Next-gen spacecraft are overwhelming communication networks
atempleton.bearblog.dev61 points by korrz 3 days ago
61 points by korrz 3 days ago
I think it could become economically viable to physically send storage devices back and forth. You can put a lot of bits in a kilogram of mass.
If we get to the point where we can reliably make a round trip to LEO once per day every day, I think some new bandwidth options open up.
Transmitting information through the air seems very obvious, but there are certain advantages to physical transport.
Low orbit space relays. You can hit them from high above with what you want to transmit, buffer it there and they can upload it (or download it?) to Earth pretty fast. Having a few hundred terabytes or a petabyte or two in space for storage I think it is pretty doable nowadays.
If they are low orbit then they are moving fast, which means wider radio beams. And if those beams would also hit earth, hogging spectrum needed for final download.
For the skeptics here, this is the exponent thats driving the development of datacenters in space. The data has utility but it will be stuck in orbit. Space-based storage and processing makes a lot more sense when you consider that getting all that data to ground is challenging now, and will soon be impossible.
Yes, the original film for moon explorer has been stuck in orbit around the moon for decades. The world had a large network of satellite communications, and there was Arciebeo, but if it's not done here ... A few microwave dishes on all the NSF buildings should easily take are of it. Oh we had those ... But... What about streaming tape? Just ask Uncle Vint.
so... can "datacenters in space" talk be a poorly thought out attempt to move compute to orbit to not fight for bandwidth?
Compression.
Starlink is conspicuously absent.
Starlink could do laser comms with other satellites, probably, assuming they shared positioning information and whatever proprietary laser sauce is keeping their intraconstellation links up.
But their radar link to ground is Ku band, which is already getting congested (partly by Starlink itself!). That’s why everyone’s talking about moving to Ka, despite the worse attenuation and higher cost. Much more bandwidth is available at Ka band, as well.
Edit: I’m slightly out of date, Starlink now also operates at least partially in the Ka band.
Starlink has already demonstrated the capability to do laser communication with a maneuvering spacecraft in a very different orbit from the constellation, during the Polaris Dawn mission. And Starlink has way more than enough downlink capacity for the "staggering" numbers in the article. 85 TB/day is a drop in the bucket compared to the traffic Starlink sees. Starlink will need to expand their downlink capacity in the future, but not because of demand coming from space. Maybe unless space GPUs actually happen.
Website reminds me of that Earthsong VS Code theme
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I want to giggle like most everyone else with this comment...
...then I look at what I'm doing at my new job in nuspace (I jumped out of LEDs and LASERs,) and realize I'm one of the people that is tasked with making this some sort of a possibility, without having been explicitly told so.
Faaaaaaaaaaack me. Well, I have a chance to shine if I can talk sense into the right heads.
It's important to talk to your colleagues about risks of Golden Dome
Thank god we are too small to even be a consideration for that - we are the "AI datacenter in orbit before Google" race which is a little more doable with just a few engineers in a 15-large company.
Unless you mean Golden Dome could be a risk to our project, which is already an obvious thing.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
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I think the engineers working on "AI datacenters… in spaaaaaace!" largely realize it's never really gonna happen.
Oh there will be something up there that they call a datacenter. It doesn't have to actually work for them to point at it and say "the data is up there and therefore is not subject to whatever regional regulation you're hassling me about."
It's a bit like how one guy bought alpaca socks on the silk road and thousands pointed to those socks and said "see, it's not for crime."