alt Hacker NewsI still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Replies
Same way the dude solved Roadster, full self driving etc.
Presumably the cooling problem gets hand waved away as a technical detail, and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.
Send up a spacecraft with back-to-back / equal area solar panels and radiators (have to reject heat backwards, can't reject it to your neighboring sphere elements!). Push your chip temp as much as possible (90C? 100C?). Find a favorable choice of vapor for a heat pump / Organic Rankine Cycle (possibly dual-loop) to boost the temp to 150C for the radiator. Cool the chip with vapor 20C below its running temp. 20-40% of the solar power goes to run the pumps, leaving 60-80% for the workload (a resistor with extra steps).
There are a lot of degrees of freedom to optimize something like this.
Spacecraft radiator system using a heat pump - https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883588B1/en
Periodically send a crew to a comet to bring back a large slab of ice to put in the data center.
Remember MoviePass, and how they were losing gobs of money by letting people see unlimited movies for $20/month?
It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt.
The "datacenters in space" thing is a similar play: it's so obviously dumb that a bunch of smart people have tricked themselves into thinking "wow, SpaceX must have actually figured a way it can work!"; SpaceX has not and it is in fact exactly as stupid as it looks.
that's the best part! They don't!
My guess would be just a regular radiator and cooling system like a liquid pump. The only obstacle should be the vacuum. That said I don't have any hopes Elon has any understanding of any of it.
Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space, the ratio of solar panels to radiating area will have to be about the same. There is nothing uniquely heat-producing about GPUs, ultimately almost all energy collected by a satellite's solar panels ends up as heat in the satellite.
IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
Maintenance cost must be pretty fucking insane
This "Space Datacenter" sounds like biggest bullshit in last decade, which is pretty damn fucking high bar.