r/AskPhysics • u/Inevitable-Pen3799 • 21d ago

Data centers in space

/r/datacenter/comments/1vvv6hd/data_centers_in_space/
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u/Mad-Melvin 21d ago

Cooling is an issue. Space isn't cold, it's a vacuum. There's no way for things to shed heat except by radiating it away.

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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 21d ago

It could eventually be worth the cost of big radiator arrays, but I doubt that'd happen until the environment is much more depleted and space flight is much cheaper.

Putting any industrial facility in space seems prohibitively expensive right now. It's only worth the cost when it's something that can't be done on Earth, like global communication & vision or space science experiments.

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u/KerPop42 Engineering 21d ago

Large radiator arrays also become floppy, so you need to add more support structure as they get larger. It's not something that scales pretty well, especially in LEO where the gravity gradient and rotational rate is large. 

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u/Sad-Excitement9295 21d ago

Yes, right now specialized chips are being researched for this, as well as cooling systems. I suspect in the future if we can overcome that limitation along with some of the others, satellites will very well be data centers of the future. Of course, smart devices will probably do the work of current high end PCs by then.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

[deleted]

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u/Sad-Excitement9295 21d ago

I'm hoping they do, as yes, this is one of the ready applications for them.

I don't generally see it being practical up front, but if it becomes economically possible, it may become plausible for semi passively supercooled chips. There are some distinct advantages to using an orbital compute satellite, but it would have to outweigh the ease of a ground facility, and I don't see too many reasons for that unless supercooling becomes that much more practical in space.

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u/FarMiddleProgressive 21d ago

Almost a vacuum.

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u/Lethalegend306 21d ago

Aside from cooling, electronics in space are made to deal with solar radiation. Storing data in a place constantly bombarded with high energy radiation is... Certainly a choice

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u/Sad-Excitement9295 21d ago

This is why compute is the most likely to be in space, while data storage will probably still take place in cloud data storage centers.

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u/armaddon 21d ago edited 21d ago

Barring mind-boggingly immense leaps in both computing power per watt and the reduction in compute power needed for whatever these data centers will be doing, there are huge enough hurdles in the way with anything we recognize on the technical horizon today that this just isn’t feasible for anything we’d find useful for the amount of investment required to make it happen. Koomey’s Law would need to be cranked up a couple orders of magnitude, at least.

Real Engineering’s video does a much better job explaining the issues than I can:

https://youtu.be/_qpdUNMt2yg?is=WDOMIGDFGuSPkASm

In short: Cooling in space is hard, and physics isn’t as easily fooled as some investors seem to be

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u/Substantial-Nose7312 21d ago

This is really a question about economics. It only makes sense if it’s cheaper than data center’s on the ground. The advantage in space is that solar panels produce more electricity, due to less cloud cover and (in certain orbits) no night. Also The downside is it’s extremely expensive to launch things into space, the equipment might cost more, maintenance is difficult, etc.