Space datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.
FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.
The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.
I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.
Is it dumb and impractical when NIMBYs and folks directly opposed to your political agenda want to prevent any and all terrestrial datacenter development?
Quite a bit of money have been raised on the premise that certain things can be easier to make in space than on earth due to gravity, which creates sedimentation
Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results
Material science and manufacturing are two that have always seemed interesting to me, particularly monocrystalline stuff like semiconductors, optics, and metallurgy.
There's a lot of fundamental science to be done in space; some forms of crystal are much easier to grow, chemical reactions and biological interactions etc. etc. For reference, it wasn't long ago NASA was trying to figure out if spiders could form webs in space.
This is an old idea, dating back to at least the 1940s. Many experiments have already been done in microgravity environments.
In the 1960s, they used sounding rockets to do experiments on how molten metals solidify in microgravity, with manufacturing applications in mind.
In the 1970s, they ran experiments, also on sounding rockets, on melting and solidifying materials without letting them touch a container: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19840059952
More recently, many microgravity experiments have been performed on the International Space Station. Experiments were done on protein crystal growth aboard the ISS in 2000, just a couple of years after it was launched. (I think it took some time to get the experimental facilities up and running.)
Another experiment on the
Here’s an assortment of links on the subject, starting with a good overview:
The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.
So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.
Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):
You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.
Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.
It would be nice if SpaceX published GNSS pseudodistance/carrier phase from all Starlink satellites. It would give excellent realtime tomographic information about the ionosphere...
Here's the thing I might not love Elon or everything he does and there are plenty of things to disagree with him about and I won't comment on him as a person
But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.
Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.
Elon turning the concept of space into the vanity project of a mentally unstable man child kinda sucks though. Makes it hard to give a shit knowing he is personally profitting from it.
There's that one photo with a dummy driver in a red tesla and in the background you can see the earth. I think it's one of the best photos ever, part of it is the absurdity of the fact that it exists at all.
Purity tests, the guy has indirectly killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids through the cancellation of US AID and you're calling this a "purity test", maybe go fuck yourself ?
Why is it called microgravity and not freefall? Cus afaik you are experiencing almost the same force of gravity as you would on the surface, you are just constantly falling.
Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results
In the 1960s, they used sounding rockets to do experiments on how molten metals solidify in microgravity, with manufacturing applications in mind.
In the 1970s, they ran experiments, also on sounding rockets, on melting and solidifying materials without letting them touch a container: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19840059952
More recently, many microgravity experiments have been performed on the International Space Station. Experiments were done on protein crystal growth aboard the ISS in 2000, just a couple of years after it was launched. (I think it took some time to get the experimental facilities up and running.)
Another experiment on the
Here’s an assortment of links on the subject, starting with a good overview:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/applications-within-re...
https://issnationallab.org/research-and-science/space-resear...
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/the-benefits-of-microg...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001550
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150023126
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/manufacturingscience/...
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/optical-f... https://thedailypost.digital/how-microgravity-made-zblan-cou...
If you manufacture there how do you recover it?
So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.
Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):
https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...
The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.
But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.
Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.