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Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
by sbulaev
by sbulaev
I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?
But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.
First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.
How does capacity not apply in space? You can’t just boost a gpu into orbit and it’ll start running. It needs to be hooked into power and cooling infrastructure still and that will always be limited by how much infrastructure you have up there.
Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
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Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
Ha, peak HN. Everyone else is idiot.
BTW, we seem to have Noisesphere instead of Noosphere.
Edit: @kieranmaine thanks! Wonder how long they have to wait to turn them on again.
> The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
Sorry for the snark but that has the same level of credibility as your comment.
If Google did not exist, I don't think the world would be noticeably different.
It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.
>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.
It's more like blockchain than LLM: there's no clear value proposition and you have to squint really hard to see any perceived benefit.
So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.
I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil
From the article:
> Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs for testing, but they won’t be able to run continuously. The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
I mean, ah, define 'working'.
No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.
Economics are another matter.
Literally nobody thought it would explode if you run it for even a nanosecond.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
Look at the article: they threw 4 cards in a box and launched it. It works for 15 minutes and then it has to snooze for who-knows-how-long.
- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong
- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before
- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.
The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.
> There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.
Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.
In the extremely unlikely situation that you weren’t, and so the mods can see I engaged with the question.
I personally am against for economic reasons and feel like point 2 laid out by me is the most likely, although there is another option I could entertain where the people running these companies are so high on their own supply with the TESCREAL beliefs, or literally high like we’ve seen guys like Musk be in public, that they actually believe in this being economically plausible despite all contrary evidence.
The economics of mass production of satellites has been demonstrated to work out just fine (see Starlink) and what's missing is the same shift when it comes to space launches. Now I'm not saying that this is going to happen, but that's what the whole purpose of Musk's Starship/Superheavy rocket is.
If - and that's a big if! - the whole Starship concept works out, it'd drastically change the economics of putting satellites in LEO and the whole idea instantly becomes much less stupid.
So basically it's a bet on Starship working as advertised in the very near future. If it does, data centres in space (e.g. in the form of laser-linked satellite swarms) become a compelling alternative to terrestrial data centres. No regulatory issues, no infrastructure problems (power, water, ...), no risk of sabotage or drone strikes (see AWS in Middle East), and no land leases required.
Once you add up all these risks and costs and put them next to the launch cost that SpaceX envisions for Starship, the concept suddenly sounds quite plausible.
I'm sceptical myself - though for very different reasons - but I wouldn't call it an outright scam. It all hinges on one thing: Starship has to work. Cheaply, reliably, and within the next couple of years. If it turns out to be less capable, significantly more expensive, less reliable than F9 and F9 Heavy, or not ready until the mid-2030s, the concept is dead.
They're, ahead, not doing that, though. Per the article, they explicitly will not attempt to provide adequate cooling.
Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.
If they do get things to work, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
But Elon’s claim that by 2027, the cheapest place to put data centers will be in space? Yeah, that’s impossible. But then again, only a fool would believe him at this point.
I highly doubt that space data centers will be more advantageous than terrestrial before 2035, and that’s very optimistic.
If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for someone in Google's position.
And FWIW, there are quite a few people claiming that they'd "go against the laws of physics", etc. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838152
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.
At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.
You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, LMT, NOC, RTX etc.. if you believe that.
Let me know when Raytheon / BAE / Lockheed Martin / General Dynamics get in on it.
Negative on: Risk, cost, thermals, radiation, maintenance, latency, complexity, environmental.
The only win they have is making more outlandish shit to inflate value until it goes snap. One trick pony.
Even as some sort of failsafe compute for when some meteor hits the earth - already enough for a government to pay 10000x premium for it and it will bring in cash.
Obviously this is not intended to play in the same league as common enterprise datacenter.
No one is going to give a shit about compute if an asteroid hits us. If we survive it, it’ll turn into a resource war within weeks. We’ll be back to the Stone Age.
The only feasible thing I can see is jurisdiction related and that’s not something we should be encouraging. I mean we’ll just end up jamming data centres from the ground.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.
Since the heat distribution over the radiator is not ideally uniform, I suppose that the emitted power will be less, if they want to keep the chips at 70C.
Since the temperature has the fourth power in the formula, having the GPU work at 100C would increase the radiator efficiency quite a bit.
that is exactly what i said.
>something with evidence
middle-school physics, basic knowledge, at least if you decided to participate in such a discussion.
Yeah, no, sorry, this is not a datacenter.
And ah, I see you’ve been dancing around with definitions and goomba fallacies around this thread. You definitely asked your question in good faith.
First of all, orbital data centre doesn't mean a monolithic 500MW monstrosity orbiting Earth. That's not what the companies actually investigating the idea (Google, Amazon, SpaceX, ...) have in mind.
The real-world implementation would use constellations of Starlink-sized satellites, so we're talking about a ~10kW power envelope. Under ideal orbital conditions (sun synchronous near polar orbit, ~250-450km), you can get away with as little as 40m² of radiator area depending on engineering margins, provided you allow your radiator/coolant temps to be 70°C and above (70°C is what I used for my estimation plus an ideal 400km SSO and a reasonably efficient radiator similar to the improved ETCS on the ISS - no ammonia for the coolant, though see below as to why).
People often cite the ISS and its ~100m² radiators for comparison. The problem with that is that for one, the design operating temperature of the ISS' EATCS is 4°C on the low temp loop and 17°C on the moderate temp loop. That little known fact aside, the current improved ATCS is capable of rejecting 70kW of waste heat - way more than the thermal output a realistic satellite would produce. The active temperature control system (ATCS) of the ISS is designed around humans and science experiments in a 400km 52°N to 52°S orbit, not silicon chips that are allowed to run much hotter than 25°C and sit in SSO.
In short the *actual* thermodynamics work out just fine if you consider real satellite designs instead of sci-fi monstrosities, use realistic operating temperatures for the coolant loop designed around silicon chips, and the desired target orbit.
So when you say "unless we learn how to change those rules the problem will be unsolvable" I'd honestly like to know why my 25+ year old literature on satellite mission and hardware design, Boeing's numbers from "Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview" document, the formulas from NASAs "Guidelines for thermal analysis of spacecraft hardware", this gem from DLR https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2024.11.024 and my calculator are all wrong at the same time.
Sure, I only did some napkin math (still took nearly 45min) using some simplified formulas and crude estimates for the required parameters (I was curious, but not THAT curious), but I always rounded up and used a healthy 2x margin on top of the estimated result.
So please tell me why I'm wrong.
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Also datacentre in space, even if it works, will have a statistical failure model. At the moment that failure model is based on throwing another one up there because fixing stuff is expensive and risky.
So I ask you what happens when your model starts hitting the tail end of the failure curve and can't launch more capacity because associated asteroid strike driven economic failure cripples your launch capacity.
It's just stupid entirely.