And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside what you designed for occurs.

That's with current launch costs, right? Nobody is claiming it's economic without another huge fall in launch costs, but that's what SpaceX is doing.

Over 10 years ago, the best satellites had 500W/kg [2]. Modern solar panels that are designed to be light are at 200g per sqm [1]. That's 5sqm per kg. One sqm generates ca. 500W. So we're at 2.5kW per kg. Some people claim 4.3kW/kg possible.

Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.

120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which is still good.

[1] - https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr... [2] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-pos...

Death, and some science. That's it?

Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?

If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their useful life before reentry is low anyway.

A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.

If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.

> Solar panels in space are more efficient...

... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.

>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.

with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.

>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000

noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.

>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.

Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.

installation of large solar plants is largely automated already

It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.

A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.

it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these discussions have no sense otherwise.

> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?

once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.

source?

If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).

Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.

Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :)

The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking

This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.

> since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government

More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.

> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space

More corrosion. And still, interconnects.

> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong

I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.

Swear that fella is like the Elon Musk of HN - when he talks about subject outside of his domain he gets caught out.

> you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development

Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days for large ones. (In America.)

Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor of in-space data centers.

Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher latency to earth.

So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.

I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.

Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.

1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.

2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs

3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.

4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...

> Source? I can't immediately find anything like that

I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.

So freedom from law and regulation?

He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people

> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve

no he won't

Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.

Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.