Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
Comments
GlenTheMachine
NitpickLawyer
Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there).
> The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.
6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways) and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail.
That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.
protocolture
Did Microsoft do any of that with their submersible tests?
My feeling is that, a bit like starlink, you would just deprecate failed hardware, rather than bother with all the moving parts to replace faulty ram.
Does mean your comms and OOB tools need to be better than the average american colo provider but I would hope that would be a given.
protocolture
>The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
And once you remove all the moving parts, you just fill the whole thing with oil rather than air and let heat transfer more smoothly to the radiators.
sagarm
Does using oil solve the mass problem? Liquids aren't light.
protocolture
I would wager that its lighter than:
Repair robots
Enough air between servers to allow robots to access and replace componentry.
Spare componentry.
An eject/return system.
Heatpipes from every server to the radiators.
littlestymaar
First, oil is much heavier than air.
Second: you still need radiators to dissipate heat that is in oil somehow.
monster_truck
I suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the landing bit
I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for parted out supercomptuers)
closewith
Spreading heavy metals in the upper atmosphere. Fun.
oceanplexian
Why does it need to be robots?
On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.
Robotbeat
Bingo.
It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).
(Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)
weq
Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!
Nevermark
And in the meantime, he has responsibly redistributed and recycled their mass. Avoiding any concern that Earth's mass could be negatively impacted.
monster_truck
That isn't going to last for much longer with the way power density projections are looking.
Consider that we've been at the point where layers of monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite some time now.
Robotbeat
You mean like every single kitchen?
wmf
Yeah, just attach a Haven module to the data center.
hamburglar
Seems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.
Robotbeat
If mass is going to be as cheap as is needed for this to work anyway, there's no reason you can't just use people like in a normal datacenter.
littlestymaar
Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time.
Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
BruSwain
If you are out of the magnetosphere, wouldn't your data be subject to way more cosmic ray interference, to the point that its actually a consideration?
ddtaylor
ECC everything?
1970-01-01
If I'm reading this correctly, the idea is
1. YOLO. Yeet big data into orbit!
2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
3. Profit!
It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module) docks and mirrors the data.
philosophty
"Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time."
This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in constant use.
There are definitely failures but they're very low unless something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad batch of hardware.
xnx
Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.
Brian_K_White
Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.
JumpCrisscross
Coming from someone in this space, SpinLaunch has more legs to stand on than Starcloud.
wmf
That's how you get another Theranos.
energywut
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
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.
Robotbeat
This isn’t true. The radiators on ISS are MUCH smaller than the solar panels. I know it’s every single armchair engineer’s idea that heat rejection is this impossible problem in space, but your own example of ISS proves this is untrue. Radiators are no more of a problem than solar panels.
PaulDavisThe1st
seems oddly paradoxical. ISS interior at some roughly livable temperature. Exterior is ... freakin' space! Temperature gradient seems as if it should take of it ...
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
thwarted
There's nothing paradoxical about it. There's no such thing as a temperature gradient in a vacuum, there's nothing to hold or measure temperature against. And thus a vacuum is a really good insulator. Which is why a vacuum flask, which ultimately became one of Thermos' most well known products, is used to control temperature both in and outside the lab.
Robotbeat
Except a thermos has a really low emissivity, otherwise (if it had high emissivity), it’d be a poor insulator due to thermal radiation, the same reason why ISS’s radiators are much smaller than its solar panels.
throwawaymaths
there literally is nothing to absorb the heat. Conduction and convection are out, all you got is radiation.
new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children of a dead earth
Robotbeat
Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e. in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake, tbh.
Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law. The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an overblown gotcha, considering every satellite still has to dump heat and works just fine.
semi-extrinsic
The problem is not that radiators don't work. The problem is the need for liquid cooling. The heat prduced per area in the GPU/CPU is much bigger than the cooling capacity per area of your radiator.
Even here on earth, contemporary GPU racks for AI have had to move to liquid cooling because it is the only way to extract enough heat. At 120 kW for 18x 1U servers (GB200 NVL72), the power density is waaay beyond what you can do with air even.
The last time Starcloud was doing the rounds on HN, I estimated that they need to be pumping water at a flow rate of 60 000 liters per second, if you use the numbers in their whitepaper. That's a tenth of the Sacramento river, flowing in space through a network with a million junctions and hoping nothing leaks.
dismalpedigree
I’d settle for at least a high school physics education. This idea seemed insane when I first heard about it a few weeks back. This analysis just makes it that much more crazy.
If YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I can think of some more enjoyable ways.
throwawaymaths
they got the sun synchronous orbit part right.
ThrowawayTestr
A great interactive example of this is the game Oxygen Not Included. By the late game, you're biggest problem is your base getting too hot from the waste heat of all your industry.
Robotbeat
You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all far more predictable.
Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating. Space radiators use a high emissivity coating. Literally every satellite manages to deal with heat rejection just fine, and with radiators (if needed) much smaller than the solar arrays.
Latency is potentially an issue if in a high orbit, but in LEO can be very small.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance is impossible? Literally, what is ISS, where this is done all the time?
Radiation shielding isn't free, but it's not necessarily that expensive either.
Orbital maintainence is not a serious problem with low cost launch.
The upside is effectively unlimited energy. No other place can give you terawatts of power. At that scale, this can be cheaper than terrestrially.
GolfPopper
Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
mandevil
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
While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...
xyzzy123
They don't need to do that if they go after your ground station operators.
To escape the law you need to hide or protect something on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother putting the computers in space?
mulmen
Because you need an enormous amount of energy to run the servers. You may hide the downlinks but you still need power.
xyzzy123
I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.
mulmen
Yeah exactly. We’re riffing on how implausible that is, right?
_carbyau_
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...
notpushkin
What if you’re a stateless person? (Not an easy status to acquire these days, but any US citizen can just renounce their citizenship without getting a new one, for example.)
reaperducer
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
Generally though, countries don’t disappear: they have a predecessor and a successor.
reaperducer
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
That is why international treaties come with implicit or explicit enforcement options
mandevil
That is not how international law works, you don't get to say "we are a new country and therefore not bound by treaties that earlier forms did."
This principle was established when Nazis were convicted for war crimes at Nuremburg for violating treaties that their predecessor state the Weimar Republic signed, even after the Nazi's repudiated those treaties and claimed they were signed by an illegitimate state, and that they were a new Reich, not like the Wiemar Republic.
Basically if territory changes hand to an existing state that state will obviously still have obligations, and if a new state is formed, then generally it is assumed to still carry the obligations of the previous state. There is no "one weird trick" to avoid international law. I assure you that the diplomats and lawyers 80 years ago thought of these possibilities. They saw what resulted from the Soviet and Nazi mutual POW slaughters, and set up international law so no one could ignore it.
alephnerd
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_
:-) 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
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
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
Exactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not subject to their jurisdiction.
runako
[Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]
> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
bobthepanda
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
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
>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
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.
See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
psds2
Who would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind of value?
edm0nd
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
> 2026, we will get ransomware from space!
Ahem, cloud ransomware.
ronsor
Anyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter satellite.
nkrisc
Pretty worthless unless the execs live in space too.
dismalpedigree
Why? Its not like we put execs in jail for allowing their companies to do terrible things under their watch.
notahacker
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
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…
XorNot
We'd build it then? The problems of a space data center are extremely generic and only worth solving when you actually need one. Which would never be in low earth orbit.
ggreer
If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.
The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.
For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.
Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.
I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.
Brian_K_White
You can also drink from a shoe. It's absolutely possible.
Aperocky
Same with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, inventing a detour because it sounds cool and ultimately don't work out because Occam's Razor.
darth_avocado
Let me alert all the NIMBY folks, let them know that data centers will be blocking their view of the moon and casting shadows on their backyards.
Nevermark
Just give all those astronomers mockup telescopes with little screens creating the fancy images they want inside them.
They will calm down.
quantified
Of course, they're soft targets in space war too, they could generate lots of debris.
hellisothers
Man I read “AI training in a high latency self sufficient satellite orbiting earth” as the start of a Sci-Fi novel…
raverbashing
Just another good proof of paper being an ideal medium for fiction
Any purported advantages have to contend with the fact that sending the modules costs millions of dollars. Tens to hundred millions
oceanplexian
We’re probably thinking of it the wrong way. Instead of a single datacenter it’s more likely we build constellations and then change the way we write software.
There will probably be a lot more edge computing in the future. 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal. Space infrastructure will probably have some parallels.
rtpg
> 20 years ago engineers scoffed at the idea of deploying code into a dozen regions (If you didn’t have a massive datacenter footprint) but now startups do it casually like it’s no big deal.
Are there many startups actually taking real advantage of edge computing? Smaller B2B places don't really need it, larger ones can just spin up per-region clusters.... and then for 2C stuff you're mainly looking at static asset stuff which is just CDNs?
Who's out there using edge computing to good effect?
ugh123
Sounds like a great investment for SoftBank
FridgeSeal
I think the upside is that it’s VC fodder. I imagine their thinking went about as far as “wow, what if we like….did AI…but in space?!”
throwawaymaths
reliable energy is the only (maybe valid) reason. you can get yourself into a sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit and avoid shading by the earth.
paxys
Bandwidth - negligible
littlestymaar
> There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
It's outside of any jurisdiction, this is a dream come true for a libertarian oligarch.
mschuster91
It's not, all objects in space fall under the jurisdiction of the country that launched the rocket.
kolbe
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
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
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
You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.
mook
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.
riknos314
Maybe.
If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.
malfist
You can have sun synchronous around an earth orbit. L1 would do nicely
energywut
Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
notepad0x90
You're making lots of assumptions. They can put like 1000 Raspberrypi's which don't need all that much cooling and relatively little energy requirements.
For your other concerns, the risks are worth it for customers because of the main reward: No laws or governments in space! Technically, the datacenter company could be found liable but not for traffic, only for take-down refusals. Physical security is the most important security. For a lot of potential clients, simply making sure human access to the device is difficult is worth data-loss,latency and reliability issues.
kemotep
Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face.
PaywallBuster
good use case for bitcoin mining?
- lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them fail as they go
tenuousemphasis
No. Too much heat to dissipate. Plus there's no benefit to mining in space.
ericyd
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
Same for me.
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
quantified
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
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.
__m
$10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.
ggreer
If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).
fsh
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
"...dumbest possible idea.."
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
wlesieutre
Solar roadways!
MarkusQ
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?"
Metacelsus
maybe on Io :)
varelse
[dead]
Space roboticist here.
As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.
As a first cut, this would require:
- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant
- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.
- regular launches containing replacement hardware
- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.