| ▲ | kin 8 hours ago |
| For those questioning viability, there's a startup called Starcloud https://www.starcloud.com/ with a public whitepaper explaining a bit their hardware and economics https://www.starcloud.com/wp.
They've already had one small proof of concept launched.
Not trying to promote, I just heard about them on the ycomb podcast |
|
| ▲ | stingrae 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| “A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km” I think dodging debris is challenging at that scale. Also this is the solar cells not the radiators |
| |
| ▲ | hdgvhicv an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Desert land is full of that amount of area available for peanuts. That’s 4000 acres. I see a 6000 acre ranch available in Arizona for $7m. The cost of building a 5GW DC is about 100 billion. Land including enough for all the solar and battery you need to be completely self sufficient is basically free. | | |
| ▲ | King-Aaron an hour ago | parent [-] | | You can fly a drone laden with fireworks across a desert. Harder to do in LEO | | |
| ▲ | consp 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things. Otherwise the economies do not make sense. The "terrorism" threat is nearly non existant in practice and only the legislative threat is real, which might be good cause to think about what you are doing in the first place. |
|
| |
| ▲ | flog 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder if the shadows from such a large area would have a climate cooling effect? | | |
| ▲ | me_again 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The Earth's surface area is ~ 510,000,000 km^2. For simplicity, say exactly half of it is receiving sunlight. If the satellite perfectly shadows 16 km^2, it would reduce incoming solar energy reaching Earth by 16/205,000,000 = 0.00000078%, I think. So not really. There are some proposals for space-based geoengineering, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290112... has a summary. I can't say how plausible any of them are. | |
| ▲ | johntb86 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ideally you'd put it in an orbit that wouldn't shadow earth, since if it goes in front of earth in part of the orbit then it'll go behind earth (and be in shadow) for part of the orbit. They mention they'd want it in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, which would be in sunlight all the time and would never shadow the earth. | | |
| ▲ | vl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | How can this practically work though? As Earth goes around the Sun 90 degrees, orbit will become half-shadowed. | | |
| |
| ▲ | lend000 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would be cool if so, but I wonder what the plan is regarding radiation pressure pushing things out of orbit. | |
| ▲ | glenstein 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the principle is correct but probably it would need to be much bigger. |
| |
| ▲ | FuckButtons 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Presumably that’s not a single satellite. | | |
| ▲ | jasonwatkinspdx 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Nope, it's a single massive panel sat and they're using $30/kg as their launch costs. Up to you how plausible you think that is. | |
| ▲ | efskap 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right, the goal here is a more realistic Dyson swarm, not a Dyson sphere (yet) |
|
|
|
| ▲ | seanhunter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Historically there have been many startups with pitches that haven’t worked out. The existence of a startup who think they can tackle a particular problem isn’t evidence of the viability of their proposed solution. If they succeeded, that would be evidence. |
|
| ▲ | rhplus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What happens to all the precious metals that go up with these data centers? At least with a land based data center we have a vague hope of recycling the raw materials at some point in the future. |
| |
| ▲ | nilamo 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just like with all the satellites, the recycling plan is to allow them to burn in atmosphere. Maybe after we breathe enough of it, we can recover the metals via crematories. |
|
|
| ▲ | a11r 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That whitepaper puts the cost of a 40 MW cluster at $167m on land and $8.2m in space, inclusive of launch costs. |
| |
| ▲ | wmf 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They seem to not be counting the $1B of GPUs on either side, making the difference pretty small. They also think launching 200 racks of equipment into space will cost $5M. | |
| ▲ | alienthrowaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated. | | | |
| ▲ | j2kun 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | that sounds ridiculous. How could it be so much cheaper | | |
| ▲ | stonogo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because launch costs and density are completely imaginary. The whole thing is predicated on launch vehicles they hope someone builds eventually. They also appear to have profoundly miscalculated their radiation shielding costs and amounts, but I'm not really motivated to calculate that correctly. | | |
| ▲ | alexnewman 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | At planet we didn't have any radiation shielding. Why would spacex need it? | | |
| ▲ | rout39574 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the planet we have tremendous radiation shielding. The van allen belt and the atmosphere, to start with. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | jasonwatkinspdx 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're assuming $30/kg launch costs. | | |
| ▲ | singron 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Falcon heavy has never flown SSO, but it's probably over $1500/kg, which is >50x more expensive. Even the most optimistic estimates for a future starship launch cost is at least $100/kg, so it makes no sense to use $30/kg. The other line items are probably similarly unrealistic since they include their own launch costs as well. They also spec 300 racks of 500kg each, which is <40% of the weight of the comparable land rack. I doubt the full weight reduction since the racks still need to survive launch force/vibration in addition to fluid/pressure enclosures that land racks don't require. I think it's likely that just about every part of this report has a similarly cooked numbers, and we can just throw the whole thing out. |
| |
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because they have factored in a genie’s lamp, which they will use to wish costs down significantly |
|
|
|
| ▲ | thelastgallon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Admiral Rickover explains the difference between PoC and practical: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html. It is about nuclear, but applies here as well. |
|
| ▲ | bahmboo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Starcloud seems like a whole lot of hand waving and BS. This is a good video that goes over their problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg |
| |
| ▲ | Mountain_Skies 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It reminds me of the Hyperloop white paper, whose existence for many was proof enough that it was viable and beyond questioning. |
|
