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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8749 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis

You won't see this because you've blocked me, but this isn't true and several people have tried to do the math. Here's the most recent. To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters. The article doesn't discuss solar panel sizing, but using star cloud's numbers of 400 W/sqm we're talking about 2500 sq m before we consider redundancy. And that's just power and cooling for a single MW. In fact, it seems to me that it's the space DC boosters who refuse to engage on this and show their work.

Serious question, do you think that all of these engineering organizations who are going all in on this concept haven't done the math themselves?

I was skeptical about the cooling issue myself but I did the math myself and it turns out that if you're willing to run your chips a little hot you can get away with less radiator surface area than solar panel surface area. It's simply not the issue that people seem to think it is.

To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters

I've unblocked you just to respond to this, though I don't remember why I blocked you in the first place.

In short, even if we assume 2000 square meters, this is nothing. Ascend 950 SuperPod has an area of 1000 square meters for the actual scale-up compute unit that works as one GPU.

«Redwire Q-Rad Deployable Radiator (commercial, TRL 5-6): 3.5–4.9 kg/m² areal density. Source: Redwire radiator datasheet lists; brackets our StarThink V1 assumption as plausible near-term path.» Let's say 4. This is just 8 fucking tons. This is peanuts. At $100/kg it'd be merely $800000 for delivery, 8% of Starship capacity, or four more big Starlinks. 1 megawatt of compute costs… let's see, a modern-ish GPU that draws 1 kW in a rack can go for $20K at least, and actually we'll see prices creep towards $50K. Well there you have it, $20 million as the floor (and GPUs are just ≈40% of BOM). 1 megawatt is 8760 MWh/year. Google tells me wholesale electricity in the US is like $45. Almost $400K a year of free power. None of this matters of course, when inference margins are >80% even with hardware depreciation, and all that matters is deploying as fast as possible, as much as possible.

You don't know the relevant numbers in any of the involved verticals, and for some reason (unfathomable to me) you want to believe that the numbers support your (quixotic but perplexingly popular) case against compute in space. They don't.

This. Basically, space is the last place you want to put your data center. Putting your computers basically anywhere else, be it in high altitude balloons, the summit of Mt Everest, the Mariana Trench, Point Nemo, downtown Manhattan, on harnesses worn by stray cats, the surface of the Moon, the rectal cavities of cybertruck drivers, Antarctica, Gaza (to just brainstorm a few not-so-good ideas) is going to be much less of a hassle than LEO.

While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

There are also other minor objections (e.g. if satellite data links would scale to backbone ranges, we would not rely on expensive undersea cables instead, how do you service your equipment? and Kessler syndrome makes you extremely vulnerable to sabotage), but cooling is the big one.

It is not that computing in space is impossible per se (every cubesat does some, after all), it is just that it is extremely painful compared to computing dirtside.

As an analogy, there is no reason why sex in the vacuum of space should be impossible, one could certainly design pressurized space suits which have docking ports in the correct places. It is just that we already have much more convenient places to have sex, including space stations, beds, parachute jumps, submarines, mini-golf prop houses, presidential offices, fields of nettles, BDSM dungeons and many more. Until we saturate these environments, there will be little economic demand for space suit sex (beyond the novelty value).

presidential offices

OK Bill Clinton.

I tend to agree that building compute in places where the most efficient electricity option is hamsters in wheels is probably an easier engineering challenge than cooling datacenters in space.

Basically, space is the last place you want to put your data center. Putting your computers basically anywhere else, be it in high altitude balloons, the summit of Mt Everest, the Mariana Trench, Point Nemo, downtown Manhattan, on harnesses worn by stray cats, the surface of the Moon, the rectal cavities of cybertruck drivers, Antarctica, Gaza (to just brainstorm a few not-so-good ideas) is going to be much less of a hassle than LEO.

I think you're greatly exaggerating. Deep ocean is a much more hostile and inaccessible location than LEO by almost any possible metric I can think of except, possibly, the energy cost of reaching it. The Moon is much further away, requires much more Δv, and isn't even sunny for half the time. Antarctica is extremely energy-poor and is unavailable for commercialization in any case.

While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

At 400K, your panels should be able to reject over 1KW per m² to deep space, continuously. That's actually pretty efficient! You can do better with air cooling of course, so long as you don't care about environment heating at all, but that's also at some energy cost.

It is not that computing in space is impossible per se (every cubesat does some, after all), it is just that it is extremely painful compared to computing dirtside.

Dirtside computing can be infinitely painful, depending how uncooperative governments want to be with regulations and lawsuits. At least in LEO there's limited jurisdiction.

and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

Why do you think you can just say this and not show the math for radiative cooling? The prose about stray cats and sex in a vacuum is cute, again, very Russian-engineer-coded, but the boring reality is that a Starlink satellite is substantially made of, well, chips, which do computations, and it dissipates just fine with a primitive one-sided radiator on the hull. How do you imagine anything ever works in space? How does ISS work? Do you believe that 20 kW is workable but 120 is where physical limits kick in? Care to show this? For example:

Net heat rejection per square meter:

q_net = ε σ (T_rad⁴ – T_sink⁴) – q_env

From there, two quick steps give us the mass:

Required radiator area: A_rad = Q_waste / q_net Radiator mass: m_rad = A_rad × (kg/m² areal density)

At 295 K (est. Starlink V3 baseline), net heat flux is 288 W/m².

At 350 to 355 K StarThink (V1/V2), net heat flux rises to 484 to 569 W/m²

Staying at 295 K would require about 828 m² (StarThink V1) and 1209 m² (StarThink V2) of radiator area. The model’s higher-temperature operation cuts that to 72 m² and 129 m², a massive difference.

…… Near-term, ≈50 kW/ton designs can be closed with conservative assumptions: two-sided, ε ≈0.9, 4 kg/m² areal density at 370 K operation.

This is an engineering question. And your objection is the «Mars has radiation, bet you never thought about that eh» tier smug dismissal, it's plainly disrespectful and incurious. I suspect that you thought of that one too, well, I recommend to read on Suncatcher.

Other items are also trivial.

The fact is that the US cannot compete with China on power generation in the medium term due to political schizophrenia, pathetic industrial base outside some bloated military supply chains and third world logistics at sufficiently low cost per kilogram to orbit, yeeting inference nodes into one makes straightforward economic sense. Freed from gravity, atmosphere, moisture and hail hazard, solar panels become like 50 times more effective per unit of mass (likely more because you can move to lighter substrates). You don't need batteries with 24/7 noon. You don't need cabling. You don't even need a lot of structure.

You have it entirely backwards. Having sex in spacesuits is what we have been doing all this time, running electronics in the wet dirt. Carbon life is made for Earth. Metals prefer the orbit and vacuum.

While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

This is at least a solvable design problem, if not a trivial one --- terrestrial temperatures being generally comfortable compared to the extremes of hot and cold in space. It's a bit different for LEO because the Earth is a big object in view, but otherwise the Sun is hot and dark space is very cold.

The entire planet sits in (mostly) thermal balance between solar radiation, terrestrial energy, and radiative cooling to space. No particular reason a satellite can't do that too, although again not as trivially as "slap a heat sink and fan on it" that works down here.

I agree. I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”. Power needs could theoretically be solved by using nuclear reactors instead of solar panels (which is still pretty impractical compared to just… building a reactor on Earth) but the absolutely ludicrous size of the necessary cooling radiators (and what happens if/when that radiator gets hit by a micrometeor or a piece of debris? how easy is it to repair? how long can you wait?) makes it a non-starter, barring some borderline-magitech advancement in cooling that would surely also make it easier to build on Earth. Cooling and especially power are the limiting factors of datacenter construction, above the raw land requirements.

Maybe there’s a future case for datacenters on the moon, using some sort of geothermal-esque cooling system with boreholes? I imagine the underground temperatures of the moon are pretty damn cold, I bet we could use it as a heat sink. But there a whole lot of steps to cover before there’s any benefit at all to doing that instead of just building a normal datacenter.

I think the only real economic case for what we’d recognize as sci-fi-level space development is mining, whether that’s helium on the Moon or rare earths from asteroids, etc. I think this would require launch economics to get vastly cheaper before anything could come of it, but it could potentially take off as both a sovereign and zero-pollution (on Earth anyway) means of acquiring certain resources. I think it’ll happen eventually. But not very soon. Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the radiator for a spaceship itself is basically just a big piece of metal, right? It's what the condensing stage of the cooling unit dumps heat into to reject it? As an HVAC tech I'll say it should work fine if it has a hole in it, just like plenty of condensers on earth work fine with hail damage on the fins or dirt on them. Not ideal, but fine.

but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”.

I am sincerely curious: are you a conspiracy theorist? Do you think Musk, Jensen Huang, Google and everyone else are in on the joke, just peddling a physically nonsensical project because they know that the target audience (VCs) has the intuitions of an illiterate Ghanaian child? Is this the great blessing of living in a nation with a perfected cognitive sort – almost everyone can be clueless, but anyone can make 6 figures?

But space really is cold, by the way. 2.7K. It's not like your Stanley "vacuum" that has room temperature. Radiative cooling doesn't work when the radiated heat radiates right back at you. You've never actually touched cold vacuum, and yes it is a meaningful notion. In the vacuum of space, you radiate and lose energy like a long-wave infrared heater, and very quickly die. The cartoons are correct on this account, they just conflate "vacuum of space" and "absence of air".

I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”.

Well, space is a vacuum, yes, but the radiative heat sink is extremely cold. People have suggested testing cooling in a vacuum chamber to prove the infeasibility, but this misses the critical factor that the vacuum chamber walls are not ~2 K, and the efficacy of radiative cooling scales by the differences in temperature to the 4th power.

But, see, we've been to space, and had to cool shit down up there. It would seem like NASA has the table to know exactly how much radiator surface is needed for every heat load and the heatload is theoretically calculable based on existing chip design. I suspect that the datacenter inside the satellite would need to be redesigned down to a very small level due to the lack of a cooling medium, but 'how much radiator do we need to get rid of heat' doesn't seem like something we'd debate without really knowing the answer- it's not exactly the drake equation of building datacenters in space.

I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”.

Have you actually done the math on this, or has someone else? My understanding is that it's totally doable with relatively modest radiators; I'm open to this guy not knowing what he's talking about, but all I've seen from the other side is sneering.

The bigger issue is probably that chips are designed to work immersed in air, which conducts heat away. In orbit, you'd have to either build a pressurized system or redesign the chips to have a different kind of active cooling. It's getting the heat to the radiator that would be the problem.

The economic case for asteroid mining is also dubious as far as I can tell.

Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.

Indeed, and I have seen people discuss that a niche for space datacenters might be processing satellite data up there rather than beaming it down (for latency and availability reasons). Perhaps, presumably you wouldn't AI-scale DCs for that so it might be more feasible.

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