The Data Center Boom Is Fueling The Space Solar Race

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The idea of harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down to Earth was the stuff of science fiction back in the 20th century. Now that the 21st century is well under way, space solar is beginning to take shape as a real thing that will happen, eventually. In the meantime, the AI boom has sparked an interest in scaling up space solar arrays to power orbiting data centers.

Space Solar & The Data Center Boom

CleanTechnica has spilled plenty of ink over activity in the space-to-Earth solar power field, ever since the technology began to take shape at CalTech in the early 2000’s. The idea of beaming data down to Earth from orbiting data centers is a more recent development. Though it seems a little nutty, the basic idea is a firm one. After all, solar energy is available in space on a 24/7 basis all year, which qualifies it for federal support under the wildly outdated “reliability” argument put forth by various members of the Trump administration.

In addition, objections from neighborhood residents are non-existent in space. Concerns over America’s vanishing farmland are also eliminated, as are time-consuming permitting and approval complications.

“In Western countries, new large-scale energy and infrastructure projects often take a decade or more to complete due to myriad permitting requirements, rights of way and utility/transmission line restrictions, and environmental reviews,” observes the Washington based US space solar startup Lumen Orbit.

Spacey as it may seem, Lumen has outlined its business model in a white paper titled, “Why we should train AI in space.” The plan leverages a recent decline in the cost of rocket launches, alongside the constant availability of solar energy in space.

“A capacity factor >50% is impossible on Earth due to the day/night cycle alone,” Lumen observes. “By contrast, the capacity factor of our proposed space-based solar array is greater than 95%, with no day/night cycle, optimal panel orientation perpendicular to the sun’s rays, and no effects from seasons or weather.”

“Additionally, the peak power generation will be ~40% higher than terrestrial solar farms as the atmosphere attenuates and scatters solar radiation, even on a clear day. Therefore a given solar array in space will generate over 5 times the energy as the same array on Earth,” they add.

“This means that it is possible to generate extremely low-cost solar energy in space.” the company concludes.

A New Name, Same Space Solar

Lumen produced the white paper last year. The company has since rebranded itself as Starcloud and is continuing its space solar plans with the backing of A-lister NVIDIA through its NVIDIA Inception branch.

NVIDIA showcased Starcloud in a blog post on October 15, providing CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston with an opportunity to remind everyone about the advantages of space solar with regard to powering data centers.

“In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,” Johnston explains.

“The only cost on the environment will be on the launch, then there will be 10x carbon-dioxide savings over the life of the data center compared with powering the data center terrestrially on Earth,” Johnston adds.

NVIDIA also underscores additional sustainability and cost-cutting advantages. “Instead of relying on fresh water for cooling through evaporation towers, as many Earth-based data centers do, Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink,” Nvidia explains.

The space solar angle eliminates the expense of an energy storage system, too. “Constant exposure to the sun in orbit also means nearly infinite solar power — aka no need for the data centers to rely on batteries or backup power,” Nvidia emphasizes.

Bring On The Robot Swarms

If all goes according to plan, Starcloud’s refrigerator-sized, 60-kilogram Starcloud-1 satellite will launch into orbit in November with an NVIDIA H100 GPU on board.

Meanwhile, the big question is how Starcloud expects to harvest enough solar energy in space to run high performance GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) at scale.

For that, Starcloud has turned to the Colorado startup Renezvous Robotics. “Partnering with Rendezvous gives us the ability to scale our orbital power and cooling systems to meet the growing demand for space-based datacenters and AI workloads,” explained Johnston in a press statement this morning.

If Rendezvous Robotics does not ring a bell, join the club. The startup was in stealth mode until just a few weeks ago. On September 10, the company unveiled itself and announced the successful close of a pre-seed round. “Its patented TESSERAE technology was invented at MIT by Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, incubated at the Aurelia Institute, and spun out as Rendezvous co-founded by Ekblaw alongside Phil Frank and Joe Landon,” Rendezvous says of itself.

The company’s contribution to in-space construction is a system of modular tiles assembled by swarms of autonomous robots. “The autonomous modules dock, correct mistakes, and can reconfigure over time,” Rendezvous explains.

Rendezvous already has orbital experience under its belt. Under the new collaboration with Starcloud, the company expects to build space solar arrays at the gigawatt scale. “The collaboration represents one of the first concerted efforts to use autonomous in-space construction to build orbital computing at scale — a foundational step toward realizing gigawatt-scale datacenters and power infrastructure in orbit,” Rendezvous notes.

Next Steps For Space Solar Power

Rendezvous and Starcloud have a long way to go before they get to the gigawatt scale. Next steps include assessing the self-assembling solar arrays along with thermal radiator technologies, towards the goal of scheduling flight demonstrations sometime in the future.

As for the rest of the space solar field, last year NASA disappointed advocates when it concluded that space-to-Earth solar beaming does not meet its standard for priority investment. Still, NASA has supported some key foundational technologies that underpin the space solar field. Researchers in the UK, for example, have suggested that NASA’s Heliostat Swarm and Planar Array systems are likely candidates.

Whether space-to-space or space to Earth, the space solar field has a long way to go before it scales up to any significant degree. In the meantime, solar advocates here on Earth are not letting the gigascale grass grow under their feet.

The high speed train wreck that passes for the US government has dropped the ball, but governments elsewhere in the world are supporting solar energy hand over fist. Aside from the massive scale of solar development under way in China,  the United Arab Emirates has just introduced a 1-gigawatt solar-plus-storage model that it aims to replicate around the world.

Those are just two examples. If you can think of any others, drop a note in the comment thread.

Image: In a new twist on the space solar field, a US startup aims to launch data centers into orbit around the Earth and power them with PV arrays assembled by swarms of autonomous robots (courtesy of Rendezvous Robots courtesy of prnewswire.com).