Economics of Orbital Vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

I'm not sure. A couple of points:

1) The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down."

2) As I mentioned the regulatory frameworks in this area are evolving very quickly. It is unknown what the regulations will be in 1, 2, 5 years and how that will impact your business.

But I think we'd be better off if taking a political position did not automatically piss off half the country. I think a lot of competent but normal people refuse the get involved in politics because of how toxic it is.

I wish Musk had stayed out of politics, but I'm glad he hasn't given up on Tesla/SpaceX just because of the enemies he's made. I think any normal person would have.

Scenario B: A homeowner adds a new window to their home.

Scenario C: A homeowner buys an online-course to learn how to make windows and then adds one to their home.

Scenario A has approximately no benefit to the economy. The homeowner is no better off (same number of windows) but had to spend money. The window maker might be better off, but only to the same extent that the homeowner is worse off.

I totally agree that Scenario A is not a benefit to the economy. That's the "broken window fallacy".

But Scenario B is definitely better for the economy. The homeowner has decided that having a new window is better than having the money. So the homeowner is better off. The window maker is also better off because they get the money. This is what happens when a billionaire buys a yacht.

Scenario C is the best. The homeowner has a new skill, which they can use to add more windows to their house or maybe their neighbors' houses. Over time, the amount of money spent on window-making will decrease, but the number of windows will stay constant or increase. That's a net benefit. And the online-course creator still made money.

This is what Musk is doing. He is developing new technologies that enable new capabilities and/or make existing things cheaper (e.g., electric cars, access to space, rural internet connectivity).

There is also Scenario D: The homeowner doesn't buy a new window but just keeps his money under his mattress. This is clearly the worst for the economy. Hording money like that means that there is less money circulating and lowered economic activity. The window maker is worse off, and even the homeowner is worse off if they would like to have a new window.

Billionaires who don't spend their money are the real danger, not the ones who tweet too much.

Investing their money is slightly better in that it makes the price of borrowing cheaper. But that only helps up to a point. Someone has to spend money or else there's no point in being able to borrow some. So I wish more billionaires were following Scenario C.

Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.

I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!

The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.

Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.

Let’s say you need 50m^2 solar panels to run it, then just a ton of surface area to dissipate. I’d love to be proven wrong but space data centers just seem like large 2d impact targets.

In general I don't understand this line of thinking. This would be such a basic problem to miss, so my first instinct would be to just look up what solution other people propose. It is very easy to find this online.

Or 3.651 km squared and 2.581 km squared.

Cue jokes about running out of orbital space. Or SpaceX coming up with a new Super Super Heavy.

Heat dissipation isn't going to work across surfaces at that scale passively. So there will need to be radiators with fluid exchange over all that real estate. Orders of magnitude more trouble, weight, risk and expense than transferring electrons.

Which means cooling area now needs to be talked about in cooling volume and flow. So the cascade of complexity challenges goes all the way back to infernal launch volume logistics.

Cooling is going to be orders of magnitude more trouble than power.

At least we can assume renegade space trash is going to get caught by these mitts.

How are these ideas getting any respect?

As you intimated, the radiated heat Energy output of an object is described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which is E = [Object Temp ]^4 * [Stefan-Boltzmann Constant]

However, Temp must be in units of an absolute temperature scale, typically Kelvin.

So the relative heat output of a 90C vs 20C objects will be (translating to K):

383^4 / 293^4 = 2.919x

Plugging in the constant (5.67 * 10^-8 W/(m^2*K^4)) The actual values for heat radiation energy output for objects at 90C and 20C objects is 37.95 W/m^2 and 12.99 W/m^2

The incidence of solar flux must also be taken into account, and satellites at LEO and not in the shade will have one side bathing in 1361 W/m^2 of sunlight, which will be absorbed by the satellite with some fractional efficiency -- the article estimates 0.92 -- and that will also need to be dissipated.

The computer's output needs to be accounted for, for reference[0] a G200 consumes up to 700W, though that is presumably taken from the incident solar radiation so we don't need to add that separately, we can just model the satellite as needing to shed 1361 W/m^2 * 0.92 = 1252 W/m^2 for each square meter of its surface facing the sun.

We've already established that objects at 20C and 90C only radiate 12.99 W/m^2 and 37.95 W/m^2, respectively, so to radiate 1252 W per square meter coming in from the sun facing side we'll need 1252/37.92 = 33 times that area of shaded radiator, if that radiator's surface can be maintained at a uniform 90C. If we wanted the radiator to run cooler, at 20C, we'd need 2.919x as much as at 90C, or 95 square meters of shaded radiator for every square meter of sun facing material.

[0] Nvidia G200 specifications: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h200/

Overall not a great model. But on the other hand, even an amateur can use this model and imagine that additional parts and costs are missing, so if it's showing a bad outlook even in the favorable/cheating conditions for space DCs, then they are even dumber idea if all costs would be factored in fully. Unfortunately many serious journalists can't even do that mental assumption. :(