Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.
energywut · 3h ago
Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.
Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
Latency? Highly variable.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
Radiation shielding? Not free.
Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.
There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
wkat4242 · 2h ago
Yes cooling is difficult. Half the "solar panels" on the ISS aren't solar panels but heat radiation panels. That's the only way you can get rid of it and it's very inefficient so you need a huge surface.
GolfPopper · 2h ago
Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
mandevil · 2h ago
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal warrant etc.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
bigiain · 19m ago
While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...
_carbyau_ · 7m ago
Maybe not so much... they'll just grab you. Obligatory XKCD.
Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's still a lifetime supply...
reaperducer · 2h ago
nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them.
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
christina97 · 1h ago
Generally though, countries don’t disappear: they have a predecessor and a successor.
reaperducer · 1h ago
A successor may take possession of the land, but that doesn't mean it will also take responsibility for the previous government's liabilities.
afiori · 34m ago
That is why international treaties come with implicit or explicit enforcement options
alephnerd · 1h ago
Those kinds of countries don't tend to be the kinds of countries with active space programs.
And more critically - they have successor states.
The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
_carbyau_ · 12m ago
:-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them...
notahacker · 2h ago
The 'Principality of Sealand', anywhere else on the high seas or Antarctica have their issues with practicality too, but considerably less likelihood of background radiation flipping bits...
paxys · 2h ago
Unless the company blasts its HQ and all its employees into space, no, they are very much subject to the jurisdiction of the countries they operate in. The physical location of the data center is irrelevant.
peterbonney · 1h ago
Exactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not subject to their jurisdiction.
psds2 · 2h ago
Who would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind of value?
edm0nd · 2h ago
Dozens upon dozens of illicit shady bulletproof hosting providers.
2026, we will get ransomware from space!
The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in theory they actually could get something like that setup if they wanted.
ronsor · 2h ago
> 2026, we will get ransomware from space!
Ahem, cloud ransomware.
ronsor · 2h ago
Anyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter satellite.
bobthepanda · 2h ago
Given that most of the major powers have satellite shootdown ability this isn't worth all that much if you're causing enough trouble.
FredPret · 2h ago
Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
bryanrasmussen · 2h ago
>Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.
This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.
At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.
If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
FredPret · 2h ago
By that logic, politicians around the world would make it illegal for themselves to trade stock on their insider knowledge. I'm not holding my breath.
The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...
chatmasta · 15m ago
Yes, and also just because a space data center isn’t useful today doesn’t mean it won’t be required tomorrow. When all the computing is between the ground and some nearby satellites, of course the tradeoffs won’t be worth it.
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
paxys · 2h ago
Bandwidth - negligible
kolbe · 2h ago
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
notahacker · 2h ago
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
energywut · 1h ago
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
malfist · 1h ago
You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.
mook · 29m ago
That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.
malfist · 3m ago
You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely
energywut · 2h ago
Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
kemotep · 1h ago
Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face.
This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I can't scroll or zoom to fit.
v5v3 · 58m ago
Same for me.
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
quantified · 3h ago
And all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night sky.
trhway · 1h ago
My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same weight and launch cost.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
fsh · 3h ago
I wonder if Starcloud is some kind of social experiment to figure out which is the dumbest possible idea that still somehow gets investors.
SirFatty · 2h ago
"...dumbest possible idea.."
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
wlesieutre · 1h ago
Solar roadways!
MarkusQ · 1h ago
Recently had a conversation of space based solar power pros and cons screech to a halt when someone said "Well what about space based geothermal?"
Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
Latency? Highly variable.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
Radiation shielding? Not free.
Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.
There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
https://xkcd.com/538/
Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's still a lifetime supply...
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
And more critically - they have successor states.
The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them...
2026, we will get ransomware from space!
The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in theory they actually could get something like that setup if they wanted.
Ahem, cloud ransomware.
Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.
This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.
At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.
If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!