The coolant still needs to remain relatively cool to hold that silicon temperature, though. Practically it can’t be like 60C.

Ah, ya that makes sense, whatever the numbers the the chip can be the coolant will be less.

I just wanted to add another note

Even if this ozone thing turns out to not be true, there are still all sorts of other things being burned up in the atmosphere that can have other potential effects. It all needs to be studied given the size of these constellations.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 50-60 years from now, if there is a real issue, that it eventually comes out that SpaceX or other mega constellation companies figured out it would be a problem, and just said nothing. Much like how big oil new CO2 was a problem forever ago and hid it.

It’s possible it could go to a higher orbit, but we don’t have mega constellations in those orbits. I don’t know enough to know how far something could get flung up either, but I suspect if you’re in a 5y orbit, you aren’t reaching a 50y orbit area, and probably not even a 10y orbit area.

Ya, the economies of how much total space / material for the global network is similar, although lets say higher due to losses in efficiency in distributing it over so many dishes, but in terms of how big any individual radiator is and how much space each one is going to take, the smaller sizes make it easier to manage. Trying to figure out a 150-200m² solar panel radiator is a lot easier than trying to figure out a 1km²

The individual power of each satellite having to use a mesh network to train might not be fast enough, maybe they’ll still use land based ones for training, but no single person needs more compute than what a satellite can provide. So from the inference / customer computation side of things, it isn’t a problem.

edit: I meant radiator, not solar panel

edit: looks like blackwells can run sunstained at 88c, so that will help a bit more as well on size, the calculator now says 103m² instead of 127m^2

They aren’t making a datacenter like on earth. They’re putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.

Everyone keeps thinking they’re putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.

Edit: Oh I missed your tool this time was a real calculator this time, thank you! That says 127 square meters, with black body, 70c and 1 (but no idea if those are good values)

For 100kW? I’m not going to try and figure things out from that massive site. A pre made calculator would have been nice if they had one.

edit: It is going to be LEO and likely connected to starlink with the same laser link they use.

Edit: Looking at orbits they might use sun synchronous orbits? It might not be in sun 100% of the time, but they are nearly always in sun.

Edit: I have no way to know if this is right, but a couple AI responses are saying for 100kW it would be ~150-170 square meters with temperatures around 70c

We already radiate heat away just fine in space, it’s just a matter of how much space do you need to use to do it and all the implications of what that would mean for any given satellite. I wouldn’t call it free, because you need the hardware to do it and the extra weight reduces the payload capacity of whatever you’re sending up, but we can do it.

Starlink also uses laser links to talk to each other which these satellites would also use. How they work can depend, but generally they bounce around in space until they can’t, and they might come back down to land, to move somewhere else over fiber to another ground station until they can go back up to reach you. But the more laser links the less they have to come down for technical reason, but they might still come down for bandwidth reason. I don’t really know how likely it is that any given connection is point to point.

Example of what could happen.

Your dish -> starlink -> starlink -> ground station -> Google -> ground station -> starlink -> ground station -> starlink -> groundstation -> starlink -> starlink -> your dish.

Fiber is still the better option on land if you can get it there, but there are a lot of places it’s never going to get laid, and will never be in the air, or on bodies of water.

Edit: Corrections on the laser links with an example.

This isn’t true for low orbit items. They will come down on their own in ~5 years.

At the absolute worst case scenario, we’d be blocked or ~5 years. Maybe 10 years if they put it a little higher.

If they stop working they will just de-orbit it early, or if they can’t cause it’s really broken, they’ll just wait the ~5-10 years to come down on it’s own.

I don’t think anything was proven yet, but something came out saying it warranted more studying?

Satellites might need to be redesigned around it in the future and more studies should be done.

These aren’t big things, they’re small satellites. They’re going to be ~100kW. They only need to 5x the existing radiator they think will work.

These are also going to be in a low orbit so they have good latency

Ya its going to be massive, I imagine larger than starlink if these dreams come true.

I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.

They aren’t these massive things. They’re going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW

Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x’d the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that’s still tiny. It’s the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.

Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.

They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they’ve figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.

Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.

If starship works (huge if) the markets it can open will be very different than the markets Falcon9 opened.

Something will need to develop around the new capabilities to use beyond their own use for starlink, but its going to be much easier for companies to come up with uses for it.

They make most of their money off starlink now, not ISS.

Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?

They aren’t maintained. They’re a constellation of small satellites in LEO like starlink that just go up and eventually come down.

If they’re too far up latency would be too high

No one is repairing any of these starlink type dishes.

First time I’m hearing about a non google OEM made phone, that would be amazing!