I'm surprised that Google has drunken the "Datacenters IN SPACE!!!1!!" kool-aid. Honestly I expected more.
It's so easy to poke a hole in these systems that it's comical. Answer just one question: How/why is this better than an enormous solar-powered datacenter in someplace like the middle of the Mojave Desert?
It's probably not why they're interested in it, but I'd like to imagine someone with a vision for the next couple decades realized that their company already has data centers and powering them as their core competency, and all they're missing is some space experience...
I think it's a good idea, actually.
I have my doubts that it's worth it with current or near future launch costs. But at least it's more realistic than putting solar arrays in orbit and beaming the power down
It gets very exciting if you don't have enough.
> Nothing to obsess about.
It's one of the primary reasons these "AI datacenters… in space!" projects are goofy.
A giant space station?
> no need for security
There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
> no premises
Again… the space station?
> no water
That makes things harder, not easier.
>There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
I don't know what you mean by that.
Fundamentally, it is, just in the form of a swarm. With added challenges!
> I don't know what you mean by that.
If you can get to space cheaply enough for an orbital AI datacenter to make financial sense, so can your security threats.
Right, in the same sense that existing Starlink constellation is a Death Star.
This paper does not describe a giant space station. It describes a couple dozen of satellites in a formation, using gravity and optics to get extra bandwidth for inter-satellite links. The example they gave uses 81 satellites, which is a number made trivial by Starlink (it's also in the blog release itself, so no "not clicking through to the paper" excuses here!).
(In a gist, the paper seems to be describing a small constellation as useful compute unit that can be scaled, indefinitely - basically replicating the scaling design used in terrestrial ML data centers.)
"The cluster radius is R=1 km, with the distance between next-nearest-neighbor satellites oscillating between ~100–200m, under the influence of Earth’s gravity."
This does not describe anything like Starlink. (Nor does Starlink do heavy onboard computation.)
> The example they gave uses 81 satellites…
Which is great if your whole datacenter fits in a few dozen racks, but that's not what Google's talking about here.
Irrelevant for spacecraft dynamics or for heat management. The problem of keeping satellites from colliding or shedding the watts the craft gets from the Sun are independent of the compute that's done by the payload. It's like, the basic tenet of digital computing.
> Which is great if your whole datacenter fits in a few dozen racks, but that's not what Google's talking about here.
Data center is made of multiplies of some compute units. This paper is describing a single compute unit that makes sense for machine learning work.
The more compute you do, the more heat you generate.
> Data center is made of multiplies of some compute units.
And, thus, we wind up at the "how do we cool and maintain a giant space station?" again. With the added bonus of needing to do a spacewalk if you need to work on more than one rack.
Yes, and yet I still fail to see the point you're making here.
Max power in space is either "we have x kWt of RTG, therefore our radiators are y m^2" or "we have x m^2 of nearly-black PV, therefore our radiators are y m^2".
Even for cases where the thermal equilibrium has to be human-liveable like the ISS, this isn't hard to achieve. Computer systems can run hotter, and therefore have smaller radiators for the same power draw, making them easier.
> And, thus, we wind up at the "how do we cool and maintain a giant space station?" again. With the added bonus of needing to do a spacewalk if you need to work on more than one rack.
What you're doing here is like saying "cars don't work for a city because a city needs to move a million people each day, and a million-seat car will break the roads": i.e. scaling up the wrong thing.
The (potential, if it even works) scale-up here is "we went from n=1 cluster containing m=81 satellites, to n=10,000 clusters each containing m=[perhaps still 81] satellites".
I am still somewhat skeptical that this moon-shot will be cost-effective, but thermal management isn't why, Musk (or anyone else) actually getting launch costs down to a few hundred USD per kg in that timescale is the main limitation.
Night.
I mean, how good an idea this actually is depends on what energy storage costs, how much faster PV degrades in space than on the ground, launch costs, how much stuff can be up there before a Kessler cascade, if ground-based lasers get good enough to shoot down things in whatever orbit this is, etc., but "no night unless we want it" is the big potential advantage of putting PV in space.