I am a mechanical engineer, I have a multi decade career doing exactly these kinds of thermal analysis.
This video is basically saying that cooking data centers in space is possible. It is.
The question is if it's better, in any way, to putting them on earth. It isn't.
The common misconception I see is that people think that space is cold like Antarctica is cold. It isn't. Antarctica is cold because there is lots of matter, very cold. Space is cold because there is no matter. No matter to put the heat into and take it away.
It's the same reason that a hard boiled egg takes minutes to cook in water, but 30 to cook in the oven. Now put it in a vacuum insulated thermos and see how long it takes to cook.
Radiation is the weakest of the three heat transfer modes. So much so that in engineering school we often cross it off as negligible compared to the other two (convection and conduction).
Do the heat transfer math yourself, let us know what you find.
One of the comments on the YouTube video you linked says it best. " The only reason to do this is if you have a company who's business is to get things into space".
You obviously didn’t watch the video, he literally does the heat transfer math using radiation only, it works just fine.
Instead of just stating “it won’t work” why don’t you actually do the calculation yourself and show why it won’t work?
Yes they have an incentive to put things in space, but it actually is a decent idea if they can execute on it the same way they did with Starlink. There’s huge demand for compute, many data center projects on earth are being scuttled because of NIMBYs and lack of power, there are no NIMBYs in space and a sun synchronous orbit means you can power them without batteries.
In order to talk about these things we need to think about the power from the grid, all the way to the cooling water coming out. Not just talk about how we can calculate or optimize each little piece. Of course we can do that, it's the overall system we are talking about and need to understand.
Forest for the trees.
What do I mean by that here?
He does the calculations for 20 kW. Which sounds like a lot. It's only enough to cool one node, not one rack, one node, in a modern data center. The starlink satellite he referenced is viewed as the absolute most modern thermal design in a satellite.
Most data centers have 2000-5000 nodes and the hyperscalers have 100,000 or more.
So to replace a single data center we need 2000-5000 of these things up there, at a minimum, or one thing that is 2000-5000 times bigger.
And maintenance.
And the hardware gets obsoleted every few years.
Or you could just put it in the desert in Nevada. But we don't need rockets to get there.
And leadership that respects and "gets" it's customer base. Customers that feel respected and who genuinely feel like the company they are supporting is in their corner are the most rabidly loyal. If you build a customer base like that, and keep respecting them, the problem solves itself.
I love these videos so much. I'm a mechanical engineer who designs these kinds of things all day, and these have been a great inspiration for me for many years.
What a cheap shot. “gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners” - cos there are soooo many of those happening we can’t fix a single bridge.
How about another explanation. Your government is totally opposed to helping citizens for “free” (let’s ignore that most government revenue comes from good ol’ taxpayers) when the alternative is to farm out the provision of expensive services to lobbying corporates.
They’re more than happy to punish people however. For free _and_ for corporate profit.
Sure, untreated mental illness is a tragedy, and humanity sucks balls at biology, so hard it's as if we wished to be made of silicon. How does this make for a trend or justify the idea that the WEIRD's least-harm decisions explain broader resources allocation in real monetary terms. We're talking about the price of how much concrete pouring in the sad story you linked?
(WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic, indeed a dying breed)
I think the story I linked is if anything more damning than "the wall" in what it tells you about the minds who think it's appropriate.
At least "the wall" passes the first smell test: Want fewer people move between A and B: Build wall between A and B. It just falls apart when you fill in the details (visa overstays, tunnels, ladders, etc. etc.)
In contrast, baby-rapist-murderers obviously do not deserve free, very costly surgeries for non-life-threatening[1] conditions that non-murderers don't get subsidies for. For starters, they're baby-rapist-murderers.
But anyway, I just picked one example. I'm sure the Wall costs are thousands of times more than just trans surgeries for prisoners. That doesn't mean there aren't many, many billions wasted on Team Blue boondoggles.
[1] And no, these surgeries don't decrease chances of suicide. Studies don't all agree but some have found that they increase those chances. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38699117/
He said, so many years ago, that there will become a time where computing power is so prevalent that we will stop using the person to make the computers job easier and start using the computer to make the humans job of interfacing with it easier.
But in this context, it would mean the other side of increase productivity is decreased time to do the same work. These are the same thing.
There is a third, Embrarer. They have most of the market in small regional jets in some cases, but those are in reality very different than say a 777 or 787.
These two choices are conglomerates of what used to be a much larger set of manufacturers. In short Boeing, Airbus and it's suppliers are basically what is left of all the old big aerospace manufacturers.
Indeed. Embraer (Brazil) does jetliners carrying up to around 150 pax. So did Bombardier (Canada), though they sold their C-Series to Airbus (now the Airbus A220). Then there's COMAC (China) and UAC (Russia; also a conglomerate of Sukhoi, Tupolev, etc.).
These compete with the smaller versions of the Airbus A320 family (like the discontinued A318 "Baby Bus") or Boeing B737 family.
So, in that narrow-body and regional jet segment there are a few players.
But in the big wide-body (=2 aisles) long-range jets, there's only Airbus and Boeing.
Another manufacturer of regional aircraft with a significant market share is ATR, though it makes turboprop airliners, so not exactly the same category as Airbus A220 and Embraer E-Jet.
For private jets, in order of most to least deliveries per year (number per year in parenthesis):
Cessna (171)
Gulfstream (158)
Bombardier (157)
Embraer (155)
Cirrus (106)
Dassult (37)
Honda (12)
Which is nothing compared to:
737 (447)
767 (30)
777 (35)
787 (88)
These two choices are conglomerates of what used to be a much larger set of manufacturers
This. The entire market has been allowed to be monopolized through mergers and buy-outs. Russia used to have their own aerospace industry (and that fleet was reliable enough to be allowed to fly in Europe) but then Russia happened.
>Russia used to have their own aerospace industry (and that fleet was reliable enough to be allowed to fly in Europe) but then Russia happened.
It's absolutely irrelevant what Russia did or could have done here in this industry.
Same with Chinese planes. If they ever manage to make a competitive passenger plane, it will not be allowed certification by US and European authorities purely for political reasons, the same way how their EVs are not allowed for sale in the US or how they aren't allowed to have ASML EUV machines. This isn't a fair game, never was.
The decisions on purchase of aerospace units is 90% (inter-)national politics and only 10% meritocracy, since both Boeing and Airbus are massive defense players making advanced killing machines, and no country wants to directly or indirectly fund the defense industry of their geopolitical rivals.
When a third country needs to chooses between Airbus or Boeing for their flag carrier fleet, they don't objectively compare the operational history and tech specs of Airbus vs Boeing and make the decision based on that, they just ask themselves "do I want to be in bed with EU-France or with Uncle Sam as my main ally and provider for the next 30+ years". Hence why most oil-rich middle eastern states chose Boeing as the US is their main defense provider anyway and don't want to anger them, especially when Donald Orange makes a visit to your state.
That's just how politics works when you operate at that level. Handshakes, dinners and bribes. Always has.
