Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1

This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.

It's research to collect data, and it's not your money, what do you care?

> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.

Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.

Not just that, you’re wasting so much compute due to the risk of bit flips. That the case for any hardware you currently have in space, you need some correction mechanism which generally mean computing the same thing multiple times just to ensure correctness. And the cooling story without an atmosphere is also another obvious pretty massive problem. And the risk of losing an entire payload if the rocket fails. Etc…

I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“

> progress will likely only accelerate

I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development

GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.

For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.

Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.

Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.

For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.

At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.

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.

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

Just call it SkyNet and lean into the evil.

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?

That's nit-picking. It's one of the first steps towards this goal. Why would any sane engineer put a complete orbital data centre prototype into space without having any data on how most crucial piece of equipment would perform in the target environment?

First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.

By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.

Because when things are getting built that obviously should not work, in one's view of the world, it threatens that view of the world. Finding out that your common sense and understating of basic physics and economics has a sizable hole is pretty unpleasant for most people.

But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.

> Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct?

I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil

It's like watching flat earthers launch yet another experiment to prove the earth is flat. We already know the outcome, including the subsequent press release that has the words "very promising" and "flawed assumptions" in the same sentence. But this "flat earther" has billions to burn and enough clout to keep investors and the media in the carousel for the better part of the next few years.

>... orbital data centers...

>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.

No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.

The hardest thing about AI datacenters is power. The second hardest thing is cooling. All of these are physical challenges and exponentially harder in space.

So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.

It’s simply a stupid idea that indeed will not work, and this little tech demo is mostly a proof of that. It’s awful to many people, especially engineers, to witness incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. Especially when we’re talking about investments of billions of dollars and orbital launches.

Oh I'm just against it because I love the night sky and I don't want it littered with even more trash from obscenely rich American oligarchs. This tech doesn't help me, or anyone that is not in power. Instead it (and light pollution, but that at least not everywhere on the planet) destroys one of the few things that is there, commonly available for everyone to enjoy: the majestic view of the night sky.

Actually, some of us predicted exactly what’s about to happen: these companies will launch a handful of GPUs into space, declare that it’s “working”, and then continue to build out terrestrial data centers at orders of magnitude faster rate.

No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.

It's an offensively stupid idea. Anyone trying to sell you on it thinks you're stupid.

Look at the article: they threw 4 cards in a box and launched it. It works for 15 minutes and then it has to snooze for who-knows-how-long.

Everything about technological progress is like this. It props up their ego, and they risk nothing. The man in the arena is always dangerously close to being the villain.

Spend the money on something we already know works that will help people today, right now.

Soon the musical chairs game will come to a screeching halt. Interest rates are skyrocketing and not even a Presidential decree will make them come down.

To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.

What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.

Because it’s so fucking stupid for the stated benefits that you get

- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong

- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before

- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.

The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.

> 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.

This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.

Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.

Elon Musk supports it and will be the main beneficiary if it succeeds. That's it.

Google's blog post (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...) describes the goal of the launch as "designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." That doesn't sound like a bad idea, obviously it might be useful to have dedicated machine learning hardware on spacecraft or satellites for local processing. Maybe they just framed it as an orbital data center test for marketing, because that's a trendy topic and sounds more newsworthy than "hardware durability test"?

I've heard arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, they would be uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason space data centers would be impossible?

Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.

If they do get things to work, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the 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.

The obvious argument in favor that I see: Seizing such a data center is exceedingly difficult and destroying one would be a major international incident

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.

The physics aren't the problem, though. You CAN cool the processors provided you have large enough radiators, a really good system for the coolant flow, and hardware that's fine operating continuously at around 100C or above.

That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.

Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.

The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.

Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.

I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.

Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.

Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.

Looks like you pasted in the wrong input box. This was a comment form, not google or an llm.