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