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Antarctica is closed to economic exploitation by international treaty. It's the complete opposite of escaping terrestrial legal jurisdiction. As for oceanic datacenters, they have a lot of technical disadvantages compared to orbital components. Large vessels would be preferable for stability, security, and navigational control, but power generation becomes impractical unless you permit commercial maritime nuclear reactors, which seems unlikely, or plan to have LNG refueling tankers visit every few weeks, which is expensive. A constellation of small solar powered vessels scales a lot less conveniently in the ocean, given communications constraints from the ground, security difficulties, and the scale of ordinary maritime maintenance that is necessary.
So, I think you are wrong - there are other advantages. In orbit, security is a non-issue, environmental degradation is minimal, solar power is abundant, communications are easier, and in general the floor cost per node is lower, meaning that scaling down incurs fewer penalties.
Space is also covered by various international treaties, and nations on Earth would be quick to update any such treaties to cover datacenters even more strictly if companies were using such datacenters to flaunt the law of countries. And at least in their current state, these treaties basically make satellite operators subject to the laws of their host nation.
Long distance oceanic LNG shipping is about 3 to 5 cents per KG. I imagine it would be cheaper when you're just shipping out to international waters from the coast. Starship's most optimistic projections for price per kg to low Earth orbit is a little under $100 per kg, but could end up closer to $1,000 per kg.
As opposed to the cost of sending people into space to fix the space datacenter? Most space DC proposals I've heard have actually proposed not having any human maintenance at all because of how expensive it would be, instead opting to add extra redundancy for essential components and just writing it off when a GPU or PSU fails.
Please, please, please show me your math for this. Even use the $100 per kg to LEO price if you want to make itas favorable to your argument as possible. I would be willing to bet you $100 donated to the charity of the winner's choice if you math shows it being cheaper than a container ship (or oil platform type structure) 370 KM off the coast (i.e. in international waters) of some LNG processing hub.
People didn't do some very basic pricing math with Solar Roadways and similar grifts. Solar Roadways would cost a metric ton more per km than just using asphalt, and a metric ton more that just sticking solar panels in a field or the desert or on a rooftop somewhere etc., while being a worse road surface and producing less power.
Space datacenters face similar economic disadvantages, and none of the proponents seem to be saying anything about the financial math here. I personally find the discussion of stuff like "How are you going to cool it?" irrelevant and a distraction, except inasmuch as they affect the cost. Cooling the datacenters is absolutely feasible, but it definitely complicates the engineering (and drastically increases the amount of material that has to be launched) far above and beyond what would be needed for a nomal terrestrial datacenter or some of the other exotic options I mentioned.
Space datacenters don't have to be cheaper than ground datacenters, they just have to be cheaper for processing space data than ground datacenters. The latency and bandwidth of space-to-grond will make space datacenters naturally attractive as space scales.
That's maybe a trivial compared to the actual core question, which is whether space datacenters can make sense for processing ground data. I think that's an open question. But the economics will become known as space datacenters are built to process space data.
What are you smoking? Firstly, there's hardly any space data other than scientific probes by various space agencies, and communication satellites operated by both public and private entities. The latter, by their very nature, need to communicate with the ground.
Secondly, the latency difference would depend largely on where both the datacenter satellite and the source of the space data are located. In LEO, space datacenters would be less consistent in their latency than ground stations because they're orbiting the Earth roughly every 90 minutes (or you'd have to be constantly passing the data around to different space datacenters to keep latency somewhat consistent, but this data transfer would likely kill any gain you got from the latency reduction and then some).
This is not true and hasn't been true for over a decade. There are ~13,000 of satellites in space now. They are constantly collecting data and monitoring events. Even in the 2010s Planet Lab was able to scan every part of the Earth multiple times a day, and this was with a fleet of a few hundred satellites. Starlink now processes large amounts of internet traffic, set to increase enormously. Video sensors lidar sensors optical sensors infrared sensors synthetic aperture radar sensors particle detectors magnetometers gravitometers the works. All these systems are constantly collecting data. All these satellites are at risk of running into each other, or colliding with space debris, or have regular system checks that get reported back to Earth. And the number of satellites in orbit is going exponential as SpaceX and Rocket Lab make the costs to launch cheaper than ever before.
Even just the imagery needs are enormous. Planet Labs for example processes something like 30 Terabytes of imagery a day. I don't know how they do it, but it's not hard to imagine the constraints. Even the most basic Planet Labs Dove 1 and Dove 2 CubeSats from the early 2010s didn't report every image they took back to ground antenna networks. The stress on bandwidth would be enormous. What would happen even then is that each CubeSat would take a multitude of images and algorithmically select the best with which to phone home. Now consider that as a satellite moves across space, images of the same location on Earth are taken from different satellites. Deciding which images to send (which videos, which reports, which temperature data, etc.) can become a giant coordination problem. And there's no special reason why that wouldn't be done in space: it's simply a question of convenience.
A datacenter is just a warehouse of computers. There's nothing special about it. Datacenters process and manage data storage and dissemination for other computer. This is already happening in space. In a trivial sense we already have datacenters in space. We just don't call them that, because the ones in space are not as large and generalized as the ones we have on Earth. But there's not really any serious debate that datacenters in space are going to grow. The question is, at what scale? Will orbit-bound datacenters grow into a significant computer industry, or will they stay at this trivial level? Will they ever be efficient for processing data that originates from earth, or will they only be useful for data that originated in space? These are open questions.
This is basically how Starlink already works. When you connect to Starlink it switches which satellite you're connected to every few minutes.
With Starlink or a similar system I imagine it would be easy to beam a lot more of it down.
Yes, which is why putting them in space has very limited advantages that rarely outweigh the benefits of a terrestrial datacenter.
Starlink works by just handing off a connection/stream to a different satellite. It doesn't need to pass off 30 terabytes of image data that are already partially processed, it's a fundamentally different problem.
You mean data-collecting satellites could outsource their data processing to specialized satellites that coordinate intense computing problems for them?
Nope, at least not easily. But they can outsource their data transmission (which takes orders of magnitude less energy and computing power than actually processing it) to Earth.
I really don't think this was the gotcha you thought it was.
A satellite that coordinates transmission scheduling is functionally a data center. It probably even runs SQL. We’re simply debating how far it will scale.
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