The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.
E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.
You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.
The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.
Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.
I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.
Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.
Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.
The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.
To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.
Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).
Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.
Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.
This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.
It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.
Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.
You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.
So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.
The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.
So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.