Does It Make Sense To Put Data Centers In Space? Can They Really Cost Less To Operate?
Scott Manley3 HN recommenders · 2024–2025
502K views · explainer · dated · Uploaded 2024-09-09
Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.
Recommended in orbital data center threads as a sober explanation of why the idea doesn't work out economically or thermally.
1:21:22Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer
TNMoC
19:10Velocity NY 2013: Richard Cook, "Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems"
O'Reilly
52:35Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind • Bryan Cantrill • GOTO 2017
GOTO Conferences
59:56AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401)
Amazon Web Services
23:32The Solar Gravitational Lens will Map Exoplanets. Seriously.
Launch Pad Astronomy
28:36Literate Devops with Emacs
Howard Abrams
1:01:4234C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk
media.ccc.de
34:19Falcon Heavy Test Flight
SpaceX
4 comments from Hacker News
If you want to see exactly the type of solar panels needed for a data center (and why they’re impractical in even ideal situations) then check out this mockup of a proposed space data center ran off solar: [VIDEO]
Scott Manley has published a video a few months ago explaining why putting data centers in space is an absolutely terrible idea. Lumen Orbit, the company mentioned, is a former name of Starcloud. [VIDEO]
The great Scott Manley did a video about that: [VIDEO] basically it doesn't make sense with current technologiesa and even with Starship's proposed specs/price it won't be profitable. Check it out...
Scott Manley had a video about this last year. [VIDEO] The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues. Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.