alt Hacker NewsGoogle’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space
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Whenever I hear about this I can't help but be reminded of the Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer, where a hugely-expensive commercial project was actually part of a secret CIA initiative to recover a Soviet submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
I'm not sure that's truly the case here, but it does seem like the tech Project Suncatcher is working on has at least some overlap with requirements for military SIGINT and in-orbit imagery processing.
Aside from practical issues, why make your datacenters so vulnerable?
If data centers in space end up being economically viable, then I don't see how anyone can catch SpaceX. They are ten years ahead in both launch capability and satellite manufacturing.
I didn't have time to watch the videos, but in the text I didn't see anything that addresses data center operations requiring manual intervention.
Swapping out obsolete or failing TPUs. Rewiring or replacing connections. "Listening" for sounds indicating an equipment failure.
What are the proposals to address these needs?
Does anyone understand the math behind this bit?
> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth....
People want to put ai in space to hook them to sensors and predict . Checkout project Merlin
How is no one in the whole thread aware that the intention behind orbital datacenters is military? You want to process outputs of large space based sensors in space itself, and reduce latency (e.g to other space based assets) or increase goodput (to ground).
Either it's that weird "space is easier than getting land on earth"(it's not) or the same tortured arguments about heat dissipation, no one is going to run consumer scale compute with consumer scale economics in space ffs. And maintenance and cost does not matter when it comes to strategic military assets, they are a step function useful enough to warrant even a few monthly replacement.
Everyone else with strategic weapons and a space program e.g india china is launching one as well.
Suncatcher? Not to be confused with Reflect Orbital's FCC-approved giant space mirror https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48871367
And just like that Elon Musk shifted the overton window away from "unthinkable" on yet another topic.
> Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure
It’s very confusing to have a project related to space called a moonshot project.
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lowkey insane that it will end up cheaper to shoot your datacenter into space than get it past the county board permitting process.
Alphabet holds approximately 551 million shares of SpaceX (trading under the ticker SPCX), valued at roughly $94.1 billion, which represents about a 4% to 6% stake in the company.