Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.

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.

There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).

Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.

Its running for 15 minutes and then must shut down for a long time to cool down. Thats exactly why those "science-fluencers" said its a dumb idea. This is far away from proving that its a viable idea.

Source for that?

I suspect it’ll go in the trash like their previous experimental infrastructure ideas did.

Just call it SkyNet and lean into the evil.

Golden Dome is the name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.

It is 700w of heat radiating by 1m2 at 70C ( ie one GPU can sit on such a radiator) What is not to work ok here?

No air. No convection, only radiation.

It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.

It's not even a test of an orbital data center. All it will do it determine if and how a Google TPU performs in space.

Genuine question: why are there so many people up-in-arms on orbital data centers? Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct? 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.

The reasons against doing this is obvious. Is there any coherent description of why someone would think it is a good idea? And I don't mean, like, delusional reasons, but an actually rational argument for "here is where it might work out and we need to try and measure to find out".

What are the obvious reasons against it? I've heard lots of arguments that cooling is a hard technical challenge and launching into space is uneconomical at the moment. But is there an obvious reason this would be impossible?

Lots of technologies start out that way, and it's only through investing in developing them that you're able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's a viable technology.

Assuming they do get the numbers to work out, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.

I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.

Edge computing in space is needed for Golden Dome. Weapons targeting etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.

No one is building that. They ran out of money and kit taking Iran on already.

At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.

Literally the entire aerospace industry these days is centered around Golden Dome.

You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, LMT, NOC, etc.. if you believe that.

Yep. No one that matters and isn’t in the investment hype bubble.

Let me know when Raytheon / BAE / Lockheed Martin / General Dynamics get in on it.

It’s a completely fucking stupid idea in all ways if you throw any engineering rationale at it at all.

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.

It needs a single use case to justify its existence. And I am pretty sure it has one. The question is will google reveal it? Probably not.

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.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606

Wall-e predictions getting closer