News The European Commission Wants Your Data Centers in Space

Wow. You guys really paid out over two million pounds to have some bloke say "Well that's not gunna work now, is it Guv?"

Quick! Better levy a fine against another American technological powerhouse to pay the bills. I'm sure someone is guilty of something requiring a $1B+ fine.
 
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They just love to inflict pain and suffering onto themselves. Just like their war on fossil fuels will see that people get frozen this winter. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

very stupid idea for a very stupid reason. and a complete waste of money. This is what it’s like, letting bureaucrats run things. they run them into the ground from sheer stupidity.
 
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The stupid thing would be to believe that everything you do now is perfect and can't be improved upon...
Datacanters need a lot of space which is very expensive to buy or rent on Earth and will only get rarer to find as things go on and they need a lot of electricity that is also getting pretty scarce, and very expensive, on Earth and especially in Europe.
Sending them to low orbit space would solve both of these problems, viability is just a matter of how long it would take to break even.
Europe doesn't have the luxury of vast amounts of useless space as other countries do.
 
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solar winds, radiation, stray space junk, repairing a issue/damaged drive, etc etc.

ideas got way too many issues that make it not viable currently.

let alone if someone flat up destroys em during a war.
And that's why they pay 2 millions for scientists to actually crunch all of that data and see how much not viable it is.

With your type of thinking we would've never set foot on the moon, wouldn't have the ISS, wouldn't be planning to go to Mars et cetera.

I don't even think you guys are europeans, so maybe leave this to us instead of inserting your american depressive self-doubting criticsm?

2 Million Euros is a drop in the bucket. Datacenters in space is a great idea and will happen regardless what we think.

If we can analyse on the issues and work on them then the entire space industry will profit from it.
 
With your type of thinking we would've never set foot on the moon, wouldn't have the ISS, wouldn't be planning to go to Mars et cetera.

I don't even think you guys are europeans, so maybe leave this to us instead of inserting your american depressive self-doubting criticsm?

2 Million Euros is a drop in the bucket. Datacenters in space is a great idea and will happen regardless what we think.

If we can analyse on the issues and work on them then the entire space industry will profit from it.
As you can see I'm for this project, I was just saying that it makes sense for them to study how viable it is.
 
Datacenters in space is a moronic idea and it will never happen.

"Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"

The smart thing to do would be to put them in the ocean. Launching them then consists of shoving them off the side of a barge.
 
Yeah, something goes wrong and needs to be replaced and then it cost $1 billion to get up there to fix it. This is not going to happen ever as said above.

let me just jump in my starship and go fix that. Yeah right to those saying it’s going to happen I laugh at you.

This is not the same thing as going to the moon or even Mars. This is just plain stupidity and for a stupid reason on top of that.

maybe once we make it to star trek technology, but until then you can forget it and it’s a complete waste of 2,000,000 pounds

Europe would be much better investing in lots and lots of the newest nuclear technology to produce power so that they don’t have a huge power crisis and aren’t relying on other countries for oil or natural gas. There are many new reactor designs to choose from that are infinitely safer
 
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Yeah, something goes wrong and needs to be replaced and then it cost $1 billion to get up there to fix it. This is not going to happen ever as said above.

let me just jump in my starship and go fix that. Yeah right to those saying it’s going to happen I laugh at you.

This is not the same thing as going to the moon or even Mars. This is just plain stupidity and for a stupid reason on top of that.

maybe once we make it to star trek technology, but until then you can forget it and it’s a complete waste of 2,000,000 pounds

Europe would be much better investing in lots and lots of the newest nuclear technology to produce power so that they don’t have a huge power crisis and aren’t relying on other countries for oil or natural gas. There are many new reactor designs to choose from that are infinitely safer
Datacenters in space is a moronic idea and it will never happen.

"Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"

The smart thing to do would be to put them in the ocean. Launching them then consists of shoving them off the side of a barge.
Both of you missed the point. This is for the future and yes it's better since you don't have an atmosphere causing issue or natural catastrophies
 
Putting things in space is already a viable business, or at least it's a business, I have no idea how they are doing business wise.
So it makes sense to look into if it makes economic sense for other things as well.
 
With your type of thinking we would've never set foot on the moon, wouldn't have the ISS, wouldn't be planning to go to Mars et cetera.
not really?

ISS and trip to moon was done before we made a mess of our planetary space.

the ISS specifically does get damaged at times by debris.

Datacenters in space is a great idea and will happen regardless what we think.
not in our lifetime.

data centers = big business.

big business = Profit focused.

the cost to do ANY service/upgrade on a data center in space is WAAAAY too high for any company to do it any time soon.

Much faster & cheaper to do what MS is doing and putting data centers in ocean.


When (if) humanity ever progresses enough on space manufacturing & figures out how to clean up our LEO (low earth orbit) sure it would be viable...but not in our lifetimes. (unless maybe ur in teens)
 
solar winds, radiation, stray space junk, repairing a issue/damaged drive, etc etc

"Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"

Yeah, something goes wrong and needs to be replaced and then it cost $1 billion to get up there to fix it. This is not going to happen ever as said above.

let me just jump in my starship and go fix that. Yeah right to those saying it’s going to happen I laugh at you.
How are these concerns fundamentally different from the issues that are already being dealt with for communications satellites, or any of the other myriad electronic devices humans have already launched into orbit?
 
If you make smaller modules that can be brought to space in larger numbers then if one breaks down it won't be a big loss and they can just make it burn up in reentry.
so if a few drives of an array goes down your answer is destroy everything even if its a few thousand dollars instead of a few million to fix everything?


How are these concerns fundamentally different from the issues that are already being dealt with for communications satellites, or any of the other myriad electronic devices humans have already launched into orbit?

satellites get damaged.
they have ppl to repair them or increase service time....however they are REQUIRED to be there. (so not much fo an option)

data centers need repairs/upgrades/etc by design (flash wears out, mechanical disks physically die, and random silicon lottery random issues).



also SSD are increasingly more sensative to radiation (as we reduce quality for larger size).


satellites are 5-15yrs or so service usually...thats a long time thus cost of them is fair for their importance.


and every time we send soemthign up, send soemthign to burn up, etc we add to the space junk in LEO (low earth orbit) which is actually gettign to be an issue if we want to shoot stuff into space in future.

so more stuff we put in sky the more it adds up to an issue (entirely different from the serviceability issue & cost )
 
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so if a few drives of an array goes down your answer is destroy everything even if its a few thousand dollars instead of a few million to fix everything?
Hmmm, you know what I would do?!
A study to see how good or bad this would be from an economical standpoint as well as an ecological or any other standpoint I could come up with.

I wouldn't just assume that it's terrible from the get go.
 
Datacenters in space is a moronic idea and it will never happen.
I half-agree. The amount of mass you'd have to transfer into orbit would seem to be a nonstarter, at least from an environmental standpoint. And not everything can survive the G-forces or temperatures from being flung into space by that spin-launch thingy.

Where I disagree is at the point when we can scale up asteroid mining. Then, you might imagine most of the manufacturing actually happening in space. However, that's too far off to solve the more pressing problems facing datacenter operators, and is still mostly just an exercise in the imagination.

One of the more notable concerns would be the issue of solar flares and CMEs. Even just considering the amount of ambient radiation, I wonder how taxing the error-corrrection would be to achieve similar reliability to the terrestrial computing we currently do.

"Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"
Uh, you heard of robots? Datacenters are highly regular and most of the parts can be modular and replaceable by them. You'll still need a handful of technicians, but a lot of it can be automated.

The smart thing to do would be to put them in the ocean. Launching them then consists of shoving them off the side of a barge.
Thermal pollution has its own ecosystem effects. You can overstimulate algae growth that results in fish-kills (i.e. as the algae decays) or trigger toxic algae blooms. Not only that, but the ocean is a fairly harsh environment. Ships and platforms don't last forever, and are costly to engineer, build, and maintain (compared with datacenters on land, at least).
 
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Putting things in space is already a viable business, or at least it's a business, I have no idea how they are doing business wise.
So it makes sense to look into if it makes economic sense for other things as well.
Starlink satelites are tiny and they send up dozens in a single payload. What they're doing is in no way comparable.

How are these concerns fundamentally different from the issues that are already being dealt with for communications satellites, or any of the other myriad electronic devices humans have already launched into orbit?
Existing satellites tend to use older process nodes and have much lower computational requirements. Or, if they do need to perform high-speed computation, they can afford exotic resiliency schemes, like 3-way redundancy. Both of these approaches are non-viable for modern datacenters.
 
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Hmmm, you know what I would do?!
A study to see how good or bad this would be from an economical standpoint as well as an ecological or any other standpoint I could come up with.

I wouldn't just assume that it's terrible from the get go.
I'm not opposed to asking big questions and running the numbers. That's one thing I enjoy about Randall Munroe's What If series:

https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/ (a good gift idea, for any nerds in your life)​


...even if the answer usually ends up in the destruction of all life on the planet.
: O

An idea I read about in Popular Mechanics (or one of those magazines), a few decades ago, was to put solar power stations in orbit and microwave the power down to the surface. They'd be much more efficient than terrestrially-based solar power. The obvious hazard of the microwave beam going off course wouldn't be a problem, if you simply made it wide enough. It would also be a lot less to put in orbit and maintain, than entire datacenters.

As for the waste heat, I wonder if there's anything terribly useful about actually trying to focus the IR directly back into space, rather than letting it diffuse in all directions. Perhaps you could even shift it into certain wavelengths that are less prone to getting trapped by the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
 
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