Comment on Why put data centers in space?
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week agoHere's the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it's perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.
What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they'd get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn't be necessary here though.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Unless I missed something, all of his math assumes 20kW of computers, that’s not even one rack for heavy stuff, of course you can run a data center in space if you send one satellite up for each computer, that’s just unpractical.
Let me put this into perspective, what you’re saying is like someone has an idea for a revolutionary parking plaza, and they’re showing you it’s feasible to spend millions of dollars to park one motorcycle in it.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
The actual Starmind satellites will have 175kW of compute on them, Scott made that video before the specs were released so he assumed a minimum package. But all of this scales linearly, if you double the power usage you just double the size of the solar panels and double the size of the radiators. If a 20kW satellite works then you can bolt ten of them together and get a 200kW satellite that works too.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Cool, so we moved from a single motorcycle to a couple of cars, still a long way from a parking lot. You’re not understanding the issue, the scale is not feasible, you’ll spend millions of dollars to launch a single satellite that’s not even 1/10th of a tiny data center.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
They're not putting up just one satellite. It's going to be a constellation. The constellation as a whole will be equivalent to a data center.
Also, it won't cost them millions of dollars to launch a single satellite. That's why this project is paired up with Starship development, the two go hand in hand. Starship makes the launches cheap, Starmind gives Starship the scale of demand a ship like that needs for its economics to work.