Thread

Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

233 points · 553 comments · xnx

kin · 1790291957 · focus · HN ↗
For those questioning viability, there's a startup called Starcloud <a href="https://www.starcloud.com/">https://www.starcloud.com/ with a public whitepaper explaining a bit their hardware and economics <a href="https://www.starcloud.com/wp">https://www.starcloud.com/wp. They've already had one small proof of concept launched. Not trying to promote, I just heard about them on the ycomb podcast
1. stingrae · 1790292853 · focus · HN ↗
  “A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km”
  I think dodging debris is challenging at that scale.
  Also this is the solar cells not the radiators
  1. FuckButtons · 1790294607 · focus · HN ↗
    Presumably that’s not a single satellite.
    efskap · 1790297206 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, the goal here is a more realistic Dyson swarm, not a Dyson sphere (yet)
    jasonwatkinspdx · 1790299980 · focus · HN ↗
    Nope, it's a single massive panel sat and they're using $30/kg as their launch costs.
    Up to you how plausible you think that is.
    yencabulator · 1790353380 · focus · HN ↗
    There's an artist's impression of the frigging thing in the whitepaper! It's very obviously a single enormous thing!
    > Figure 3. A data center in Sun Synchronous Orbit, showing a 4km x 4km deployed solar array and radiators.
  2. flog · 1790298979 · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder if the shadows from such a large area would have a climate cooling effect?
    glenstein · 1790299515 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the principle is correct but probably it would need to be much bigger.
    johntb86 · 1790301352 · focus · HN ↗
    Ideally you'd put it in an orbit that wouldn't shadow earth, since if it goes in front of earth in part of the orbit then it'll go behind earth (and be in shadow) for part of the orbit. They mention they'd want it in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, which would be in sunlight all the time and would never shadow the earth.
    vl · 1790304653 · focus · HN ↗
    How can this practically work though? As Earth goes around the Sun 90 degrees, orbit will become half-shadowed.
    sephamorr · 1790305440 · focus · HN ↗
    The earth isn't exactly round, you can use this to process your orbit exactly 360deg/year so you can always stay in the sun. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
    addaon · 1790307368 · focus · HN ↗
    s/process/precess/
    madamelic · 1790341075 · focus · HN ↗
    It's wild that I didn't even realize it didn't say precess until I saw your comment. Brains are weird.
    lend000 · 1790307104 · focus · HN ↗
    Would be cool if so, but I wonder what the plan is regarding radiation pressure pushing things out of orbit.
    busssard · 1790331485 · focus · HN ↗
    would radiation pressure not counterbalance the radiation pressure from the sun?
    given solar cells are only 30% efficient. if you put the radiators behind the panels then you have the structure already and always keep the radiators shaded
    me_again · 1790311968 · focus · HN ↗
    The Earth's surface area is ~ 510,000,000 km^2. For simplicity, say exactly half of it is receiving sunlight. If the satellite perfectly shadows 16 km^2, it would reduce incoming solar energy reaching Earth by 16/205,000,000 = 0.00000078%, I think.
    So not really. There are some proposals for space-based geoengineering, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901125002291" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290112... has a summary. I can't say how plausible any of them are.
    [deleted] · 1790322521 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. hdgvhicv · 1790316236 · focus · HN ↗
    Desert land is full of that amount of area available for peanuts.
    That’s 4000 acres. I see a 6000 acre ranch available in Arizona for $7m. The cost of building a 5GW DC is about 100 billion. Land including enough for all the solar and battery you need to be completely self sufficient is basically free.
    King-Aaron · 1790316542 · focus · HN ↗
    You can fly a drone laden with fireworks across a desert. Harder to do in LEO
    consp · 1790320174 · focus · HN ↗
    The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things. Otherwise the economies do not make sense. The "terrorism" threat is nearly non existant in practice and only the legislative threat is real, which might be good cause to think about what you are doing in the first place.
    DoctorOetker · 1790322265 · focus · HN ↗
    > The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things.
    Consider a global human population, fractured into historically formed nations and power blocs. Consider corruption and clans taking up a fraction of positions of power at a certain duty cycle. It's unavoidable legislative bodies would eventually abuse control of technology, for those points in time yes, doing the right thing becomes doing the illegal thing, but only because corruption attained such powers.
    > Otherwise the economies do not make sense.
    The economics at what scale? At scales of earthly compute, earth is cheaper and more maintainable. At stellar scale, the power simply isn't available on Earth, so the most economic path is whatever is the most economic space ML datacenter path.
    XorNot · 1790323244 · focus · HN ↗
    What the heck are you talking about? Basic grounding problem: who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much? You know that place where 100% of your customers and the hostile legislative bodies would be.
    King-Aaron · 1790324576 · focus · HN ↗
    > who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much?
    Militaries.
    hdgvhicv · 1790342061 · focus · HN ↗
    Ones that have to worry about local laws?
    busssard · 1790331370 · focus · HN ↗
    this is also about geopolitics. Destroying satellites in space hurts your own space infrastructure (see the movie "Gravity")
    On the ground nothing harms your own infra by dropping a bomb on another datacenter that might be powering the opponents entire military strategy.
    Terrorism threat is nonexistent now, but maybe not in the future.
    NetMageSCW · 1790370732 · focus · HN ↗
    The movie Gravity was not a documentary. It broke more laws of physics than the claims about data centers do.
    busssard · 1790418234 · focus · HN ↗
    exaggeration makes visible, runaway collisions are definitely a problem. I didnt like the movie, but space collisions are no joke...
    igleria · 1790335862 · focus · HN ↗
    cheaper to defend on earth than launch and maintain in space.
2. a11r · 1790296231 · focus · HN ↗
  That whitepaper puts the cost of a 40 MW cluster at $167m on land and $8.2m in space, inclusive of launch costs.
  1. j2kun · 1790298567 · focus · HN ↗
    that sounds ridiculous. How could it be so much cheaper
    [deleted] · 1790298886 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    stonogo · 1790299881 · focus · HN ↗
    Because launch costs and density are completely imaginary. The whole thing is predicated on launch vehicles they hope someone builds eventually. They also appear to have profoundly miscalculated their radiation shielding costs and amounts, but I'm not really motivated to calculate that correctly.
    alexnewman · 1790302431 · focus · HN ↗
    At planet we didn't have any radiation shielding. Why would spacex need it?
    rout39574 · 1790302759 · focus · HN ↗
    On the planet we have tremendous radiation shielding. The van allen belt and the atmosphere, to start with.
    jazzyjackson · 1790308122 · focus · HN ↗
    I suppose “at planet” refers to the company Planet
    <a href="https://www.planet.com/products/planet-insights-platform/" rel="nofollow">https://www.planet.com/products/planet-insights-platform/
    NetMageSCW · 1790370889 · focus · HN ↗
    In LEO you would still have the Van Allen belts.
    stonogo · 1790342833 · focus · HN ↗
    Because running 40MW of high-speed inference on GPUs is a different sort of mission then bolting a camera to a Jetson SBC and dropping a cubesat into orbit?
    alexnewman · 1790434940 · focus · HN ↗
    Why is it different. I don't understand at all. I thought this was all shown to not be needed since even before we did it at planetlabs
    jasonwatkinspdx · 1790300094 · focus · HN ↗
    They're assuming $30/kg launch costs.
    singron · 1790309415 · focus · HN ↗
    Falcon heavy has never flown SSO, but it's probably over $1500/kg, which is >50x more expensive. Even the most optimistic estimates for a future starship launch cost is at least $100/kg, so it makes no sense to use $30/kg.
    The other line items are probably similarly unrealistic since they include their own launch costs as well.
    They also spec 300 racks of 500kg each, which is <40% of the weight of the comparable land rack. I doubt the full weight reduction since the racks still need to survive launch force/vibration in addition to fluid/pressure enclosures that land racks don't require. I think it's likely that just about every part of this report has a similarly cooked numbers, and we can just throw the whole thing out.
    jrflowers · 1790309652 · focus · HN ↗
    Because they have factored in a genie’s lamp, which they will use to wish costs down significantly
  2. wmf · 1790299954 · focus · HN ↗
    They seem to not be counting the $1B of GPUs on either side, making the difference pretty small. They also think launching 200 racks of equipment into space will cost $5M.
  3. alienthrowaway · 1790309592 · focus · HN ↗
    how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated.
    anon48293 · 1790312633 · focus · HN ↗
    Is there not enough space in space?
    gf000 · 1790323721 · focus · HN ↗
    Space, as in the near absence of material that makes it an almost perfect insulator. Add to it constant compute producing heat and you just cooked your GPUs with no way to dissipate.
    NetMageSCW · 1790371037 · focus · HN ↗
    That must be why everyone on the ISS has died of heat stroke.
    gf000 · 1790371937 · focus · HN ↗
    You surely walk around with fans all around your body similarly to GPUs, even though you are in the same environment as them?
    If not, then you may realize how stupid your comment is.
    Good4boothee · 1790329828 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know why people are so fixated on heating as some kind of gotcha. If we already assumed magical 16km^2 solar array, then we can also assume matching size radiator, with heatpumps. If ISS can do it, then there is no technical issue with doing it on bigger scale. It "only" doesn't make any sense from financial viewpoint, terrestrial datacenters beat it in every way.
    NVidia's recent support for warm (45 °C) water cooling for their new racks probably had more impact on price of compute than than space servers will ever have.
3. bahmboo · 1790297261 · focus · HN ↗
  Starcloud seems like a whole lot of hand waving and BS. This is a good video that goes over their problems:
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
  1. Mountain_Skies · 1790302240 · focus · HN ↗
    It reminds me of the Hyperloop white paper, whose existence for many was proof enough that it was viable and beyond questioning.
4. rhplus · 1790304019 · focus · HN ↗
  What happens to all the precious metals that go up with these data centers? At least with a land based data center we have a vague hope of recycling the raw materials at some point in the future.
  1. nilamo · 1790304208 · focus · HN ↗
    Just like with all the satellites, the recycling plan is to allow them to burn in atmosphere. Maybe after we breathe enough of it, we can recover the metals via crematories.
  2. madamelic · 1790341433 · focus · HN ↗
    Precious metals stop being precious metals once asteroid mining begins. I don't think it will be super soon but I could certainly foresee it being a thing within 10 - 15 years which is about 2 - 3 generations of satellites from my very brief Google.
    rexskimmer · 1790346824 · focus · HN ↗
    We are decades away from asteroid mining at best, even assuming we go all in starting today. The difficulties and numerous engineering challenges of mining at zero g cannot be understated.
5. thelastgallon · 1790309221 · focus · HN ↗
  Admiral Rickover explains the difference between PoC and practical: <a href="https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html" rel="nofollow">https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html. It is about nuclear, but applies here as well.
6. seanhunter · 1790316990 · focus · HN ↗
  Historically there have been many startups with pitches that haven’t worked out. The existence of a startup who think they can tackle a particular problem isn’t evidence of the viability of their proposed solution. If they succeeded, that would be evidence.
  1. notahacker · 1790323373 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah. Starcloud is notable for two things: firstly that they've raised a lot of money and secondly that theyve already abandoned the nonsense in their white paper and shifted to a "lots of satellites" model like everyone else exploring orbital datacentres...
  2. Good4boothee · 1790336349 · focus · HN ↗
    I think SpinLaunch is great example. They were actually able to fund and make a working prototype, tested it, but still decided it is not practical after all, before pivoting to production of knockoff Starlink-like satellites.
7. kleiba2 · 1790324671 · focus · HN ↗
  Note how their cost comparison table mentions "launch" but not a word about how to retrieve systems parts after their end-of-life. "There's so much junk already circling around the planet, what does it matter if we'll leave it there to rot?" can't possibly be the stance they're taking.
  1. MisterMunchkin · 1790326171 · focus · HN ↗
    If it’s in low orbit then it will just burn up. Satellites have to keep thrusting slightly in order to keep their position.
    kleiba2 · 1790338547 · focus · HN ↗
    So I suppose recycling is not a thing in space?
    NetMageSCW · 1790371096 · focus · HN ↗
    Just like it wasn’t a thing in the 1800s on Earth.

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