Orbital Data Centers connecting directly to Starlink via laser

[ZachF]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

[Mark K]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

[Robotbeat]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

Some datacenter hardware is designed not to need any servicing. Just sufficient redundancy for the life of the server. And the servers are often value-dense enough that $50/kg is pennies.

Energy and cooling costs may be relevant. But in orbit you have brighter and more consistent sunlight, so if you have cheap enough radiators, you have a chance of having lower energy/thermal costs than on the ground. Like space based solar power but without the most expensive part of that, which is the massive high power radio transmitters and receivers (and the inefficiency of all that).

[dlapine]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

Some datacenter hardware is designed not to need any servicing. Just sufficient redundancy for the life of the server. And the servers are often value-dense enough that $50/kg is pennies.

Energy and cooling costs may be relevant. But in orbit you have brighter and more consistent sunlight, so if you have cheap enough radiators, you have a chance of having lower energy/thermal costs than on the ground. Like space based solar power but without the most expensive part of that, which is the massive high power radio transmitters and receivers (and the inefficiency of all that).

Figure that 1 rack of 80 standard servers and networking weigh in at about 2MT (~4400LBs), takes 50KW of power and would like to have at least a 100 Gbs network link for HPC operations or at least a 10Gbs link for general IT.

Next gen starlink could easily support that with one or more links.

Going any further in pricing and value and feasibility/optimization of space-based data centers is probably off topic for this thread.

[vsatman]

SpaceX says it plans to increase Starlink's download speeds from ~100 Mbps currently to 10 Gbps in the future:

I understand correctly that these 10 Gbps will be satellites in the V band 37.5..42.5 GHz??

Or optical.

optical   between UT and StarLink  sat??
the optical channel has large losses in the atmosphere and then you will have to use large diameter optical receivers on the ground

[rsdavis9]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

Some datacenter hardware is designed not to need any servicing. Just sufficient redundancy for the life of the server. And the servers are often value-dense enough that $50/kg is pennies.

Energy and cooling costs may be relevant. But in orbit you have brighter and more consistent sunlight, so if you have cheap enough radiators, you have a chance of having lower energy/thermal costs than on the ground. Like space based solar power but without the most expensive part of that, which is the massive high power radio transmitters and receivers (and the inefficiency of all that).

Figure that 1 rack of 80 standard servers and networking weigh in at about 2MT (~4400LBs), takes 50KW of power and would like to have at least a 100 Gbs network link for HPC operations or at least a 10Gbs link for general IT.

Next gen starlink could easily support that with one or more links.

Going any further in pricing and value and feasibility/optimization of space-based data centers is probably off topic for this thread.

Does it make sense to put these datacenters at a higher altitude.
1. Can connect to more satellites directly.
2. Easier cooling and better solar.

[Robotbeat]

This thread is to shunt some off-topic discussion away from the Starlink thread.

[Robotbeat]

Good question, and we can talk about it here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=52902.0

[rsdavis9]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

Some datacenter hardware is designed not to need any servicing. Just sufficient redundancy for the life of the server. And the servers are often value-dense enough that $50/kg is pennies.

Energy and cooling costs may be relevant. But in orbit you have brighter and more consistent sunlight, so if you have cheap enough radiators, you have a chance of having lower energy/thermal costs than on the ground. Like space based solar power but without the most expensive part of that, which is the massive high power radio transmitters and receivers (and the inefficiency of all that).

Figure that 1 rack of 80 standard servers and networking weigh in at about 2MT (~4400LBs), takes 50KW of power and would like to have at least a 100 Gbs network link for HPC operations or at least a 10Gbs link for general IT.

Next gen starlink could easily support that with one or more links.

Going any further in pricing and value and feasibility/optimization of space-based data centers is probably off topic for this thread.

Does it make sense to put these datacenters at a higher altitude.
1. Can connect to more satellites directly.
2. Easier cooling and better solar.

[RonM]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

[Robotbeat]

The more popular Starlink is, the less Starlink will need to peer at all. Data centers will just have their own Starlink terminals.

What will really be interesting is when you’ll have orbital data enters communicating to Starlink directly with lasers.

Has anyone done the economic math on orbital datacenters when the price to LEO is under $50/kg?

As long as all the manufacturing is on earth it would almost never be cost effective to put a data center in orbit.
The same reason we don't put data centers in the most expensive real estate on earth. Even $50/kg is super expensive compared to some cheap earth real estate. We are becoming really good at get getting data to and from earth orbit with Starlink so it just makes the case even better for nice data centers on Earth close to maintenance and utilities.

I could see them relocating to the coldest available places or places with cheap electricity and cooling but still with maintenance labor available, generally the biggest operating costs for data centers.

Some datacenter hardware is designed not to need any servicing. Just sufficient redundancy for the life of the server. And the servers are often value-dense enough that $50/kg is pennies.

Energy and cooling costs may be relevant. But in orbit you have brighter and more consistent sunlight, so if you have cheap enough radiators, you have a chance of having lower energy/thermal costs than on the ground. Like space based solar power but without the most expensive part of that, which is the massive high power radio transmitters and receivers (and the inefficiency of all that).

Figure that 1 rack of 80 standard servers and networking weigh in at about 2MT (~4400LBs), takes 50KW of power and would like to have at least a 100 Gbs network link for HPC operations or at least a 10Gbs link for general IT.

Next gen starlink could easily support that with one or more links.

Going any further in pricing and value and feasibility/optimization of space-based data centers is probably off topic for this thread.

Does it make sense to put these datacenters at a higher altitude.
1. Can connect to more satellites directly.
2. Easier cooling and better solar.

Yes, if latency isn’t essential, then putting the orbital data centers in MEO or beyond is probably a good idea. Less crowded and more energy and easier to dump heat. I could imagine Bitcoin mining could be done in orbit if the price is low enough. (Can keep the solar, thermal, and comms equipment but do servicing every few years to upgrade the silicon as ASICs are improved.... GSO or even the Lagrange Points should be no problem for Bitcoin latency. I think you could get electricity costs on orbit down to 1-2¢/kWh, plenty cheap for scamcurrency mining... And possibly for doing things like computer simulations or neural network training.)

Some things you’ll want as low of latency as possible. Those could go in LEO or even cohosted on Starlink satellites.

[Coastal Ron]

I actually knew of someone that was working on orbital data centers about 5 years ago, but I just checked and they have changed their business completely away from that.

They were focused on securely storing information, and using the physical location barrier of space.

[Robotbeat]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) direct to Starlink and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

[Robotbeat]

An interesting thing about satellites beyond LEO is you don’t need multiple hops any more to talk to each other. Just about any satellite in MEO or GSO or a Lagrange point or whatever can just communicate directly with any other (if both are equipped with appropriate transceivers and apertures), at least the vast majority of the time (you can still occasionally get eclipsed by the Earth or Moon or possibly have the Sun interfere). It’s less of a net and more of a direct connection any-to-any topology. I’m not sure what the consequences of that are, but it’s interesting to me. With lasers, then, no company can serve as a monopolizing middleman requiring payment for transit. Censoring also becomes less feasible (hello, Space Force!).

National barriers and other geographic constraints would be much less effective at controlling the flow of information by default.

In fact, this might be one possible advantage of optical ground-space comms... deniability and lack of regulation. A satellite blinking in Morse Code (doesn’t even need to be laser light, could be just reflected sunlight) can transit information directly to people on the ground looking up. (And same for the other direction... people on the ground can use a bright flash light to transmit Morse Code to any persistently observing satellite in view, especially at night. Or during the day with a large mirror.)

[RonM]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

If performance is key then these tasks are best done in a local data center. Orbital data centers will only give you a performance increase if the user is also in orbit.

When we have more space stations or even space colonies in LEO, then connecting their data centers via laser comms using vacuum frequencies would be amazing. ISS did some testing using soft X-rays. It was called XCOM and used NICER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_Interior_Composition_Explorer#XCOM

[Robotbeat]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

If performance is key then these tasks are best done in a local data center. Orbital data centers will only give you a performance increase if the user is also in orbit.

When we have more space stations or even space colonies in LEO, then connecting their data centers via laser comms using vacuum frequencies would be amazing. ISS did some testing using soft X-rays. It was called XCOM and used NICER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_Interior_Composition_Explorer#XCOM

No, if LATENCY is key, then local (or perhaps LEO, depending on details) is best.

Not all performance considerations care about very low latency. NN training, simulations, scamcurrency mining, and non-real-time rendering don’t care about latency as long as it’s, say, a second or less.

[rsdavis9]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

If performance is key then these tasks are best done in a local data center. Orbital data centers will only give you a performance increase if the user is also in orbit.

When we have more space stations or even space colonies in LEO, then connecting their data centers via laser comms using vacuum frequencies would be amazing. ISS did some testing using soft X-rays. It was called XCOM and used NICER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_Interior_Composition_Explorer#XCOM

No, if LATENCY is key, then local (or perhaps LEO, depending on details) is best.

Not all performance considerations care about very low latency. NN training, simulations, scamcurrency mining, and non-real-time rendering don’t care about latency as long as it’s a second or less.

Video streaming.
For a 20000km orbit the latency is 66ms one way.
Could be a good place for the mars laser interconnect.

[Robotbeat]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

If performance is key then these tasks are best done in a local data center. Orbital data centers will only give you a performance increase if the user is also in orbit.

When we have more space stations or even space colonies in LEO, then connecting their data centers via laser comms using vacuum frequencies would be amazing. ISS did some testing using soft X-rays. It was called XCOM and used NICER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_Interior_Composition_Explorer#XCOM

No, if LATENCY is key, then local (or perhaps LEO, depending on details) is best.

Not all performance considerations care about very low latency. NN training, simulations, scamcurrency mining, and non-real-time rendering don’t care about latency as long as it’s a second or less.

Video streaming.
For a 20000km orbit the latency is 66ms one way.
Could be a good place for the mars laser interconnect.

Yeah, it is a good place to put video streaming caches, potentially. Video streams usually buffer much longer than that. And you could actually have a mix, like the first few seconds when you go to a new spot on a video stream are served by whatever storage is closest (giving the user a super smooth experience) while the buffer is filled by something with maybe 100ms of latency but is cheaper to operate. And as you hinted, there's no reason to put that exactly in GSO, which has a limited number of slots which can cost money. A bit higher or lower would be fine if you were planning on serving the whole globe anyway. But this way, you wouldn't need a full cache on every Starlink satellite. Just a few such servers in high orbit would be able to serve the whole world.

However, storage uses VERY little energy and can be extremely compact. Might want to just cohost that on a Starlink satellite or something.

Or you might have huge GSO satellites over different regions to provide local content, but they just use lasers to talk to Starlink and the Starlink network does the last-1000km delivery. Or, perhaps, the Starlink terminals (which are phased arrays and could talk to GSO or wherever they want) could just talk directly, but that potentially runs into the limited radio bandwidth problem (could be mitigated by using a non-stationary but still geosynchronous orbit with the satellites going far out of the geostationary line of satellites, giving you ability to do more spatial multiplexing).

[RonM]

What are the perceived benefits for orbital data centers? Starlink's low latency and high bandwidth make connections to conventional ground-based data centers more efficient. What issues are we trying to solve here?

You only have a latency advantage if you’re in LEO as well.

But you might have a bandwidth and energy cost advantage due to ability to use unrestricted laser comms (all the way to UV) and potentially cheaper energy due to more consistently available sunlight.

For high performance computing (simulations), artificial intelligence training, scamcurrency mining, and graphics rendering (ie for movies, etc), then there might be a cost advantage for beyond LEO orbital data centers.

If performance is key then these tasks are best done in a local data center. Orbital data centers will only give you a performance increase if the user is also in orbit.

When we have more space stations or even space colonies in LEO, then connecting their data centers via laser comms using vacuum frequencies would be amazing. ISS did some testing using soft X-rays. It was called XCOM and used NICER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_Interior_Composition_Explorer#XCOM

No, if LATENCY is key, then local (or perhaps LEO, depending on details) is best.

Not all performance considerations care about very low latency. NN training, simulations, scamcurrency mining, and non-real-time rendering don’t care about latency as long as it’s, say, a second or less.

Ok, then what are the benefits of putting a high performance processing system in space? How is it cheaper or better than a data center on Earth? Power, cooling, maintenance, physical upgrades to name a few issues are all easier to do on Earth.

As Coastal Ron mentioned, physical security is a possible answer. Maybe video streaming. What else?

[Tomness]

I always felt Google's investment into Starlink was to provide backbone and new end to end encrypted direct connection between connections. Say I have Starlink and using Google Stadia and playing with a another Google Stadia member in my area or another then it's my terminal to say to data center and back to another member. Or data center to data center via direct connections to transceivers. By passing different ISPs and backbone overhauls.