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One of the most profound feelings I had was being in the middle of nowhere at night and looking at the sky.
Majority of people my generation are able to experience what once was very common only few times in their lifetime due to light pollution.
It feels dreadful to realize that even that experience will be taken away forever.
Orbital data centers are a dumb idea. Put a solar farm in the desert and add some batteries? That’s cheaper.
So I wouldn’t be too worried about this, the economics of this won’t pan out.
Datacenters need cooling. Cooling always externalizes heat go the environment. The places you want centers are cold and water available.
Neither space or typical deaert.
A desert isn’t necessarily hot.
It's actually very easy to cool in deserts, because low humidity makes it very easy to move heat into the ambient air. You have to contend against ambient temperatures, but that's what insulation is for. The other big things you need for datacenters are reliable power and a low probability of infrastructure-disrupting natural disasters.
Still easier to cool in the desert than in space
You can do radiative cooling in space (you just need big radiators). You cannot do that reasonably in desert.
Taking aside you certainly can do radiative cooling in desert at night just fine - you have air, which even if hot to desert standards during the day is still by magnitudes more effective for cooling via direct heat transfer than radiating heat away in vacuum.
I did realize geothermal would be the way to do it in the desert; the ground is still typically cooler than the heat computers give off.
It's still problematic that most deserts dont haveaccess to groundwater, so bootstraping and maintenance are an issue.
You can try to put the heat underground. Maybe there is an aquifer you can use. Or maybe your desert is close to the coast!
Still easier than radiating it into space.
> Still easier to cool in the desert than in space
What is the physics and the math than let you conclude that?
Presumably that vacuum is an insulator.
Lack of medium in space so can't rely on convection or conduction there? This is really basic.
But what if you need compute for activities in space? Is the desert on earth still a good option?
With today's very high orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that the desert is cheaper.
With very low orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that space would become cheaper. Solar panels have no atmosphere/night/seasons and are always pointed at the Sun, no cover glass for hail, no 24h battery either. Radiators are 1/10th the area of PV which is very doable.
The question is, where exactly is the tipping point between those two extremes, and will Starship reach that? Opinions on this naturally bifurcate depending on one's feelings about Elon Musk.
I wouldn't be too worried because SpaceX engineers put a great deal of effort into reflection mitigation, including developing a space-rated mirror able to have an RF signal fire transparently through it.[1] The strategy is to bounce all the sunlight away from Earth, which makes satellites darker than even (hypothetically) covering a satellite in Vantablack.
I don’t want to be foolishly dismissive, but I just don’t see how launch costs could be small enough to compensate for the huge overhead of putting things into space and maintaining things in space as opposed to literally any other place on earth.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to tell us that this is economical to show the numbers
Ok I’ll try:
Starship becomes “fully and rapidly reusable”, needing little to no refurbishment between launches. Then the lower bound of launch costs is just the expendables (methane, oxygen, nitrogen) which could cost as little as $1M per launch.
SpaceX uses custom silicon (produced by “TeraFab”) that can run at higher temperatures then the radiative cooling requirements goes down significantly and a 100 kW satellite might weight around 1 ton.
Starship should be able to launch at least 100T payload. Assuming they could fit that many, that puts the launch cost per 100 kW at $10,000, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of the chips alone, even if it’s off by a factor of 10.
Obviously a lot needs to go right for this to happen, but it’s not impossible.
Counter argument:
Before the cost of flying very heavy shit and dealing with all the problems of operating that shit in space goes to zero, the cost of doing it terrestrially will go to zero. The idea that shooting any amount of payload into space could some how be more economical than just not doing that is completely bonkers and laughable.
It's like people completely forgot that there was 15+ years of connectivity infrastructure build out on earth before Musk did his shittier space version, not the other way around.
Transport doesn't "go to zero." Terrestrial transportation is already fully reusable, so it doesn't have the same cost headroom for improvement vs orbital launch.
Thanks, I really needed this post. I'm saving this for when people inevitably try to re-write history by saying "we didn't need Elon, because did anyone really doubted space-based AI would be the winner?? It was obvious all along because blah blah... <insert 20/20 hindsight>"
You thought you made an actual counter argument there?
The world seems to have become an abstract plaything for these billionaires why would they give a damn about practicality. This idiot shot a car into space for no good reason.
Not completely 'no good reason'—they needed to test the ability to send heavy payloads, it's great marketing for SpaceX (who intend to make money by having people pay them to put things in space for them) and brand awareness for Tesla.
Bollocks. Making the payload weird just shows the lengths that idiot will go to to give the finger to everyone
I honestly think he believes he’s doing good for mankind in a “fun and quirky way”, I don’t think he’s particularly trying to flip everyone off.
He can blow his money on 1 million satellites that will all decay back into the atmosphere within a few years
> He can blow his money on 1 million satellites that will all decay back into the atmosphere within a few years
He can also 'blow' his money on helping people by giving them opportunities:
> In 1993, Harris Rosen “adopted” a run-down, drug-infested section of Orlando called Tangelo Park. Rosen offers free preschool for all children prior to kindergarten and a free college education for high school graduates. Today, the high school graduation rate for Tangelo Park is 100 percent. And no, that is not a typo.
* https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/harris-rosen/
* https://www.today.com/news/millionaire-uses-fortune-help-kid...
Helping people with ALS speak again seems worthy, as does helping humanity become a multi planetary species.
Is throwing up "1 million satellites" going to do those things?
How about running DOGE and gutting USAID?
Or helping Trump get elected? Was that a worthy endeavour? How's that working out for the average American (or anyone else on the planet) with four dollar gas and five dollar diesel?
Decay and be replaced. You make it sound as if this is short term, like flinging confetti up in the air, instead of long term, like tiling a roof.
Why should he be allowed to pollute the night sky like that?
Not to mention the planet. Launching satellites takes an incredible amount of fuel.
Yeah, okay, you throw million satellites up there to satiate your greed and hubris. Now what? We are already past the Kessler syndrome's hypothetical tipping point when it comes to exospheric orbit saturation. Are these million satellites in exospheric orbit going to make matters better for mankind or worse?
Proposals like this has more to do with Finance (spaceX quotation / funding / shares values) than real applications. But is anyway a risky very bad idea.
Billionaires are eating everything.