[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...
Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.
> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
The main way that heat dissipates from space stations and satellites is through thermal radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation.
> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.
if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.
Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
But for a more nuanced and optimistic take, this one is good and highlights all the same issues and more https://www.peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/
(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)
>I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data centers are being built in space, that sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not to YC. (8:00)
One of these projects is bonkers IMO: china-has-an-underwater-data-center-the-us-will-build-them-in-space
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suwannagauntlett/2025/10/20/chi...
The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).
Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.
For example, the JWST uses a RAD750 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 ) which is based on a PowerPC 750 running at 110 MHz to 200 MHz.
Its successor is the RAD5500 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 )... which runs at between 66 MHz and 462 MHz.
> The RAD5545 processor employs four RAD5500 cores, achieving performance characteristics of up to 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and over 3.7 GFLOPS. Power consumption is 20 watts with all peripherals operating.
That's kind of neat... but not exactly data center performance.
Back to the older RAD750...
> The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $349,639 in 2024).
That isn't exactly price performance. Well, unless you're constrained by "it costs millions to replace it."
So... I'm not really sure what devices they'd be putting up there.
The "data centers in space" is much more a "space launch is a hot technology, AI and data centers are a hot technology... put the two together and its too the moon!" (Or at least that's what we tell the investors before we try to spend all their money)
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
What did the royal navy do? There is no mention of the UK using force against sealand in either the Wikipedia page or this BBC article about sealand. (Though obviously the royal navy could retake sealand if they wanted)
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
Very true..
Here's a recent HN link to a chilling documentary about one of the most isolated settlements in the world: >>46040459
Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.
Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/updated_hpe_spaceborn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater
Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.
Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
>"A City on Mars" (2024)
https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?
What's the actual atmospheric burden here?
This essentially says "We dont know"
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/04/rockets-affect-...
The sun synchronous are polar orbits ($$$) that are preferred for earth observation (so that the sun is casting the same shadows). As these are polar orbits, the satellite is not overhead all the time and getting a satellite into such an orbit takes a bit of work.
A SpaceX is at about $3k / kg to LEO. The numbers I see suggest a $20k / kg to a polar orbit.
The next option is being far enough out of the way that the earth's shadow isn't an issue. For that, instead of a 500 km sun synchronous orbit, you'd be going to 36,000 km orbit. This is a lot further from the surface, takes a lot more fuel... and it's a geostationary orbit.
However, as a geostationary orbit, these spots are valuable. Slots in this orbit are divided into slots.
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/wealthy-nations-...
> There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.
> Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.
Furthermore, the "out of a nations control" - those slots are owned by nations. Countries would likely be very annoyed for someone to be putting satellites there without authorization. Furthermore, they only work with the countries on those areas. They also require spacing to ensure that you can properly point an antenna to that satellite.
Furthermore, geosynchronous orbits have a 0.5 second round trip lag. This could be a problem for data centers.
Misbehaving satellites in the geosynchronous orbit are also of concern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_15 ).
----
Putting things in these orbits is pricy. For LEO, you'd need a lot of them. For geosynchronous, the idea of servicing them is pretty much a "you can't do that" (in 10 - 20 years they use their last fuel and get pushed to a higher orbit and pretty much get forgotten about).
Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are things that need to be especially well behaved because any orbital debris in that area could really ruin everyone's day.
Compute in space doesn't make sense.
Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/why-arent-the...
> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.
> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i... - page 14 shows them extended and testing at Lockheed.
Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.
Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.
https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY (from YCombinator)
> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.
These aren't small things. You can't hide it.
> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.
The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.
Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.
Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
Power:
It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.
The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.
Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...
Cooling:
Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.
A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.
Cosmic radiation:
The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.
Communications:
Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...
This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-...
And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
SDA’s “Battle Management Layer will provide automated space-based battle management through command and control, tasking, mission processing and dissemination” to support time-sensitive kill-chain closure. https://www.sda.mil/battle-management
Golden Dome and future missile tracking and ISR will depend on real -time insights, which requires Edge Computing on orbit, running advanced AI/ML algorithms.” https://unibap.com/news/defense-in-the-foreground
sorry can't help you with your user feuds
The US Government further publishes tracking on pretty much every single thing in orbit of the earth larger than a few centimeters, to help satellite operators avoid space debris. They do obfuscate the current orbit of their own spy satellites (only publishing their initial orbit), but other countries and even private citizens around the world keep obsessive tabs on these things (e.g. https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/). This sort of thing is easily within the reach of even a medium sized nation state that was interested in the investment: just need a couple of big ole radars and you can do it just like the US does. So if you do try and hide the resources of a nation-state can easily counter.
The solution to oppressive government is not technological, it's political. Prevent countries from going bad, retrieve the ones that have gone bad, it works out a lot better for everyone.
Cooling was great! Everything else sucked.
DCs in space will have all the stuff that sucked, but cooling will suck too.
>read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation"
He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.
Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296094-nasas-space-launc...