- if anyone else loves high school physics, here’s a script i made that tells you a 1 megawatt satellite (4X starlink input power) needs… drumroll…. *a surface 50 meters on a side to dissipate its heat* HOW will this be possible
- Elon Musk believes the best way to solve the difficulties of building AI data centers on earth is to move them into outer space. His merger this week of his rocket company SpaceX with his artificial intelligence company xAI could help get them there. cnn.it/4rqAmED
- Where'd I put that link... Ah! There it is. A rack of AI compute is targeting 54 cubic feet, 6000 pounds and 350 kW. 1 MW is "only" 3 racks worth of servers and would approach 18,000 pounds in weight. And this is a tech that NEEDS extremely fast, high-bandwidth interconnect.
- When I argued that this was stupid someone told me that you could just double the temperature of the radiators on the ISS to increase the efficiency like that was something you could just decide to do
- I'm a thermal engineer and ... this is not possible. It's actually hilarious how impossible this is. Even with radiators with e=0.98, you would realistically need 3-5x that ideal area and massive heat pipes (which quickly lose efficiency as a function of length) to dissipate that much heat.
- musk figures that in 2-3 years they'll be flying Starship / Super Heavy with full, rapid reuse, and this will slash launch costs per kilo by like two orders of magnitude, so you can fly as much radiator area as you like (this timeline for Starship is *wildly* overambitious, of course.)