this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space” or “super computers”.
30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC, the RX 9070 XT does 1557 tops for reference). Like that just sounds like they’re launching a powerful PC in to orbit. Like, that’s a lot of power for a satellite, for comparison the curiosity rover is using the same kind of CPU as a 2000 era imac G3, but it’s not a data center.
The idea of doing more processing of the data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.
12 of 2800 planned have been launched.
I have a server at home built from old parts and some refurbished drives with nearly as much storage as the currently launched satellites. 2800 satellites like this would come out to around 230 of my servers, or ~7PB.
A single 2U server with 12 drives, each with 24TB storage, can hold 288TB. It would take ~24 of those to get to 7PB, which is a lot of servers, but not so many that someone with quite a lot of savings couldn't afford it.
Also, the servers on the ground can be cooled by, idk, air if needed. Or water. Or I guess liquid nitrogen if you want. Point is there's an atmosphere for the heat to dissipate to, unlike space.
They've certainly had to come up with some way to effectively radiate the heat into space. The article doesn't mention it though. i presume it's one of the main reasons for networking so many machines together?