this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.
There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..
Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying
Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale
Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired
I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.
Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability
You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability
You may note that this thread is talking about data centre reliability ..
Also you can't radiate heat in space ..
You can ONLY radiate heat in space..
Yeah I'll pay that, you can't radiate it effectively enough for data centre applications though.
The ISS has 475m^2 of ammonia filled radiators that like to disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System
The whole EATCS radiates 70kW, so less than one modern data centre rack. Helpful!
Hypothetically, a relatively stationary (not doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating) "Space Datacenter" would be a perfect test bed for something like Curie point radiators. Might help with the size of radiator needed to produce the same effect, but that's probably the least difficult problem with that environment. The radiation shielding you would need would be... well astronomical.
Sure. What did it cost? How many flights to get it up there? How many human spacewalk missions to maintain it?
Yeah, I've been wondering why there's such a push against the feasibility of space data centers on a lack of cooling when it's in a vacuum where we have already solved temperature regulations. Are there good arguments for why this doesn't work for data centers in space? I mean I imagine other concerns will definitely make it difficult but this argument hasn't seemed accurate to me. I mean also I'm against data centers in general so ya know fuck them but from a reality pov like isn't that argument incorrect?
How does the Sun work?
Mostly emitting ungodly amounts of photons and radiations, as far as the earth is concerned. Is that actually cooling it though ?
Yes, all that emitted radiation does cool down the sun. It's why it has a mostly stable temperature instead of getting hotter infinitely.
Oh so youre saying we should convert the heat generated by the data centres to wide spectrum EM and emit that instead? Amazing! There should be no issues with outputting watts or kilowatts of EM from each of these assuredly numerous space data centres.
Right, I'm sure the hard radiation will help with that as well.
You can't reboot a server remotely? My vast experience having been in one collocation once made me think that surely in big datacentres each server has a remotely controllable switch on its power source, like something that comes integrated with the rack itself? Is that not a thing?
You can't remotely replace hardware.
Did I say "replace"? Oh, sorry, I meant "reboot". Must have been distracted when I typed that. Silly me.
From experience, the remote "reboot" actuators sometimes they need to be rebooted themself
Well then you add a remote reboot switch for the reboot switch. Duh!