Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company
swicano@programming.dev 4 days agoI used to think space data centers was a scam, but I learned how much power existing satellites already use (and thus must be able to radiate into space to keep cold), and just looking at the ISS, each radiator (and it has several) can reject 14 kW into space, so if the ISS has can safely generate 14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed. Space datacenters are the first step to industry, in space, which is an necessary step for a lot of future stuff.
All the above is beyond the point though, he’s playing shell games to tie his most valuable and critical company, SpaceX, to the trashheap of AI bullshit so that the government will bail him out when it crashes.
14 kW
This is a tiny amount of power. My house alone can feed and service over 3x that (48 kW). Feeding my house with 48 kW and dissipating the heat is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than doing this even once on the ISS, then twice, then thrice on this ISS…just to achieve what my home achieves right now.
Space datacenters are a meme.
You don’t use 48 kW you have 48kW capacity, that’d be 33 (1500W) electric space heaters running nonstop 24/7. I have electric heat, electric oven/range, and an electric car and I averaged 3 kW across the last week. (406 kWh between the 26th and 1st)
A comparison that is reasonable is an h100 rack cluster like this which uses about 60 kW per rack. For input power, the newer iROSA solar panels generate about 20 kW at a size of 20ft x 60ft each. Throw in 4 of those radiators, and you have something that is feasible to throw into space. Again, I can’t judge the economics of launching and running a space based datacenter business, but you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech.
The ISS is one of the most expensive pieces of infrastructure humanity has built, it costs something on the order of $150B. My home I personally paid for, out of my own pocket, and it has 3x it’s power power supply of the ISS.
How about this. You give me 10% of the cost of the ISS and that datacenter rack, and I’ll use the $15,000,000,000 to buy a big AC unit to cool the rack. We both make out. You saved 10x your money and got 3x as much power capacity, and I got FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS to service and maintain a residential sized power line.
If your argument was one of cost, you should have said so from the start! Economically, it might or might not make sense. I can’t pretend to know the economics of running a space based datacenter, I’ve never run a ground based datacenter.
But you have been arguing about power and electricity and heat and how proud you are to have 200a service at your house (congrats btw) but those aren’t the dealbreakers. If the AI bros want to lose billions putting the datacenters in space, I don’t have a huge problem with that. Better that than diddling kids and destroying society, which is what they seem to be spending their money on now.
The iss is an experiment rather than a commercially justifyable operation. While spacex aims to achieve 200$/kg launch costs, that means 17c/kwh just in launch costs. Space solar and radiator panels are in the $1000/m^2^ cost.
The ISS is only in low orbit.
Buffalobuffalo@reddthat.com 4 days ago
But data centers use tens to hundreds of megawatts. So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of times the heat.
swicano@programming.dev 4 days ago
That was my stumbling block, too. Don’t think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it’s basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.
Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I’m inclined to believe them even if I don’t get to see that math specifically. But right now it’s just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don’t as much believe them.
LadyMeow@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Yay! Unlimited space junk!
ptu@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
You’re right, but I don’t mind if he sends his stuff to outer space