Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit? The European Commission is to carry out a feasibility study on putting datacenters into orbit as part of its wide-ranging Horizon Europe research program, and has now announced companies taking part in the project. Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between European aerospace and defence companies Thales and Leonardo, …
Who gives these people money? I mean really?
Computers don't work great in space due to effects usually protected by our atmosphere, they generate a lot of heat with nowhere to send it and they weigh a ton that you have to lift in to orbit and they require maintenance (sometimes percussive maintenance).
Whoever thought any of this was a good idea should have their crayons taken off them.
Pointy-Haired Boss: "I want our data and stuff in the cloud."
"But... it already is?! We use Azure for this, AWS for that, and PhantasiCloud for all the rest."
"Okay, and where is it, I mean physically?"
"Well, there's one data centre in Ohio, another location in the Netherlands, and and and..."
"No, you don't understand (are you stupid, or what?), I want it IN THE CLOUD! My golf/fsck/whatever buddies tell me that they all put there stuff there and it's much better. So put it IN THE CLOUD, no matter what it costs!"
"M'kay, I'll see what I can do..."
I came gripe about why this is idea is crappym but the SubTitle and the first two comments covered my engineering twitching.
Also lag and latency.
MOAR crap in orbit.
And Bonus points for a nice data haven that only Big Players can afford and those would be juicy targets [supply chain, material, manufacturing, logistics, etc.] an adversary in a conflict. [Anti Satellite weapons are quite the rage witiih the Super Powers these days.] +++
This idea needs tossed n the bin as a Solution Looking For A Problem.
+++ Think of all the lost Pr0n *alone*.
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... to know this is a really dumb idea. I mean really dumb. So totally dumb I'm struggling to see how people are even putting their name to this. So, a 1U server costs upwards of a few grand, depending on spec, but would cost 20 X that to get it into LEO, so three grand for the server, $60k+ just to get it into space, and that's before the R&D of the 'datacentre' that operates in the vacuum of space, and all the launch costs and energy requirements that go along with it, plus comms, and well, engineer visits.
But telling your honourable colleagues that they are seriously hula-hula-bonka-bonka-ta-tu-ta-tu-mad is not a career improving move.
The correct handling is to profit from this stupid idea long enough to get settled for life. Then you get out, just before the real stupidity of the project hits the scandal and sensation newspaper(s).
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Even if the launch costs weren't so high, you couldn't just launch standard 1U servers - a fully cabled up 19" rack isn't going to survive the g-forces and vibrations of rocket launch. It will all have to be specially designed kit at vastly more expense.
"examining whether datacenters can be put into orbit [using] optical communications to provide a data link with facilities on the ground"
In my experience of medium haul free space optical communication the big problems were aiming precision and transient obstructions. These were tough enough to deal with when we did it over a couple of km with the occasional pigeon crossing the path, but from even low Earth orbit there are so many ways the signal can be interrupted that it seems highly unlikely to be reliable enough for business purposes.
It's much more feasible that there will be ...
Indeed, downright stupid if you ask me.
There's a long list of things that can/will affect it before it starts to melt down, among them:
- man generated space rubbish
- small/tiny undetectable meteorites
- solar flares/radiation
- etc., etc.
... and last but not least, a strike from a weapon.
O.
OK: they want to get to "net zero" carbon for data centres.
How many tons of fuel does it take to lift, say, one ton of server racks (plus batteries and solar panels plus radiation shielding) into orbit?
And how does that compare with the emissions for that same rack of servers on the ground, over 5 years, powered by any current representative power mix?
And what about the waste when this de-orbits?
Some ideas are just too stupid to spend real research money on. That doesn't stop people claiming it, but funding committees should have more sense.
This is about as dumb as an idea as you can get. Some scared high school student (the world is going to end unless...) write this?
Net Zero is what you'll have in your bank account when your industry can't compete due to the high cost of "green" energy. It's already happening at scale in Europe.
Smart countries will ignore the climate scam and profit by importing those industries using reliable and low-cost hydrocarbons.
"Not so smart countries will build Drax power station powered by 'wood waste' then import thousands of tons of wood pellets from virgin (or near virgin) forests around the globe"
Actually they built Drax on top of a coal mine with direct access to "clean coal" ... Nasty miners cost money so they shut the mine and imported open cast, brown "dirty coal" from Poland ... Nasty brown coal is not very green so they then converted 1/6 to burning wood as an "experiment" which they import from "not at all" virginal forests and they are assured that the forests are "fully replanted" as plantation monocultures ... So that's cleared that up then.
This is a government study to figure out using green madness. The launch Co2 will probably be discounted by some clever guestimate of Co2 savings before it gets up there. Or just be ignored in the name of green. When it comes to green madness everything is flexible including the price
It really depends on where you get your hydrogen from.
About 90% of industrially produced hydrogen is made by the catalytic breakdown of methane which releases the same amount of CO2 as burning it would. Then you need to cool and liquefy the hydrogen, guess what - that uses a huge amount of energy which has a definite carbon footprint.
You also need to liquefy and distill loads of air to get the liquid oxygen required which again is a hugely energy intensive operation.
So to answer your question of how much CO2 comes from a H2 O2 rocket? Directly - None. Indirectly - Far more than you thought.
We've got countless useful things to be doing down here with the heat from DCs, all of which are a much smaller engineering challenge than lofting racks onto space.
Even low grade heat has it's used if the right planning, zoning and incentives can be put in place.
Plus when one of these renters the atmosphere what's happening to all the random element plasma that gets dumped in the upper atmosphere?
without even bothering to google anything - geo synch orbit is about 4 times further out than most commercial orbits - and they are called commercial orbits because going further doesnt make commercial sense..
Geo synch has its applications, but just like blockchain, its stupid to use it if you dont need to.
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No, it would result in several orders of magnitude more emissions. At a rough estimate, between 1000 and 100,000 times the emissions of equivalent on-earth servers.
Yes, it is feasible to run servers In Spaaaace, just like it's feasible to fill a swimming pool full of jelly.
It's expensive, wasteful and utterly pointless.
And if you'd like smaller error bars in those figures, let me know where to send the invoice.
Aren't there more cosmic rays in space? Won't that make bit-flips more common?
I'm sure NASA have this one covered already, but they can do that by using very robust hardware that is also comparatively low spec (they only have to worry about running a probe, not doing big data analysis or whatever, at least not before the signal reaches the ground). A data centre run on Voyager 1 chips is not going to be a great data centre.
Considering that you need huge rockets filled with propellant that will be turned into CO2 and water in minutes just to send up a shipping container full of equipment, I doubt that this will ever be able to offset the environmental cost of producing electricity on earth.
Also on earth you can just use solar power and wind to power your datacentre.
"Considering that you need huge rockets filled with propellant that will be turned into CO2 and water in minutes"
Not necessarily. Ariane 5 (for example) uses Ammonium Percholate and liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The Ammonium Percholate produces some CO2 and other things but the exhaust is mostly water. Falcon 9 however, uses RP1, which does create CO2.
Even using hydrogen, there's an environmental cost in creating the fuel, as with everything. But building a data centre isn't exactly environmentally clean and concrete is very carbon intensive.
According to the article, the whole point of the study is to compare the environmental costs, which seems a sensible thing to do. If it turns out good or bad then so be out.
I'm more bothered about the implication being that we've messed up this planet so much, and we aren't going to change our ways, so the only option to continue going about our polluting every day lives is to put the stuff in space and start messing that up too, and then claim to be carbon clean.
Sometimes an idea is just so stupid on every single level, all I hear in my head is this tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3mDatFpNE
I just cannot stop thinking how stupid this idea is.
high costs
not repairable
pollution from the rocket
colling issues
radiation issues
bandwidth issues to/from ground
can be targeted by a satellite weapon
Just make efficient computers, power them with solar panels and batteries, and cool them with water from the sea or a river or a lake.
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