you, not "outer space"), and we're building full data centers within a decade? Give me a break, that's an Elon level prediction.

I think the bigger thing about a space-based data center that it's not on anyone's land, and not easy to inspect or capture.

Solar energy available around the clock allows it to be self-sufficient for a long time.

I suppose there will be some demand for high-security, high-price setups like that.

Right. also wouldn't space debris eventually hitting the huge solar panel system be an issue?

Starcloud is the concept I'll show my friends that datacenters have hit peak hype.

Can't wait for an alien to NIMBY one of these.

Well, for one thing you can't eat GPUs, so I'm ok with farmland taking up more water.

Also, the "warm" water has already destroyed ecosystems because the data centers are just dumping it. It's a completely solvable issue if we had any common sense regulations.

It's not a real issue, but it's truthy enough to generate real opposition to datacenter buildout and catalyze AI hate. So definitionally avoiding it from the get-go might end up being worth it.

> "the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator"

I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).

    (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200)   ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
          ([year] 10)         ;; guess at lifespan
          ([ton] 100))        ;; Starship payload
       (* ([ton] 1000)        ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
          ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
    
    ;; => 126.226944

Yeah, radiation is the enemy of integrated circuits, cosmic radiation is more damaging the smaller the features get.

You pretty much have to have multiple redundancy and special space-rated HW, which I wouldn't be surprised is stuck at super old process nodes to mitigate this exact same issue.

More seriously, space is pretty cold, and will consume large amounts of radiated heat. The problem, of course, it that the amount you can radiate thermally at, say, 150°C is pretty limited. According to the Stephan-Bolzmann equation, it's about 1800W for a perfect black body. For 5GW, that would take a square radiator 1.7km wide, always concealed from sunlight. Realistically, much larger as the temperature would drop as the coolant flows along.

I believe there is math for this very question. A similar principle applies with heatsinks. You cant just continue increasing the heatsink on a CPU, the outer edge of a large heatsink won't go above ambient and thus any heatsink bigger than that is wasting material.

I would guess in a system where coolant is pumped and the added heat of that you'll have a similar problem. This is probably further exacerbated by the fact that you cant do clever things to increase surface area - your radiating surfaces must all "see" the black of space in order to function.

LEO is the last place you should worry about space debris.

Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem.

Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.

Sounds like a "slippery slope" fallacy without further explanation.