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TwelveEyes 18 hours ago [-]
It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
dgellow 18 hours ago [-]
Not just that, you’re wasting so much compute due to the risk of bit flips. That the case for any hardware you currently have in space, you need some correction mechanism which generally mean computing the same thing multiple times just to ensure correctness. And the cooling story without an atmosphere is also another obvious pretty massive problem. And the risk of losing an entire payload if the rocket fails. Etc…
I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“
computomatic 18 hours ago [-]
GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
r_lee 18 hours ago [-]
> progress will likely only accelerate
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
hn_submit 18 hours ago [-]
Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
mediumdeviation 18 hours ago [-]
This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.
hn_submit 5 hours ago [-]
The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he shoots from the hip.
Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
rganesan 6 hours ago [-]
The idea was from Google in a November 2025 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19468). Musk started talking about this only later in December 2025.
milleramp 18 hours ago [-]
It's research to collect data, and it's not your money, what do you care?
9dev 18 hours ago [-]
Because it takes so much attention away from projects that would be worthwhile.
nine_k 18 hours ago [-]
For instance? Which projects would benefit from more public attention?
burnt-resistor 15 hours ago [-]
Solving climate change by mostly eliminating fossil fuel use, antibiotic resistant bacteria with new antibiotics, eliminating risks of pandemics generated from meat agriculture, creating novel antimycotics, curing various cancers, and reversing shrinking peace, freedom, privacy, and middle classes around the world to name a few.
jryle70 14 hours ago [-]
> Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it
Ha, peak HN. Everyone else is idiot.
18 hours ago [-]
kadoban 18 hours ago [-]
> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.
Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
spandrew 18 hours ago [-]
There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).
Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
tpetry 18 hours ago [-]
Its running for 15 minutes and then must shut down for a long time to cool down. Thats exactly why those "science-fluencers" said its a dumb idea. This is far away from proving that its a viable idea.
red75prime 17 hours ago [-]
They use passive cooling in their MVP satellite (for the sake of simplicity, probably). This, naturally, severely limits the heat rejection capacity.
kadoban 16 hours ago [-]
They use passive cooling _because it's in a goddamn vacuum_. Passive cooling is basically your only option.
red75prime 16 hours ago [-]
_Radiative cooling_ is the only option because it's in vacuum. But you can transfer heat to the radiator either passively (using thermal conductivity), or actively (using coolant). The second option allows to effectively use larger radiators.
BTW, we seem to have Noisesphere instead of Noosphere.
moralestapia 18 hours ago [-]
Source for that?
Edit: @kieranmaine thanks! Wonder how long they have to wait to turn them on again.
kieranmaine 18 hours ago [-]
FTA:
> The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
sdcfgy 18 hours ago [-]
I suspect it’ll go in the trash like their previous experimental infrastructure ideas did.
karahime 18 hours ago [-]
A lot of their experimental infrastructure has influenced later work.
sdcfgy 17 hours ago [-]
No not really.
Sorry for the snark but that has the same level of credibility as your comment.
If Google did not exist, I don't think the world would be noticeably different.
It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.
trhway 18 hours ago [-]
It is 700w of heat radiating by 1m2 at 70C ( ie one GPU can sit on such a radiator) What is not to work ok here?
nine_k 18 hours ago [-]
No air. No convection, only radiation.
trhway 18 hours ago [-]
That is what I said.
allannienhuis 18 hours ago [-]
What you said was just a statement, not something with evidence or reasoning for why it should work. How large of an area is required to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum at a constant rate?
nine_k 17 hours ago [-]
1m² of perfect black body in vacuum at 343K should emit about 700W, according to the Stephan-Bolzmann formula. Should do for a consumer GPU, or an H100.
Since the heat distribution over the radiator is not ideally uniform, I suppose that the emitted power will be less, if they want to keep the chips at 70C.
Since the temperature has the fourth power in the formula, having the GPU work at 100C would increase the radiator efficiency quite a bit.
trhway 16 hours ago [-]
>How large of an area is required to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum at a constant rate?
that is exactly what i said.
>something with evidence
middle-school physics, basic knowledge, at least if you decided to participate in such a discussion.
eutropia 18 hours ago [-]
I am curious about the physical layout for moving the highly-concentrated heat in the GPUs out to the diffuse radiation panels required to keep them at operating temperature. Would it need something like a liquid cooling loop coupled with large radiators?
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?
logancbrown 18 hours ago [-]
Genuine question: why are there so many people up-in-arms on orbital data centers? Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct? There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
nine_k 18 hours ago [-]
Because when things are getting built that obviously should not work, in one's view of the world, it threatens that view of the world. Finding out that your common sense and understating of basic physics and economics has a sizable hole is pretty unpleasant for most people.
But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.
jjulius 18 hours ago [-]
>... orbital data centers...
>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.
logancbrown 18 hours ago [-]
This argument sounds reminiscent of "this is not AGI/ASI". Arguing over definitions is arbitrary. This is an operational data-center that is processing data on TPUs. That alone qualifies as an orbital data center.
yongjik 17 hours ago [-]
Whether we like AI or not, LLMs did open up a horde of use cases that were impossible a few years ago. Orbital data centers are not like that: their value proposition is that they will provide the exact same service already offered by land-based data centers. So the only way for it to make economical sense is if it's cheaper. It's not.
It's more like blockchain than LLM: there's no clear value proposition and you have to squint really hard to see any perceived benefit.
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
> The prototype is roughly the size of a refrigerator and houses four Google TPUs, operating on roughly 1 kilowatt of solar power
Yeah, no, sorry, this is not a datacenter.
lovich 17 hours ago [-]
Anyone managing a terrestrial data center that had this level of performance and called it a “data-center” much less “operational” would be fired for cause.
And ah, I see you’ve been dancing around with definitions and goomba fallacies around this thread. You definitely asked your question in good faith.
jldugger 18 hours ago [-]
The hardest thing about AI datacenters is power. The second hardest thing is cooling. All of these are physical challenges and exponentially harder in space.
So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.
9dev 17 hours ago [-]
It’s simply a stupid idea that indeed will not work, and this little tech demo is mostly a proof of that. It’s awful to many people (especially engineers, which you'll find more than elsewhere on here), to witness incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. Especially when we’re talking about investments of billions of dollars and orbital launches.
lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
> Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct?
I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
> but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
From the article:
> Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs for testing, but they won’t be able to run continuously. The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
I mean, ah, define 'working'.
yallpendantools 17 hours ago [-]
It's like watching flat earthers launch yet another experiment to prove the earth is flat. We already know the outcome, including the subsequent press release that has the words "very promising" and "flawed assumptions" in the same sentence. But this "flat earther" has billions to burn and enough clout to keep investors and the media in the carousel for the better part of the next few years.
senordevnyc 18 hours ago [-]
Actually, some of us predicted exactly what’s about to happen: these companies will launch a handful of GPUs into space, declare that it’s “working”, and then continue to build out terrestrial data centers at orders of magnitude faster rate.
No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.
NetMageSCW 18 hours ago [-]
Plenty of people are saying it is impossible to operate GPUs in space. They are about to be proven wrong, and then very wrong.
Economics are another matter.
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
This little satellite has four TPUs, draws about a kilowatt, and can only operate for 15 minutes at a time. Like's no-one's saying _that's_ impossible. Clearly. Pop a few gaming laptops on the ISS and you're in the same ballpark, except they'll operate continuously.
senordevnyc 16 hours ago [-]
Again, no one is saying that. I bet there are GPUs in space now! What do you think that even proves?
logancbrown 18 hours ago [-]
Are you moving the goalpost? There are other people in this thread right now that are stating exactly that running orbital GPUs in space will not physically be possible (heat limits, etc).
kadoban 17 hours ago [-]
Look at what they're doing. It runs for 15 minutes and then sleeps for an unstated amount of time (I'd guess hours to days).
Literally nobody thought it would explode if you run it for even a nanosecond.
MrBuddyCasino 18 hours ago [-]
Everything about technological progress is like this. It props up their ego, and they risk nothing. The man in the arena is always dangerously close to being the villain.
cratermoon 18 hours ago [-]
Spend the money on something we already know works that will help people today, right now.
NetMageSCW 18 hours ago [-]
You first.
lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
Especially considering their just-stated opinion, who says they don't...
hn_submit 18 hours ago [-]
Soon the musical chairs game will come to a screeching halt. Interest rates are skyrocketing and not even a Presidential decree will make them come down.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
the_wolo 18 hours ago [-]
Oh I'm just against it because I love the night sky and I don't want it littered with even more trash from obscenely rich American oligarchs. This tech doesn't help me, or anyone that is not in power. Instead it (and light pollution, but that at least not everywhere on the planet) destroys one of the few things that is there, commonly available for everyone to enjoy: the majestic view of the night sky.
kadoban 18 hours ago [-]
It's an offensively stupid idea. Anyone trying to sell you on it thinks you're stupid.
Look at the article: they threw 4 cards in a box and launched it. It works for 15 minutes and then it has to snooze for who-knows-how-long.
lovich 18 hours ago [-]
Because it’s so fucking stupid for the stated benefits that you get
- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong
- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before
- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.
The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.
> There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.
Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.
logancbrown 17 hours ago [-]
Why are you so mad about orbital data centers? Your language is full of hate and vitriol. Let people build things that other people say are impossible or infeasible, find out if they work, turn out they dont work, then make improvements. If someone proposed the combustion engine to you in 1700 Im sure you would reply the same negative way.
lovich 15 hours ago [-]
Quit with the bait. It’s obvious with your follow up questions that when you said “Genuine question:”, it was disingenuous.
In the extremely unlikely situation that you weren’t, and so the mods can see I engaged with the question.
I personally am against for economic reasons and feel like point 2 laid out by me is the most likely, although there is another option I could entertain where the people running these companies are so high on their own supply with the TESCREAL beliefs, or literally high like we’ve seen guys like Musk be in public, that they actually believe in this being economically plausible despite all contrary evidence.
EcommerceFlow 18 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk supports it and will be the main beneficiary if it succeeds. That's it.
kadoban 17 hours ago [-]
I encourage Musk to launch all of his GPUs into space as soon as possible. Benefit away, creepy weirdo.
amanaplanacanal 18 hours ago [-]
Nah, it's because the economics don't make sense. It's a PT Barnum level scam.
qayxc 17 hours ago [-]
Debatable. It's not economically viable under current economics. There's an engineering problem that's solvable in the short term, e.g. the cooling issue.
The economics of mass production of satellites has been demonstrated to work out just fine (see Starlink) and what's missing is the same shift when it comes to space launches. Now I'm not saying that this is going to happen, but that's what the whole purpose of Musk's Starship/Superheavy rocket is.
If - and that's a big if! - the whole Starship concept works out, it'd drastically change the economics of putting satellites in LEO and the whole idea instantly becomes much less stupid.
So basically it's a bet on Starship working as advertised in the very near future. If it does, data centres in space (e.g. in the form of laser-linked satellite swarms) become a compelling alternative to terrestrial data centres. No regulatory issues, no infrastructure problems (power, water, ...), no risk of sabotage or drone strikes (see AWS in Middle East), and no land leases required.
Once you add up all these risks and costs and put them next to the launch cost that SpaceX envisions for Starship, the concept suddenly sounds quite plausible.
I'm sceptical myself - though for very different reasons - but I wouldn't call it an outright scam. It all hinges on one thing: Starship has to work. Cheaply, reliably, and within the next couple of years. If it turns out to be less capable, significantly more expensive, less reliable than F9 and F9 Heavy, or not ready until the mid-2030s, the concept is dead.
raizer88 17 hours ago [-]
The engineering problem is called physic and thermodynamics. And unless we learn how to change those rules the problem will be unsolvable. It's like discussing perpetual motion...
qayxc 16 hours ago [-]
I hear this a lot without actual calculations backing up the claim.
First of all, orbital data centre doesn't mean a monolithic 500MW monstrosity orbiting Earth. That's not what the companies actually investigating the idea (Google, Amazon, SpaceX, ...) have in mind.
The real-world implementation would use constellations of Starlink-sized satellites, so we're talking about a ~10kW power envelope. Under ideal orbital conditions (sun synchronous near polar orbit, ~250-450km), you can get away with as little as 40m² of radiator area depending on engineering margins, provided you allow your radiator/coolant temps to be 70°C and above (70°C is what I used for my estimation plus an ideal 400km SSO and a reasonably efficient radiator similar to the improved ETCS on the ISS - no ammonia for the coolant, though see below as to why).
People often cite the ISS and its ~100m² radiators for comparison. The problem with that is that for one, the design operating temperature of the ISS' EATCS is
4°C on the low temp loop and 17°C on the moderate temp loop. That little known fact aside, the current improved ATCS is capable of rejecting 70kW of waste heat - way more than the thermal output a realistic satellite would produce. The active temperature control system (ATCS) of the ISS is designed around humans and science experiments in a 400km 52°N to 52°S orbit, not silicon chips that are allowed to run much hotter than 25°C and sit in SSO.
In short the *actual* thermodynamics work out just fine if you consider real satellite designs instead of sci-fi monstrosities, use realistic operating temperatures for the coolant loop designed around silicon chips, and the desired target orbit.
So when you say "unless we learn how to change those rules the problem will be unsolvable" I'd honestly like to know why my 25+ year old literature on satellite mission and hardware design, Boeing's numbers from "Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview" document, the formulas from NASAs "Guidelines for thermal analysis of spacecraft hardware", this gem from DLR https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2024.11.024 and my calculator are all wrong at the same time.
Sure, I only did some napkin math (still took nearly 45min) using some simplified formulas and crude estimates for the required parameters (I was curious, but not THAT curious), but I always rounded up and used a healthy 2x margin on top of the estimated result.
So please tell me why I'm wrong.
cratermoon 18 hours ago [-]
It's not even a test of an orbital data center.
All it will do it determine if and how a Google TPU performs in space.
qayxc 17 hours ago [-]
That's nit-picking. It's one of the first steps towards this goal. Why would any sane engineer put a complete orbital data centre prototype into space without having any data on how most crucial piece of equipment would perform in the target environment?
First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
> First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
They're, ahead, not doing that, though. Per the article, they explicitly will not attempt to provide adequate cooling.
The reasons against doing this is obvious. Is there any coherent description of why someone would think it is a good idea? And I don't mean, like, delusional reasons, but an actually rational argument for "here is where it might work out and we need to try and measure to find out".
burkaman 18 hours ago [-]
Google's blog post (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...) describes the goal of the launch as "designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." That doesn't sound like a bad idea, obviously it might be useful to have dedicated machine learning hardware on spacecraft or satellites for local processing. Maybe they just framed it as an orbital data center test for marketing, because that's a trendy topic and sounds more newsworthy than "hardware durability test"?
jonas21 18 hours ago [-]
I've heard arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, they would be uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason space data centers would be impossible?
Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.
If they do get things to work, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
senordevnyc 18 hours ago [-]
Literally no one is saying it’s impossible. Of course it’s possible, and it may one day even be economically viable.
But Elon’s claim that by 2027, the cheapest place to put data centers will be in space? Yeah, that’s impossible. But then again, only a fool would believe him at this point.
I highly doubt that space data centers will be more advantageous than terrestrial before 2035, and that’s very optimistic.
jonas21 18 hours ago [-]
I agree with you about Elon Musk's claims, but that's not what we're discussing here.
If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for someone in Google's position.
I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.
MarsZebra 18 hours ago [-]
Edge computing in space is needed for Golden Dome.
Weapons targeting etc...
It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.
sdcfgy 18 hours ago [-]
No one is building that. They ran out of money and kit taking Iran on already.
At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.
MarsZebra 18 hours ago [-]
Literally the entire aerospace industry these days is centered around Golden Dome.
You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, LMT, NOC, RTX etc.. if you believe that.
sdcfgy 18 hours ago [-]
Yep. No one that matters and isn’t in the investment hype bubble.
Let me know when Raytheon / BAE / Lockheed Martin / General Dynamics get in on it.
none_to_remain 18 hours ago [-]
The obvious argument in favor that I see: Seizing such a data center is exceedingly difficult and destroying one would be a major international incident
senordevnyc 18 hours ago [-]
As opposed to terrestrial data centers, how?
NetMageSCW 18 hours ago [-]
Ask Amazon.
sdcfgy 18 hours ago [-]
It’s a completely fucking stupid idea in all ways if you throw any engineering rationale at it at all.
Negative on: Risk, cost, thermals, radiation, maintenance, latency, complexity, environmental.
The only win they have is making more outlandish shit to inflate value until it goes snap. One trick pony.
risyachka 18 hours ago [-]
It needs a single use case to justify its existence. And I am pretty sure it has one.
The question is will google reveal it? Probably not.
Even as some sort of failsafe compute for when some meteor hits the earth - already enough for a government to pay 10000x premium for it and it will bring in cash.
Obviously this is not intended to play in the same league as common enterprise datacenter.
sdcfgy 18 hours ago [-]
That’s even more crazy.
No one is going to give a shit about compute if an asteroid hits us. If we survive it, it’ll turn into a resource war within weeks. We’ll be back to the Stone Age.
The only feasible thing I can see is jurisdiction related and that’s not something we should be encouraging. I mean we’ll just end up jamming data centres from the ground.
scottyah 17 hours ago [-]
Is your mental model of the world made entirely from low budget Hollywood movies?
17 hours ago [-]
sdcfgy 17 hours ago [-]
Considering half the planet stops working when us-east-1 has a crappy day, no.
Also datacentre in space, even if it works, will have a statistical failure model. At the moment that failure model is based on throwing another one up there because fixing stuff is expensive and risky.
So I ask you what happens when your model starts hitting the tail end of the failure curve and can't launch more capacity because associated asteroid strike driven economic failure cripples your launch capacity.
It's just stupid entirely.
codeduck 18 hours ago [-]
Make the physics of this make sense to me, please.
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
It's a marketing exercise; the physics are not required to make sense for those. It's the size of a fridge, draws a kilowatt, has four TPUs and can only run for 15 minutes at a time. The physics work for _that_; they just don't give you anything useful.
qayxc 17 hours ago [-]
The physics aren't the problem, though. You CAN cool the processors provided you have large enough radiators, a really good system for the coolant flow, and hardware that's fine operating continuously at around 100C or above.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.
scottyah 18 hours ago [-]
Looks like you pasted in the wrong input box. This was a comment form, not google or an llm.
I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
Ha, peak HN. Everyone else is idiot.
Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
BTW, we seem to have Noisesphere instead of Noosphere.
Edit: @kieranmaine thanks! Wonder how long they have to wait to turn them on again.
> The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
Sorry for the snark but that has the same level of credibility as your comment.
If Google did not exist, I don't think the world would be noticeably different.
It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.
Since the heat distribution over the radiator is not ideally uniform, I suppose that the emitted power will be less, if they want to keep the chips at 70C.
Since the temperature has the fourth power in the formula, having the GPU work at 100C would increase the radiator efficiency quite a bit.
that is exactly what i said.
>something with evidence
middle-school physics, basic knowledge, at least if you decided to participate in such a discussion.
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?
But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.
>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.
It's more like blockchain than LLM: there's no clear value proposition and you have to squint really hard to see any perceived benefit.
Yeah, no, sorry, this is not a datacenter.
And ah, I see you’ve been dancing around with definitions and goomba fallacies around this thread. You definitely asked your question in good faith.
So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.
I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil
From the article:
> Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs for testing, but they won’t be able to run continuously. The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
I mean, ah, define 'working'.
No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.
Economics are another matter.
Literally nobody thought it would explode if you run it for even a nanosecond.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
Look at the article: they threw 4 cards in a box and launched it. It works for 15 minutes and then it has to snooze for who-knows-how-long.
- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong
- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before
- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.
The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.
> There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.
Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.
In the extremely unlikely situation that you weren’t, and so the mods can see I engaged with the question.
I personally am against for economic reasons and feel like point 2 laid out by me is the most likely, although there is another option I could entertain where the people running these companies are so high on their own supply with the TESCREAL beliefs, or literally high like we’ve seen guys like Musk be in public, that they actually believe in this being economically plausible despite all contrary evidence.
The economics of mass production of satellites has been demonstrated to work out just fine (see Starlink) and what's missing is the same shift when it comes to space launches. Now I'm not saying that this is going to happen, but that's what the whole purpose of Musk's Starship/Superheavy rocket is.
If - and that's a big if! - the whole Starship concept works out, it'd drastically change the economics of putting satellites in LEO and the whole idea instantly becomes much less stupid.
So basically it's a bet on Starship working as advertised in the very near future. If it does, data centres in space (e.g. in the form of laser-linked satellite swarms) become a compelling alternative to terrestrial data centres. No regulatory issues, no infrastructure problems (power, water, ...), no risk of sabotage or drone strikes (see AWS in Middle East), and no land leases required.
Once you add up all these risks and costs and put them next to the launch cost that SpaceX envisions for Starship, the concept suddenly sounds quite plausible.
I'm sceptical myself - though for very different reasons - but I wouldn't call it an outright scam. It all hinges on one thing: Starship has to work. Cheaply, reliably, and within the next couple of years. If it turns out to be less capable, significantly more expensive, less reliable than F9 and F9 Heavy, or not ready until the mid-2030s, the concept is dead.
First of all, orbital data centre doesn't mean a monolithic 500MW monstrosity orbiting Earth. That's not what the companies actually investigating the idea (Google, Amazon, SpaceX, ...) have in mind.
The real-world implementation would use constellations of Starlink-sized satellites, so we're talking about a ~10kW power envelope. Under ideal orbital conditions (sun synchronous near polar orbit, ~250-450km), you can get away with as little as 40m² of radiator area depending on engineering margins, provided you allow your radiator/coolant temps to be 70°C and above (70°C is what I used for my estimation plus an ideal 400km SSO and a reasonably efficient radiator similar to the improved ETCS on the ISS - no ammonia for the coolant, though see below as to why).
People often cite the ISS and its ~100m² radiators for comparison. The problem with that is that for one, the design operating temperature of the ISS' EATCS is 4°C on the low temp loop and 17°C on the moderate temp loop. That little known fact aside, the current improved ATCS is capable of rejecting 70kW of waste heat - way more than the thermal output a realistic satellite would produce. The active temperature control system (ATCS) of the ISS is designed around humans and science experiments in a 400km 52°N to 52°S orbit, not silicon chips that are allowed to run much hotter than 25°C and sit in SSO.
In short the *actual* thermodynamics work out just fine if you consider real satellite designs instead of sci-fi monstrosities, use realistic operating temperatures for the coolant loop designed around silicon chips, and the desired target orbit.
So when you say "unless we learn how to change those rules the problem will be unsolvable" I'd honestly like to know why my 25+ year old literature on satellite mission and hardware design, Boeing's numbers from "Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview" document, the formulas from NASAs "Guidelines for thermal analysis of spacecraft hardware", this gem from DLR https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2024.11.024 and my calculator are all wrong at the same time.
Sure, I only did some napkin math (still took nearly 45min) using some simplified formulas and crude estimates for the required parameters (I was curious, but not THAT curious), but I always rounded up and used a healthy 2x margin on top of the estimated result.
So please tell me why I'm wrong.
First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.
They're, ahead, not doing that, though. Per the article, they explicitly will not attempt to provide adequate cooling.
Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.
If they do get things to work, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
But Elon’s claim that by 2027, the cheapest place to put data centers will be in space? Yeah, that’s impossible. But then again, only a fool would believe him at this point.
I highly doubt that space data centers will be more advantageous than terrestrial before 2035, and that’s very optimistic.
If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for someone in Google's position.
And FWIW, there are quite a few people claiming that they'd "go against the laws of physics", etc. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838152
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.
At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.
You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, LMT, NOC, RTX etc.. if you believe that.
Let me know when Raytheon / BAE / Lockheed Martin / General Dynamics get in on it.
Negative on: Risk, cost, thermals, radiation, maintenance, latency, complexity, environmental.
The only win they have is making more outlandish shit to inflate value until it goes snap. One trick pony.
Even as some sort of failsafe compute for when some meteor hits the earth - already enough for a government to pay 10000x premium for it and it will bring in cash.
Obviously this is not intended to play in the same league as common enterprise datacenter.
No one is going to give a shit about compute if an asteroid hits us. If we survive it, it’ll turn into a resource war within weeks. We’ll be back to the Stone Age.
The only feasible thing I can see is jurisdiction related and that’s not something we should be encouraging. I mean we’ll just end up jamming data centres from the ground.
Also datacentre in space, even if it works, will have a statistical failure model. At the moment that failure model is based on throwing another one up there because fixing stuff is expensive and risky.
So I ask you what happens when your model starts hitting the tail end of the failure curve and can't launch more capacity because associated asteroid strike driven economic failure cripples your launch capacity.
It's just stupid entirely.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.