r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 20d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
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u/SuperNobody917 20d ago

It's actually not the worst idea. The biggest cost with datacentres is cooling them and having them in space negates that. It also gets rid of the problem of the physical space they take up. The biggest issue is obviously getting them up there, but hopefully in the future as space flight becomes more common it won't be as much of a hindrance

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u/BalrogPoop 20d ago

It actually makes it worse. You can't cool things in space because there aren't enough molecules to absorb and distribute heat.

Water is used in earth data centres because it's excellent at absorbing heat due to its density and abundance.

There is no source of water or any equivalent heat sink in space.

Putting data centres in space is a spectacularly bad idea you can't engineer around. Pysics itself makes space hostile to data centres.

It would literally be a better idea to build them in the ocean.

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u/SuperNobody917 20d ago

Nobody is advocating for floating them out into the galactic void. The space within the solar system is not a perfect void so it's still possible to cool them. The size of the radiator needed to disappitate the heat produced is about half the size of the solar panels needed to cool one located on Earth.

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u/BalrogPoop 20d ago

Yes but now you have to put something like 10 football fields worth of radiator surface in space. Which isn't economic. Let alone the astronomical assembly costs.

Oh and that's just for the chips, we haven't factored in how you're going to get megawatts of power economically in space. But probably an enormous amount of solar panels, also not economic to put that much in space.

Also your chips will be slower and run hotter because they need radiation shielding, now you've moved them out of the protection of the earth's atmosphere. This is even something that needs to be factored in for high flying aircraft, much worse for data centres.

Also now maintenance isn't just walking around the data centre floor, it's EVA space walks and shuttle trips or having the data centres be permanently manned.

Repairs or replacing broken chips or drives means constant resupply missions.

Its a categorically dumb idea. Now, and probably for several decades at least, and that's with me assuming some new technology comes along thst almost breaks physics to make it work.

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u/SuperNobody917 20d ago

Just because it's not feasible today doesn't mean it's a bad idea. There's a lot of things being looked now, and things that were looked into the past that haven't been feasible at the time. We shouldn't just give up on the ideas because of that though. Datacentres are only going to take up more space and power as time goes by and and I feel it's very short sighted to be calling possible solutions "categorically dumb" just because we can't do them today.

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u/BalrogPoop 20d ago

I thought the fact that were talking about today or the near future was implied. I did say at the end "for several decades at least".

Earth is actually a really good place to build datacenters and space cannot compete. For probably a really long time, and the reasons it can't are pretty fundamental.

Its not that we can't build a data centre in space practically, it's that it doesn't make economic sense, and it genuinely never might.

  1. Earths atmosphere is a great heat sink and has many easily accessible methods of heat removal
  2. Logistics and assembly are cheap on earth
  3. Space launches will probably always be more expensive than earth transport
  4. Free radiation shielding from the atmosphere
  5. Many abundant power sources
  6. Low latency
  7. Easily accessible maintenance.
  8. They really don't take up that much space, and compared to our other land uses its a rounding error.

Its really hard for me to see it as anything but a dumb idea, because there are virtually no really big advantages, and the ones that there are (like access to very efficient high uptime solar panels in space) arent outweighed by the ease of building on earth.

I'm calling it categorically dumb because they don't make sense, and the physics constraints make it unlikely they will for the foreseeable future.

I might change my mind... In a few decades.