Firm Claims They Can Build Data Centers in Space – RedState

Much of what is driving power generation capacity right now, not just here in the United States but around the world, is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the massive, power-hungry data centers needed for AI to operate. Some tech companies are striking deals with nuclear fission plants, and others are betting on a practical fusion reactor. But now a company, claiming to be a “space construction company,” is raising the prospect of building truly massive solar power networks and possibly data centers… (Dramatic voice) in spaaaaace. (Cut dramatic voice.)

And, as you might suspect, I have a few questions about this idea.

Nvidia recently made headlines by announcing that one of the companies it is partnering with, Starcloud, plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with “very large solar and cooling arrays approximately 4 kilometers wide and long.”

To put that into perspective, the International Space Station’s eight main solar arrays – the largest ever assembled in space, requiring numerous space shuttle launches and spacewalks – span about 100 meters and produce a maximum of about 240 kW. This represents approximately 0.005% of the power Starcloud intends to generate.

So who’s going to build this thing?

“Our mission is to build things that will be useful in space,” Phil Frank, chief executive of Rendezvous Robotics, told Ars. “These could be large flat surfaces like a solar panel. Apparently, size is no longer the limit, because we can assemble objects additively and then reconfigure them in orbit. And that’s the fundamental thesis of our company that led us to talk to the Starcloud team.”

Rendezvous Robotics was founded last year by Frank, space industry veteran Joe Landon, and an inventor named Ariel Ekblaw.

The company’s technology is based on research by Ekblaw, who founded the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab in 2016 and led the development of a self-assembling tile technology called Project TESSERAE. It has already carried out some tests with NASA in space, and another larger demonstration with 32 dinner plate-sized tiles is planned for next year aboard the International Space Station. The new company seeks to commercialize Ekblaw’s work.

Here’s the problem: Solar power on Earth may only be good in niche applications, but in space, where there is virtually unlimited room to build and one can use the full force of sunlight, unaffected by atmosphere, cloud cover, etc., it is not only more efficient, but it’s pretty much the only game in town.

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But this statement from the CEO of Starcloud, well, I think it raises more questions than it answers.

“Starcloud’s mission is to bring cloud computing closer to where data is generated,” Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud, said in a statement. “Partnering with Rendezvous gives us the ability to scale our orbital power and cooling systems to meet the growing demand for space data centers and AI workloads. Together, we are laying the foundation for a new class of orbital infrastructure.”

As far as I know, data – new data – is generated by people. There aren’t many people in orbit at the moment. So I’m not sure what that means. As for the questions I mentioned:

What exactly will these orbital facilities be used for?

Will the data centers themselves be in space? If so, how will the data – petabytes, maybe exabytes – get transferred from these orbital data centers to the people on Earth who want to use that data?

Will orbital installations only include solar power generation panels? If so, how will energy be moved from orbit to the planet’s surface?

I think this is an idea that still has a lot of bugs to work out.

Space Ghost did not respond to a request for comment.

Editor’s note: Schumer’s closure is here. Rather than putting the American people first, Chuck Schumer and radical Democrats forced a government shutdown on health care for illegal immigrants. They own that.

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