Comment on Why put data centers in space?
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day agoYou’re talking about project Natick. All reports I saw was that it was actually a resounding success. The only reason I’ve seen for why it was cancelled is because it wasn’t able to be kept at the bleeding edge as they couldn’t upgrade the servers randomly. It doesn’t really compare to launching them into space which gives basically zero benefit but adds an insane amount to the cost.
Not only upgrading hardware, but maintaining any issues along the way. Hard drives fail, Memory fails, etc. That’s just stuff that happens and can be easily remedied in a normal data center.
Now take all of those issues, and instead of being underwater… move it 500 miles into the vacuum of space. And take the heat dissipation of all that water, and make it a fraction because the vacuum of space is terrible at radiating heat despite the ambient temperature being so cold.
Cosmic radiation causes random bit flips. You would have to shield everything and make it redundant. More power, more heat, more cooling, more power… Welcome to the loop.
Yeah… No maintenance… Which is a thing that datacenters require.
Enterprise Hardware can have redundancy but things still break.
If it was a success they would have done it. Ergo, not a success.
IDK about success.
I think it went predictably in that the cooling was ok but maintenance was an issue.
Seawater is a real bitch. If you could cool things with it we would just pump it onshore.
The core reason space datacenters are uneconomical, is the 5 year replacement cycle. Includes trashing the solar and radiators every 5 years even if they could last 30+ because datacenter modules need to auto-deploy their own power and radiators. Ocean deployments would be far better. Wind/solar/batteries doesn’t need frequent change. Just drop in a new module every 5 years, while taking out the old one, and rebuilding its insides.
jj4211@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
“resounding success” but given up as a bad idea.
The fact that it could possibly “work” was not really in question, it was whether it would be worth the costs and drawbacks. It was not.
But either way you are right, space even worse than water with no benefit compared to ocean.