This also reminds me of something else: Yes, you can have all kinds of problems in space missions. Not just bit flips.
I have been thinking about planning a mars mission. And one of the things that you need to guarantee is the safety of the crew in untested environments. Like on the surface of mars, you have to guarantee that the crew can survive at least until the next ship can arrive to help them. And launch windows to mars appear only once every two earth years (once every martian year), so crew has to survive that long.
You also have to survive when there’s a power outage for any reason. Could be that the coworker stumbled over a cable and pulled out a power line’s connection. Could be that there’s 3-months-long dust storms (which would block solar panels). (they appear each martian year, sometimes more sometimes less severe, i think typical duration is less than 50 days, but just to be sure make that 100 days). Could be that there’s a problem with your electronics and they simply won’t work anymore and you can’t figure out why.
So imagine you’re standing in your apartment. I recommend you live inside the Starship for the first few years because it’s already a habitat since you flew in it for 6 months to get to mars in the first place.
Power outage. How do you get out of the door? There’s obviously a pressure door between your apartment and the outside world. And the power line’s outside. So if the power line disconnects because a rover messed up and pulled it out, there’s a power outage. And if the door is electrically operable, you can’t get out of the door to repair it. That is why i say that every door has to be manually operable. Like, pressure doors should have manual operation mode. You need to be able to operate the pressure door with your bare hands. I already thought of some designs that can actually deliver that, but i’m too lazy to do a drawing now.
A swarm of ideally flat slab-like satellites could actually work. Sun side for solar, back side a surface optimized for infrared heat radiation.
But still, even with 10x10 meters and x1000 pieces, you only get the equivalent to a small crunching center. Ignoring the problems of strong radiation and replacing parts.
This seems monumentally stupid.
space is cold!
No, space is empty. If you want to be pedantic, space is very hot actually
How do you measure the temperature of particles that aren’t there?
Also, the hot argument refers to intense solar radiation, which is available only on one side of the satellite. The other side doesn’t receive sunshine, so it will loose heat.
That’s the thing, there are particles there, just very few. Temperature is measuring how fast the particles move, and they move pretty fast in space. We feel heat based on how much energy the particles transfer to us, but because there’s so few particles, it would feel cold.
This is the same reason why getting rid of heat is so hard in space. The best ways of cooling here on earth involve giving those particles the energy we don’t want, but because there’s so few in space, conventional cooling is nearly impossible.
Cooling is still possible if you radiate the heat away. Convective cooling won’t work though.
The temperature of those few particles doesn’t really matter much since there are so few of them. The overall energy density is low. The whole concept of temperature begins to fall apart in an extreme environment like that.
Wouldn’t the more logical first approximation be to bury them underground, and then progress towards (perhaps) placing them in or near the ocean (obviously, within sealed containers, yadda yadda, salt corrosion, yadda yadda, inhospitable environ yadda yadda makes Poseidon angry).
I like the “yeet them into the sea” idea conceptually because (1) yeet them into the sea (2) in theory, you could power them via tidal/wave/OTEC (3) water cooling.
Seems…too obvious. There’s probably a good reason (or bad ones - $$$) why this hasn’t been tried yet. But I bet those reasons are eminently more solvable that “send em into space”
Yeah, I mean take advantage of geothermal heating/cooling. It does seem obvious. The only actual advantage to space is the 100% solar availability, but that’s actually not a huge advantage in the grand scheme of things.
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I’ve had to explain these points a few times to my friends who love the muskrat. They think he’s a genius for wanting orbital data centers.
All without explaining heat radiation, total power budget, physical maintenance, etc.
Data transmission/delays and damage from debris not just radiation
Delays - if you use the internet and request an answer from an LLM, you won’t notice if it’s 300-500ms slower than usual. But if you deploy and run a software stack, a delay of 5ms betweenntze app and the database can make the difference between a usable application and an inperfomant one.
Once I was asked to troubleshoot problems with a screen share app. Turned out that the far-side was in Gurgaon. The packets were routed bia 2 geosync sats. One second up, one second over, one second down. 3 second latency.
Time for a classic: The Case of the 500-Mile Email
Edit: The site seems to be overloaded, but it’s also on Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260220060645/https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
A true classic.
Every single time…
SpaceX has done some great things to revolutionize space access, and already launches to orbit 80% by mass of all the worlds space “stuff”
Now they’re getting close with StarShip/Superheavy, designed to carry 10+ times that every year. It will become much cheaper than anything before it, partly based on that economy of scale.
But where’s the market for that scale? How the heck are they launching 800+% of the world’s satellites every year? Business as usual will not support that. SpaceX needs to create new markets to drive that business, perhaps mars colonies or datacenters in space. Think of it as them wanting to create new businesses to justify their new product
Yeah, like when he undermines/debases mass transit to sell electric cars and shitty tunnel machines…for…Mars colonies…yea…there is a definitely plan in there, sort of…certainly not a grift.
People don’t read enough hard sci-fi, in a realistic space battle you use missiles and other projectiles because they don’t heat up your ship
If you have any kind of laser crap, you need to dissipate the heat and that requires surface area
And that surface area is an easy target for your enemy’s kinetics… take out the cooling system and everyone is cooked alive. Nice.
Don’t you need an atmosphere to transfer heat? Otherwise the dissipation is super slow.
Like, very interesting article. It also mentions bit flips.
I think the major protection against bit flips is to use larger structure sizes. Like, today’s desktop computers use structure sizes around 2 nm or sometimes even less than that. Which means you only need to shift a few electrons around to cause a bit flip. If you use larger wires inside the processor, they store more electrons so it takes more energy to flip them around. So there’s a much much smaller number of radiation particles that have a minimum of that energy, so lower risk of bit flips.
Does anybody have actual numbers on the structure sizes needed to effectively prevent bit flips? I mean, outer space missions like NASA flights already need this today.
Some newer radiation hardened stuff is 10x larger than that, older gear even more so. But that just reduces the risk, not sure it’s possible to negate it entirely.
An easier way is to just include more CPUs as part of the system, run them in lockstep, then compare the results by majority rule. If 2/3 CPUs say one answer and the third says something else, you discard the result of the third and go with the other CPUs.
You know how much it costs to transport stuff into space? Well, currently, around $1k/kg of material. Let that sink in.
Note this is only payload. Ship’s own weight is already included in this.
More interestingly, how much energy you need to invest for launching your photovoltaics power plant. Your EROEI is bad https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
Well, that’s not the strongest argument at the moment, the launch is a one time cost, and that cost is in the process of dropping dramatically. But don’t worry, there are a plethora of other reasons this is a bad idea.
The price is dropping but not that rapidly. IIRC the price dropped like 95% over the last 25 years … That’s a 12% reduction annually on average. Compare that to computer chips where prices dropped 60% annually IIRC and solar panels where it dropped 30% annually.
I mean… whenever a price is dropping, that’s beating the odds, and your scoffing at a 95% price drop? We’ve had our first forays into reusable rockets, preserving booster stages, occasionally fairings. But when we have fully reusable rockets, from competing providers and in different payload size ranges, then it’s a whole different ballgame.
But I guess to your point, we’re probably looking at another 95% price drop over 25 years. (But who knows, maybe just 10-15)
Still, I think that is extremely significant!
And yet another lost of reasons why these billionaires are fucking removed. Yes, im using the horrible R word, but “idiots” just doesn’t suffice.
These people are investing billions of dollars on unproven technology and now want to put trillions more in pushing those unproven technologies to space which is just removed levels of stupid. But the investments will happen, a ginormous amount of pollution will be made and it’s all nothing for humanity and a huge amount of money for a select few billionaires.
Fuck this time line, fuck removed billionaires
We need a wealth cap. Nobody should be able to do shit like this with impunity just because they have “enough money to do so”.
Give me a 1M wealth cap world wide and I’ll give you a world where everyone is happy at relatively equal levels of wealth
You would need to launch so ridiculously much into orbit. The ISS is rounded up 200 kW of solar power. 0.2 MW. Say you want the equivalent of a gigawatt data center. 1000 MW. Yeah, that’s about 5000 ISS sizes objects. It needs a bunch more cooling, and a data center doesn’t need habital zones, so a pretty barebones ISS. Launch 3 roughly ISS sized objects per day and you’re done in 4.5 years. Somehow I don’t really see that as a realistic plan.
The current solar panel system of the ISS weights about 8 tonnes, the Falcon Heavy can deliver 63 tonnes to LEO. That’s about 715 launches of the Falcon Heavy, assuming space solar panel W/kg hasn’t improved since then, that Starship never becomes commercially viable, and doesn’t include batteries, cooling, or the working components. This still isn’t in the range of feasible for a data center, but could be an option for microgravity industry. The value of a more successful or precise silicon crystal production method, for instance, may make it worthwhile.
