I don’t know where it started. Maybe someone rich watched Altered Carbon or played CP2077. But now that the fantasy’s circling among billionaires, others want to cash in.
…From the firm’s perspective, if it’s hilariously impractical, so what? It’s Bezos’s money, and they’ll take it.
And they must know funding for space-based science (the actual practical application) is drying up.
You make a sun shield to block the scorching temperature of direct sun exposure, which will generate energy and keep the equipment in the chilling cold shade… although a huge investment, in the long run, it’s more practical than keeping them on land.
I’m not sure if this is satire (I mean no offense), but its exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s nothing ‘chilling’ about being in the shade in space. Radiating large amounts of power is immensely difficult and, in fact, a huge engineering challenge for speculative spacecraft designs, like reactor-powered rockets.
As it points out, it’s already a costly challenge on the ISS and Space Shuttle:
…And that doesn’t even matter, because it’s utterly dwarfed by the stupendous cost of getting even a pound into LEO in the first place. Or the absolutely monumental cost of any kind of maintenance (or equipment writeoffs) if something breaks. Hence I’m ignoring other extreme engineering challenges, like bit-flips from cosmic radiation (which Nvidia tested on the ISS, and which gets worse as lithography gets smaller), or complexities of connecting structures in space (hence this firm).
Hence, the only things that go in space are things that absolutely must, like low volume scientific equipment. Its more practical to just put servers under antarctica because it’s still at least 50X cheaper to install them, run them, and maintain them there.
Hence, my point. Folks like Bezos aren’t expected to know esoteric, theoretical stuff. They’re business folks. But they should know enough to ask someone qualified to asses their fantasies.
TL;DR: we’re discussing fundamental physics limitations here, like the rocket equation, heat flow, how radiation interacts with mass, things like that. Not technology challenges.
In sci fi that completely throws technological/engineering limitations out the window because everything’s designed by sun-sized transcendent AI, even they face the same limitations: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49350e2d34113
I don’t have the technical knowledge to join the discussion, but wasn’t every technology we have today considered sci-fi at some point?
Is a huge heat shield with some aerogel or something behind it to contain the heat that couldn’t be turned into energy, and then a cord to transport the energy to the aerogel-coated equipment hundreds of meters away, really so unfeasible, as better aerogel and heat-to-energy conversion technology seem to be here?
Your second link seems to be about space travel. I’m just talking about having data centers orbiting Earth, like the thousands of satellites already do.
I will bet money that at some point someone argued that communications going through satellites in space would be unpractical because of engineering and technological challenges, the stupendous cost of getting stuff up there, and monumental maintenance costs compared to just having some lines going through some street poles.
Let’s say the “space datacenter” peaks at 500 megawatts, seeing how Earth ones apparently peak around this. But that includes stuff like waste heat from power generation, the cooling and comms system, eveything on the spacecraft.
Lets say we want the coolant at 60C, so the computing stuff stays under 80C, as I am trying to give this system the benefit of the doubt. And lets assume the radiator is quite efficient and ignore mere engineering concerns, and give it an overall emissivity of 0.8.
From Project Rho:
Radiator area = P / (ε * σ * T^4)
Radiator area = (10 ^ 8 W) / ((0.8 emissivity) * (5.670374419 *10^-8, boltzman constant) * (333 Kelvin ^ 4, the same as 60C))
…That’s a radiator two thirds of a mile across.
Let’s, again, toss practicality out the window and say the “weight” of the whole thing is similar to a 6 mm aluminum panel, which seems like an unreasonable feat of engineering. After all, we gotta pump liquid through the thing, and unfold it somehow. But lets go with it.
That’s 5400 cubic meters of aluminum. That’s 5.6 * 10^6 kilograms. Picture a cargo ship flattened into a disk; that’s the order of mass we’re talking about.
At 20,000 kg per flight… that’s 112 Falcon Heavy flights to low earth orbit, or ~$10 billion dollars. Just to get our impossible radiator into orbit, and nothing else. Lets say launch costs get 10X cheaper, somehow, and that’s still a billion dollars.
That’s 5400 cubic meters of aluminum. That’s 5.6 * 10^6 kilograms. Picture a cargo ship flattened into a disk; that’s the order of mass we’re talking about.
Deorbiting it would probably make for an exciting show. Also, I wonder how much aluminum you can dump into the atmosphere before you have effects.
Within 15 years, plummeting satellites could release enough aluminum to alter winds, temps in the stratosphere
Estimates suggest satellite debris could rival the amount of naturally occurring meteor dust in the atmosphere by 2040.
At that rate, a satellite would burn up in the atmosphere every one to two days, depositing 10,000 metric tons of alumina in the upper atmosphere. That’s equivalent to about 150 space shuttles vaporizing in the atmosphere every year.
The new study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, suggests that much alumina could alter polar vortex speeds, heat up parts of the mesosphere by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius, and impact the ozone layer. The metal aerosols and other particles vaporized from falling satellites would likely circulate in the stratosphere for several years, according to the authors.
Well, in 2022 Qtar spent $220b to have some football matches in the desert… and didn’t the cost of launching stuff on orbit substantially decreased in the last decade? Again, give a few decades, technology makes everything easier. If you were making that same math just ten years ago, your 10x cheaper would be the estimate you reached now.
Is a huge heat shield with some aerogel or something behind it to contain the heat that couldn’t be turned into energy
The first line of the Project Rho page:
NO, for the millionth time you CANNOT get rid of the heat by turning it into electricity!
And yes, we’re assuming the radiator is way far away on some kind of tether. Again, first few lines of the page. But the aerogel wouldn’t make a difference, it would actually hinder this system.
I will bet money that at some point someone argued that communications going through satellites in space would be unpractical because of engineering and technological challenges, the stupendous cost of getting stuff up there, and monumental maintenance costs compared to just having some lines going through some street poles.
No.
No one was saying this.
People complained about the engineering concerns, but engineers recognized it was physically practical… in theory.
But we are talking about physics now. Doesn’t matter if you’re a transcendental AI or not, you cannot engineer your way around thermodynamics, and we are talking about just one problematic system.
The only tech that would make such a dramatic difference (that’s on the horizon) is a space elevator, as it circumvents the rocket equation entirely by ‘pushing’ against the Earth. But this is really, really, really hard.
NO, for the millionth time you CANNOT get rid of the heat by turning it into electricity!
Pet peeve: Oxygen Not Included should get that patched that out of the Steam Turbine. It just does heat deletion to generate electricity rather than heat flow from warm to cool.
I kind of wish that there were more games in the genre. There’s a whole slew of things that I wish that the genre had.
What is up with this obsession with data centres in space?
I don’t know where it started. Maybe someone rich watched Altered Carbon or played CP2077. But now that the fantasy’s circling among billionaires, others want to cash in.
…From the firm’s perspective, if it’s hilariously impractical, so what? It’s Bezos’s money, and they’ll take it.
And they must know funding for space-based science (the actual practical application) is drying up.
You make a sun shield to block the scorching temperature of direct sun exposure, which will generate energy and keep the equipment in the chilling cold shade… although a huge investment, in the long run, it’s more practical than keeping them on land.
I’m not sure if this is satire (I mean no offense), but its exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s nothing ‘chilling’ about being in the shade in space. Radiating large amounts of power is immensely difficult and, in fact, a huge engineering challenge for speculative spacecraft designs, like reactor-powered rockets.
My favorite ‘speculative space travel’ site has a utterly fantastic writeup on this: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
As it points out, it’s already a costly challenge on the ISS and Space Shuttle:
…And that doesn’t even matter, because it’s utterly dwarfed by the stupendous cost of getting even a pound into LEO in the first place. Or the absolutely monumental cost of any kind of maintenance (or equipment writeoffs) if something breaks. Hence I’m ignoring other extreme engineering challenges, like bit-flips from cosmic radiation (which Nvidia tested on the ISS, and which gets worse as lithography gets smaller), or complexities of connecting structures in space (hence this firm).
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engines.php#rockettyranny
Hence, the only things that go in space are things that absolutely must, like low volume scientific equipment. Its more practical to just put servers under antarctica because it’s still at least 50X cheaper to install them, run them, and maintain them there.
Hence, my point. Folks like Bezos aren’t expected to know esoteric, theoretical stuff. They’re business folks. But they should know enough to ask someone qualified to asses their fantasies.
Every few decades technology severely affects the cost of everything.
edit: To people downvoting me, in the last decade the cost of sending stuff to space went from up to $20k/kg to $1.5k/kg.
Read Project Rho.
TL;DR: we’re discussing fundamental physics limitations here, like the rocket equation, heat flow, how radiation interacts with mass, things like that. Not technology challenges.
In sci fi that completely throws technological/engineering limitations out the window because everything’s designed by sun-sized transcendent AI, even they face the same limitations: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49350e2d34113
I don’t have the technical knowledge to join the discussion, but wasn’t every technology we have today considered sci-fi at some point?
Is a huge heat shield with some aerogel or something behind it to contain the heat that couldn’t be turned into energy, and then a cord to transport the energy to the aerogel-coated equipment hundreds of meters away, really so unfeasible, as better aerogel and heat-to-energy conversion technology seem to be here?
Your second link seems to be about space travel. I’m just talking about having data centers orbiting Earth, like the thousands of satellites already do.
I will bet money that at some point someone argued that communications going through satellites in space would be unpractical because of engineering and technological challenges, the stupendous cost of getting stuff up there, and monumental maintenance costs compared to just having some lines going through some street poles.
Let’s do math.
Let’s say the “space datacenter” peaks at 500 megawatts, seeing how Earth ones apparently peak around this. But that includes stuff like waste heat from power generation, the cooling and comms system, eveything on the spacecraft.
Lets say we want the coolant at 60C, so the computing stuff stays under 80C, as I am trying to give this system the benefit of the doubt. And lets assume the radiator is quite efficient and ignore mere engineering concerns, and give it an overall emissivity of 0.8.
From Project Rho:
Radiator area = P / (ε * σ * T^4)
Radiator area = (10 ^ 8 W) / ((0.8 emissivity) * (5.670374419 *10^-8, boltzman constant) * (333 Kelvin ^ 4, the same as 60C))
…That’s a radiator two thirds of a mile across.
Let’s, again, toss practicality out the window and say the “weight” of the whole thing is similar to a 6 mm aluminum panel, which seems like an unreasonable feat of engineering. After all, we gotta pump liquid through the thing, and unfold it somehow. But lets go with it.
That’s 5400 cubic meters of aluminum. That’s 5.6 * 10^6 kilograms. Picture a cargo ship flattened into a disk; that’s the order of mass we’re talking about.
At 20,000 kg per flight… that’s 112 Falcon Heavy flights to low earth orbit, or ~$10 billion dollars. Just to get our impossible radiator into orbit, and nothing else. Lets say launch costs get 10X cheaper, somehow, and that’s still a billion dollars.
Deorbiting it would probably make for an exciting show. Also, I wonder how much aluminum you can dump into the atmosphere before you have effects.
kagis
Oooh.
https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
Well, in 2022 Qtar spent $220b to have some football matches in the desert… and didn’t the cost of launching stuff on orbit substantially decreased in the last decade? Again, give a few decades, technology makes everything easier. If you were making that same math just ten years ago, your 10x cheaper would be the estimate you reached now.
The first line of the Project Rho page:
And yes, we’re assuming the radiator is way far away on some kind of tether. Again, first few lines of the page. But the aerogel wouldn’t make a difference, it would actually hinder this system.
No.
No one was saying this.
People complained about the engineering concerns, but engineers recognized it was physically practical… in theory.
But we are talking about physics now. Doesn’t matter if you’re a transcendental AI or not, you cannot engineer your way around thermodynamics, and we are talking about just one problematic system.
The only tech that would make such a dramatic difference (that’s on the horizon) is a space elevator, as it circumvents the rocket equation entirely by ‘pushing’ against the Earth. But this is really, really, really hard.
Pet peeve: Oxygen Not Included should get that patched that out of the Steam Turbine. It just does heat deletion to generate electricity rather than heat flow from warm to cool.
I kind of wish that there were more games in the genre. There’s a whole slew of things that I wish that the genre had.
What hasn’t affected the cost of everything every few decades?