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Chapter 1: What is the vision for data centers in space?
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Hey, it's Oz here. I'm traveling this week, and next week is the 4th of July, so we won't be publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays. But you'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors once again, starting July 10th. In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from earlier this year that really expanded my understanding of space and the new frontier that's emerging.
Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvald Larsson, and this is the story. Today, I want to start with a clip from a recent interview with Elon Musk.
Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth.
Five years from now, we'll have more AI in space than on Earth. On the face of it, it seems insane. But I recently met someone who painted a compelling vision of humans as a space-faring race. Ariel Ekblor. She founded MIT's Space Exploration Lab. She's an inventor and a space venture capital investor.
Her signature project is self-assembling structures in space, essentially magnetic prefabs that drag themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic attraction after they've been shot into space. The videos of this actually working albeit at small scale, are quite mind-blowing. And Ariel is planning to use this technology to build livable structures for humans in space.
But I wanted to start with the story of the hour, data centers in space, which, it turns out, Ariel is already working on. I wanted to know whether AI and space-obsessed billionaires could have the right idea that computation will be more efficient outside our atmosphere. Take a listen.
The first thing I think we should cover for data centers is space is not cold in the way that people think in the context of, oh, therefore it must be easy to cool data center electronics in space. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. In space, you don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cooled on Earth, you literally, you flow water through something that's touching close to the data center or you flow air through them and it cools them down because that fluid passing by is helps distribute the heat.
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Chapter 2: How does self-assembling architecture work in space?
And we are excited. for Rendezvous Robotics, one of the spin-outs that works within our ecosystem to be part of building the self-assembly capability that makes it possible to construct something that big in orbit.
So you've actually been working on this problem of data centers in space before it became hot.
Yes, yes. Because the challenge is you can't fold up something as big as a football field and put it into a rocket. That's how we do things now in space, right? James Webb Space Telescope, absolutely exquisite. We fold it up like a little toy. We squeeze it in a rocket, which is a tiny tube. Even Starship is still small by the comparison of what a football field would look like, right?
And then we try to get it to space. modular tiles, more like Legos, think space Legos, or if you have kids listening to this podcast, magnet tiles, right? It's a very popular toy these days. That's the kind of modular building block that can be packed flat in a rocket, much simpler, and then self-assemble, build by connecting those modules in space. I love magnets.
That's our particular approach, is to use magnetic field to do it. And so, yes, we've been working, even before AI data centers were a big topical obsession. We were working on what could be the infrastructure to support them.
What was the moment that's happened in the last three or four months where this went from something that you were working on but most people hadn't heard of to something that everyone has an opinion about?
I think it's the incredible drive of capital behind AI, the need to power the hyperscalers, the ability to really serve this growth in this incredible emerging technology domain. And that is leading people to search for creative solutions for where to cite energy-heavy consumption data centers. And space is one opportunity.
And on the space technology side, the main breakthrough has been driving down costs of getting stuff into space.
Exactly right. So that's a huge, that's a great point in that why are we considering space at all for this AI data center play? It's because in the last 15 years, the cost to get to space has dropped dramatically from about $50,000 per kilogram in the NASA shuttle era, sometimes quoted even higher, to now a Starship coming online south of $200 a kilogram. Which is remarkable. That's like FedEx.
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Chapter 3: What challenges exist for cooling data centers in space?
Skylar Tibbetts runs the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. And they were talking about self-assembly on Earth. And I knew, I was sitting in this audience thinking, we should be doing this in space. It's so much harder to do it on the ground, which is what Skyler's lab was exploring in a bunch of really cool ways. So I was very inspired. That was 2016, so 10 years ago.
It was one of the first classes I took at MIT.
And fast forward 10 years, and you're now working on a commercial application of that for a company backed by NVIDIA, which is the largest company on the US stock market, I think. Did you imagine that... No.
No.
Yeah, it's been incredible. I mean, we're so happy we started 10 years ago because now it's really it's so advantageous to have this technology ready now when the industry is ready for something really big like this with AI data centers.
Do you think that will be the commercial application that makes this all real for you?
Yes. I think some combination of AI data centers, antennas, really large aperture arrays in orbit to improve the type of wavelengths that you can get down to the ground, basically. So communications, telecommunications. But my long-term passion is habitats.
That's exactly what I was going to ask you.
So my goal is exactly, it's like I really want the long-term commercial success to be we are self-assembling these massive space habitats and putting people in them.
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Chapter 4: What are the advantages of placing data centers in space?
Now we want to do a swarm deployment of these little robots for inspection, diagnostic and servicing.
Reid Al-Brigotti, who writes the Semi-Fallen newsletter about technology, which I very much enjoy, said something about the SpaceX-XAI combo. Basically, yes, it's about driving down costs to get rockets into space, but it's also very much about robots, and you can't understand this story without understanding robots.
Yes, that's so true because I focus my life's work around space architecture. I really do deeply believe why humans need to go. But that's not to say that they're not, you know, profoundly supported by robots.
But why is it important for humans to go to space?
So I have kind of a three-part answer to this. The first is just tactical, which is we learn so much by going into space as humans that helps us do spin-off technologies for life on Earth. So there's a huge history of NASA, you know, Kevlar microwaves. Some people say even laser guy surgery in some part from the shuttle program. So that's very tactical. The second is more strategic.
So the first, just a playback, is you learned something along the way.
Yeah, you learned something along the way that you wouldn't have learned if you didn't send a human. The second is strategic, which is we need to go to space and we can absolutely use probes and Mars rovers and Venus flybys and things to do this.
But the more that we learn about, especially the near neighborhood of our solar system, the more we understand about Earth's longevity and how to plan for planetary health as a system. So a great example of this is when Apollo 8, I think it was 1968 on Christmas Eve, flew around the moon for the first time. took a photo of the Earth rising above the moon.
Earthrise, the opposite of moonrise that we see on the Earth. And that image, called Earthrise, launched the environmental movement in the United States. So that's an example of space exploration, when humans are involved, expanding our concentric circles of awareness as a species and why it's kind of so important for us as a civilization to push out with human life in addition to robots.
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Chapter 5: How has the cost of launching to space changed over the years?
It certainly is. The diagrams that people may have seen on the news are a little bit misleading because space is so vast. When you make a dot the size of a period on a picture to try to indicate where the debris is in orbit, you are marking out so much space that it's not as crowded or as fuzzy as it looks on these images that people see online that are depicting the space debris.
But it is serious enough that sometimes the International Space Station has had to boost itself to avoid space debris or launch timing is changed because we're tracking the debris. We have a pretty good sense of where it is. But yeah, it's serious. We sometimes see missions that have to plan around it. And I think one of the best things that we could do is active remediation.
So ESA is really motivated. The European Space Agency has some great programs around debris removal. Companies like Astroscale are planning. Interesting capability. One of my favorite ideas is to basically have a space Pac-Man that goes around and, you know, metaphorically eats, but really just collects a big ball of debris until there's enough mass in that aggregate that it starts to...
be dragged down in orbit a little bit lower in altitude, and then it hits the atmosphere, hits drag, and then burns up on reentry. So it's like a trash collector for space, a little Pac-Man.
And not to end on a lighthearted note for a very serious problem, but yes, I do think that space debris is something to contend with, and there are a lot of interesting endeavors that are looking at that right now to remediate.
I want to understand a little bit more about your vision for space habitats. And one of the things I was very intrigued by is that you asked a lot of astronauts what their experience of space was like and how it could be better.
Yes.
What did you learn from those conversations?
So this is credit to my amazing co-founder, Sana Sharma, who was a friend of mine in undergrad at Yale. And then... is an amazing designer. She has run this astronaut ethnography program through MIT. What an incredible privilege we know we have to be at MIT and get the chance to talk to so many astronauts. And she interviewed astronauts from around the world.
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Chapter 6: What role do billionaires play in the future of space exploration?
So we will try to be as agnostic as possible. We are going to have to pick a standard, but exactly to your point, we are lucky in that we're not having to be the rocket transportation. We're going to leverage the SpaceX delivery or other companies that will be able to come and dock there.
And I do think for that five-year timeframe that I gave you, five to seven years for an orbital biolab, most likely that will be us self-assembling this module and attaching it to one of the commercial space stations that are getting built that not very many people know about. More people should know about these that will be the replacement to the International Space Station.
So the ISS has been up since the, I think it was like maybe completed the design in 1998, flew in early 2000. So over 20 years. It's old. It's like any home. It really desperately needs a reno. And what NASA has decided is that we're going to decommission the International Space Station.
NASA has been incentivizing a range of for-profit companies to build their own commercial space stations in orbit. They will be basically the follow-on to the ISS.
And then we would like to assemble and then attach our Tesserae self-assembling module, if it's an orbital biolab, attach it to one of these providers like Axiom or VAST or Voyager Starlab who are going to be these next, you know, future commercial space stations.
Do you have absolute confidence that you will go to space in one of your tesserae-assembled domes?
I better, yes. I think I certainly have the courage and the desire to go. I think there's nothing worse than an architect that doesn't live and inhabit their own space. So yes, I do think I'm bullish on the fact that in my lifetime, I will get a chance to build one of these designs to human occupancy rating and hopefully go myself, yes.
Just before we close, I know this idea of democratizing space is something which is motivating for you.
Yes.
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