Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
Latency? Highly variable.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
Radiation shielding? Not free.
Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.
There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.
>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.
This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.
At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.
If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
See: https://unusualwhales.com/politics. Some of these politicians on both sides are very good and consistent stock pickers indeed.
2026, we will get ransomware from space!
The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in theory they actually could get something like that setup if they wanted.
Ahem, cloud ransomware.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
This principle was established when Nazis were convicted for war crimes at Nuremburg for violating treaties that their predecessor state the Weimar Republic signed, even after the Nazi's repudiated those treaties and claimed they were signed by an illegitimate state, and that they were a new Reich, not like the Wiemar Republic.
Basically if territory changes hand to an existing state that state will obviously still have obligations, and if a new state is formed, then generally it is assumed to still carry the obligations of the previous state. There is no "one weird trick" to avoid international law. I assure you that the diplomats and lawyers 80 years ago thought of these possibilities. They saw what resulted from the Soviet and Nazi mutual POW slaughters, and set up international law so no one could ignore it.
And more critically - they have successor states.
The Russian Federation is treated as the successor to the USSR in most cases (much to the chagrin of the rest of the CIS) and Serbia is treated as the successor to Yugoslavia (much to the chagrin of the rest)
Unless you go up there with it and a literal lifetime supply? Although I guess if you don't take much it's still a lifetime supply...
To escape the law you need to hide or protect something on earth (your ground station(s), downlinks). If you can hide or protect that infrastructure on earth, why bother putting the computers in space?
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them.
> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children of a dead earth
If YC is hell bent on lighting piles of money on fire, I can think of some more enjoyable ways.
The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.
For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.
Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.
I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.
Any purported advantages have to contend with the fact that sending the modules costs millions of dollars. Tens to hundred millions
For your other concerns, the risks are worth it for customers because of the main reward: No laws or governments in space! Technically, the datacenter company could be found liable but not for traffic, only for take-down refusals. Physical security is the most important security. For a lot of potential clients, simply making sure human access to the device is difficult is worth data-loss,latency and reliability issues.
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
1. YOLO. Yeet big data into orbit!
2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!
3. Profit!
It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module) docks and mirrors the data.
quantified•5h ago