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NitpickLawyer 14 hours ago [-]
Quick update for the folks passionate about space things (since this thread is full of unrelated comments):
V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've streamlined the production, moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine (the first iterations looked like something out of the steampunk era), and they've simplified lots of fire/heat protection.
The Booster and Ship also got some major redesigns in the way they're handling fuel, the "thrust puck" (the area where the engines get mounted) and so on. It's also a bit taller, helped by the engine upgrades. TWR has also improved, with estimates at 1.6. This should be visibly faster to clear the tower and "jump" the launch.
They are also adding ~44tons of simlinks (starlink simulators, dumb payloads). So they seem to have improved the margins for orbital payload a lot. New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them. Hopefully we'll get to see outside shots of Starship from these things, on orbit. They've filed FCC paperwork for this, and they'll likely use it to inspect the health of the heatshield on orbit.
They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.
This flight will be still suborbital, testing payload deployment, booster return to a fixed point somewhere in the coastal waters, and the ship aiming for somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They've also removed some parts of hte heatshield, to test how it handles that. (on a previous flight the ship still nailed its simulated landing with huge gaps in it, from multiple tiles missing intentionally).
If everything works on this flight, the next one is planned to be orbital.
arijun 14 hours ago [-]
> moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine
The level that they managed to fit everything inside of a simple-looking package was so high that the CEO of ULA (the Boeing/Lockheed Martin rocket company) thought they were lying when they first showed pictures [1].
The reason he was so skeptical is that for other engine manufacturers, there are generally different teams working on different parts of the engine, and because Convay's law the final artifact generally ends up looking like the organizational boundaries of the company that made it, with cleanly separated parts for every sub-organization that you can see in the final assembly. One of the things that SpaceX is good at is optimization across these kinds of boundaries, integrating hardware in ways that would be difficult for a more traditional organization.
mapt 10 hours ago [-]
The way it was explained to me early on was that the newest Raptor engines had simply eliminated many of the different types of test sensors, specifically because sufficient testing had been performed that they weren't getting useful data out of them any more.
"New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them."
Is that confirmed ?
Will be truly amazing to see.
NitpickLawyer 11 hours ago [-]
It is confirmed they'll attempt it, hopefully we also get to see it on the broadcast.
> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship.
I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.
lopsotronic 2 hours ago [-]
Depends on how you define "permanent" but the closed ecological systems (CES) problem is nowhere near solved.
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.
damnitbuilds 11 hours ago [-]
There's a whole book positing that a permanent settlement on Mars is unlikely to work, and I have not seen their arguments debunked.
Is it possible that their arguments haven't been noticed to be debunked? These are apparently the authors:
> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
slumberlust 10 hours ago [-]
Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.
Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
philipallstar 9 hours ago [-]
> Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.
I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation.
> Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
Well - it's a tricky one because that is susceptible to slippery slopes. If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS, for example. We can always spend more on Earth to achieve a temporary boon for the current population. We could have not spent money on developing Golang and used the salary to dig wells in Africa, for example.
Spending a tiny amount on space for the chance of a permanent upgrade for the species does sound like quite a good idea, and I'm personally glad the American taxpayer is doing it.
randallsquared 9 hours ago [-]
> glad the American taxpayer is doing it.
For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.
vel0city 5 hours ago [-]
> If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS
I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.
adastra22 10 hours ago [-]
As someone from within the space industry, their arguments are beyond bad. Indeed they miss the point entirely. If you don’t see much people talking about it, it’s because most people in the industry don’t want to stoop to that level.
If that's one of the better criticisms of the book, that's a pretty good recommendation for the book. The article author clearly just doesn't like their dream being shattered.
general1465 9 hours ago [-]
Whole article is trying to solve problems of human society through space exploration and colonization. Like trying to mask one's mental illness by not talking about it.
elevaet 18 hours ago [-]
We don't even have permanent settlements on Antarctica. Don't hold your breath.
Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere.
None of those are self sustaining.
echoangle 11 hours ago [-]
> Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere.
According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".
mapt 10 hours ago [-]
If you want another word for that, go with "Continuous".
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. But it was not, in fact, expected by anyone to be a permanent station; It is made of non-replaceable parts that age and fail (decade scale), it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale).
Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
> it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale)
I still don't see why self-sustainability is a part of being "permanent".
SideburnsOfDoom 6 hours ago [-]
> I would call the ISS a permanent station.
Since the ISS end of life is scheduled for 2030 - just four years from now - I really would not call it "permanent". Even if gets a few years reprieve, that's quite temporary.
> Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
echoangle 5 hours ago [-]
Something that was permanent and is now scheduled for destruction is still permanent, no?
Or can we at least agree that it was permanent at some point of its life?
> There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
Sure, but that's the case for everything, including permanent things. My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent housing.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
> Something that was permanent and is now scheduled for destruction is still permanent, no?
No, the ISS never was permanent. It had a limited lifespan from the outset. It's actually beyond the original 15-year life. But it is not indefinite.
> The ISS was originally intended for a 15-year mission, but the mission has been repeatedly extended due to its success and support
> My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent
That's true, in the sense that "A word means whatever I choose it to mean". If you were in a flat in an apartment building scheduled for demolition in 2030, would you call that "permanent housing" ?
echoangle 3 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on the context, but for a home, I would still call it permanent housing if it’s supposed to be demolished in 2070, but probably not by 2030.
I’m not sure the bases in Antarctica all have a set lifetime so it doesn’t really matter for the original point.
kelnos 16 hours ago [-]
> Permanent means self sustaining.
No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.
hvb2 16 hours ago [-]
Why on earth (pun intended), would you want that?
You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.
If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone
flohofwoe 10 hours ago [-]
Are you talking a Mars or Antarctica settlement? ;)
(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.
ActorNightly 13 hours ago [-]
The point is that we don't have technology (or at least not proven) to make a habitat on earth that can reliably provide isolation from harsh atmosphere.
When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.
christophilus 10 hours ago [-]
Plus insane storms and winds that I’m not sure Antarctica will properly simulate.
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
api 10 hours ago [-]
Nobody’s tried because they are a short flight away from South America. No point. It’s cheaper and easier to fly it in.
There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one.
To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.
general1465 9 hours ago [-]
You can try the same thing in Greenland or far north of Canada. But nobody does that either, because there is no reason to do so.
However put a reason to go to Mars, i.e. alien shipwreck and there is going to be multiple cities within end of the decade.
MagicMoonlight 14 hours ago [-]
America still isn’t self sustaining and it’s been hundreds of years.
notachatbot123 12 hours ago [-]
And the planet is dying
ponector 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it has some extra 5 billion years to live.
hagbard_c 10 hours ago [-]
The planet cannot die since it doesn't live. Planet life isn't dying either.
schainks 6 hours ago [-]
Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence.
Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.
timmmmmmay 6 hours ago [-]
there is literally zero evidence to support that assertion
SideburnsOfDoom 6 hours ago [-]
There is also zero evidence to oppose it. We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).
We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).
addaon 4 hours ago [-]
> We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).
But we don't know anything about the long term effect of 0g on human fetuses, which live in a very different environment than the humans we have tested. They live in an environment that combines fluid immersion and surface support, with buoyancy playing a major role -- which could (or could not -- absence of evidence etc) seriously change the importance of gravity for development.
I'd be more concerned about the impact of zero and low gravity on newborns than fetuses.
IAmBroom 33 minutes ago [-]
> There is also zero evidence to oppose it.
That's how reason works. "You can't prove there isn't a silver, bubblegum-farting unicorn living on the asteroid belt" doesn't make it true. Nor more plausible.
beambot 18 hours ago [-]
Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...
eagerpace 18 hours ago [-]
And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.
The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.
IAmBroom 31 minutes ago [-]
Is that why they never made it to the moon, and did their best to hide fatal failures?
They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.
kobieps 17 hours ago [-]
The outcome is guaranteed to be entertaining
inglor_cz 14 hours ago [-]
The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.
Competition does improve products.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
New Glenn's engines are quite a bit less efficient than those at SpaceX. Lower chamber pressures, lower thrust:weight ratio, and they're partial flow staged combustion.
I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.
hgoel 10 hours ago [-]
That doesn't make the BE-4 not impressive. It isn't a full flow staged combustion engine like Raptor, but it's still a highly efficient, high thrust, relightable and deeply throttleable rocket engine. These things don't often come in the same package when it comes to rocket engines.
damnitbuilds 11 hours ago [-]
Spacex's work is out there ( and I am grateful for the excitement that generates ) but BO work in the shadows, surprising us sometimes with major advances.
I suspect BO not as far behind as you think.
hagbard_c 10 hours ago [-]
They'll remain behind as long as they keep copying SpaceX's concepts since they need to wait and see before they can copy.
eagerpace 8 hours ago [-]
They’re amazing too. That’s my point. The legacy launch providers were doing zero innovation, limping along shuttle era designs and literally buying the most critical parts from our biggest competitor. The people who hate Elon have no concept how revolutionary the Merlin engine was given this context. It doesn’t matter if SpaceX is successful or not, they revived the entire US space industry. That’s what matters.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.
Taniwha 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure they're all that simpler, the basic plumbing probably hasn't changed much, it's just that modern fabrication tech means you can hide all the complexity inside
damnitbuilds 11 hours ago [-]
A single metal piece that contains plumbing inside it is simpler than a metal piece with attached pipes for that plumbing.
jeltz 9 hours ago [-]
In this particular case maybe but in general I would say it is the other way round.
api 10 hours ago [-]
Simple is harder than complex.
AntiUSAbah 7 hours ago [-]
Why was this flagged?
Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:
Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part.
Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.
snicker
And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.
Or lets say they are joining already anyway.
myrmidon 6 hours ago [-]
For reference: Starlink is <$20bn yearly revenue (a bit over $1k/customer).
Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.
Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).
AntiUSAbah 13 hours ago [-]
He again mentions data center in space.
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
signatoremo 9 hours ago [-]
So you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]?
Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments?
I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection.
For china its a future investment. Its R&D, an image topic and its the job of a state anyway to do fundamental R&D.
Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.
Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.
j_w 9 hours ago [-]
I think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.
lossolo 8 hours ago [-]
From the links you shared, it seems they are first trying to determine whether it's economically feasible at all.
Yossarrian22 9 hours ago [-]
CASC yes
Google yes
Blue Origin yes
But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons.
I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date
whamlastxmas 6 hours ago [-]
What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid
halfmatthalfcat 3 hours ago [-]
Heat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.
svantana 12 hours ago [-]
I dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!
8 hours ago [-]
sidewndr46 9 hours ago [-]
while there may not be atmospheric weather, low earth orbit has its own "weather". Before you even reach LEO you start getting bombarded by all forms of energetic particles. None of these are things you want your computers saturated with
sschueller 12 hours ago [-]
You can only cool by radiation in space. You may get more energy from the sun but how are you going to get rid of all the heat fast enough?
svantana 12 hours ago [-]
How hot do you think black objects in space get? Something like 10°C. Look up thermal equilibrium of an ideal black body.
adastra22 10 hours ago [-]
In the vicinity of the Earth, they get to about the temperature of the Earth. That’s not a coincidence. Hotter if they are actively generating heat.
Geof25 10 hours ago [-]
So you can have datacenters in space, you are just not allowed to use them
jeltz 9 hours ago [-]
Not using them would also solve all issues with cosmic radiation.
Symmetry 8 hours ago [-]
Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move some of the solar energy they absorb to a central location which presents problems in moving the waste heat back out so that spot doesn't get too hot. But that doesn't change the overall equilibrium temperature.
adastra22 6 hours ago [-]
Running a data center generates heat.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
But are they doing work internally that generates heat? Genuine question.
Schiendelman 7 hours ago [-]
They are. But only as much heat as they get from the solar radiation that's hitting them anyway. Exactly that amount.
saalweachter 5 hours ago [-]
Except you aren't leaving that heat in place.
You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.
If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.
It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.
Schiendelman 5 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm curious: all the comments I see about this act as if the people proposing putting data centers in space are complete idiots. Do you believe they are complete idiots?
fatbird 2 hours ago [-]
They're hucksters who know that adding "in space!" to a sales pitch is a free booster for tech enthusiasts.
It's the same way that Sam Altman talks about the risks of AI deciding to kill humanity: because that's dramatic and attention grabbing, and also the most unlikely outcome. Talking about it keeps us from talking about the real, ground level problems like the massive, unplanned-for disruption in jobs and education.
They just need to keep the money tap flowing, and tomorrow can worry about itself. Who's going to hold them accountable for data-centres-in-space five years from now, when they don't exist? Has Musk suffered any blowback from his hyping the Hyperloop that never materialized?
saalweachter 5 hours ago [-]
No, I think they're charlatans.
senordevnyc 5 hours ago [-]
If they’re actually serious about this, they could simply address the points about cooling that numerous experts have raised. But they haven’t done that, at least not that I’ve seen. I have no idea whether they’re complete idiots, and I don’t really care. Maybe it’s idiocy, maybe it’s hubris, maybe it’s a grift, I have no idea. But until I see a compelling solution to this known problem, or a compelling suggestion as to why they’re not sharing a solution, I’ll continue to think they aren’t particularly smart or serious about this.
db48x 7 hours ago [-]
If you gather 1kW of power from the sun then you have to reject 1kW of heat once you are done with whatever computation you are doing. There’s a bit more heat absorbed from the environment since some sunlight strikes parts of your satellite that are not solar panels, but it’s not too bad. Starlink satellites, just to pick a relevant example, do not need a radiator at all because they stay mostly edge–on to the sun and they can radiate all the heat through their own surface area. The ISS needs big radiators because they want it to be comfortable for humans, but electronics can run significantly hotter than that.
lukan 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, you get much more radiation from the sun and other sources. How do you do cooling? Radiators the size of small moons?
Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.
svantana 12 hours ago [-]
The joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.
AntiUSAbah 11 hours ago [-]
Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.
You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.
One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.
The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.
Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.
250.000 * 5 square meter of area.
This alone increases the potential debris in space.
And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.
db48x 7 hours ago [-]
It’s very easy to overestimate the difficulty of cooling things in space, unless you actually run the numbers. So please follow along as Scott Manley runs the numbers: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.
Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you’ll find that it must reject about 22kW of heat. That’s a fair amount, but at 65°C it can radiate it all away just using it’s own surface area! No radiator required at all!
Of course the power density of computer racks has been going up over the years. If you want to reach 100kW per satellite then they will need a modest radiator, but nothing extravagant. It would still be smaller than the solar panels, and far smaller than the ones on the ISS. And don’t forget that because radiated heat goes up as the fourth power of temperature, raising the temperature of the system by even a small amount raises the radiation emitted by a lot. If you design the system to run hotter you can minimize the size of the radiator. Most chips these days are designed to max out at 100°C to 110°C without lasting damage, although running them at that temperature 24/7 may reduce their lifespan. There will be some sweet spot in the middle.
And it turns out that a Starlink v3 already has a volume somewhat larger than a 48U rack. You talk about launching 250k satellites in order to have 250k GPUs in orbit, but that’s ridiculous. A real compute swarm will be hundreds or thousands of satellites each equivalent to a whole rack of GPUs.
But you’re not wrong to be skeptical. The economics might not work out even if the cooling is easy enough. It’s just that rejecting the idea takes a lot more than back–of–the–envelope calculations.
causal 3 hours ago [-]
What doesn't make sense to me here is that even on Earth, where we have an atmosphere to disperse heat into, we find that closed-loop cooling is too expensive and so use evaporative cooling.
If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.
AntiUSAbah 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not rejecting the basic idea in itself. There is nothing in this idea which we as humans can't do today. No issues here. Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.
The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.
A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.
I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.
In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.
kamaal 7 hours ago [-]
Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable. None of this is purely in the territory of 'known' impossible(like FTL travel).
Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard.
This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to continue climbing, or give up and quit.
Your mileage may vary.
AntiUSAbah 6 hours ago [-]
My problem is not the doing thing but the economy of it.
We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.
Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.
Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.
His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
> Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable
The first line of the post that you are supposedly replying to is:
> Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.
Unless is cost-comparable to a data centre on Earth, and I am told that it very much is not, then there is no financial feasibility for space datacentres.
orbisvicis 9 hours ago [-]
More energy will be required than radiation absorbed by a spherical (ish) data center. You'll have massive solar panels piping energy in, and so the temperature would by higher than thermal equilibrium at that distance.
lukan 12 hours ago [-]
Starlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.
svantana 12 hours ago [-]
I don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.
lukan 12 hours ago [-]
Well I was talking about heat. But regarding radiation, there is a long history of transistors in space dealing with radiation. But ... there is also a whole science how to deal with making it reliable: answer, expensive redundancy.
And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.
If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.
AntiUSAbah 12 hours ago [-]
Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.
The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?
And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.
You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.
Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous
The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive
geertj 11 hours ago [-]
The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.
This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.
adrian_b 8 hours ago [-]
But the slots on such Sun-synchronous orbits are limited and many applications want them.
A few datacenters could occupy some slots, but it would be difficult to accept a large number of datacenters obstructing such orbits.
saalweachter 8 hours ago [-]
Aren't dusk-dawn orbits already the most crowded orbital space with the most orbital debris?
svantana 11 hours ago [-]
A polar low earth orbit can be always-on (no earth shadow). Each satellite will be in thermal equilibrium, around 10°C. Catastrophic destruction from micrometeoroids is rare. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I don't see any dealbreakers in the math/science.
mapt 10 hours ago [-]
Kessler Syndrome is the biggest dealbreaker. We're already fairly far advanced in that scenario from Starlink, and competitors/scaleouts to Starlink promise to be worse.
If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately.
Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a physically-enforced type of commons, inextricably tied to tragedy if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.
m4rtink 9 hours ago [-]
Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.
Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.
Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.
mapt 3 hours ago [-]
A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.
SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.
When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.
Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.
AntiUSAbah 6 hours ago [-]
5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.
This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.
sschueller 12 hours ago [-]
Nobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either.
In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.
AntiUSAbah 12 hours ago [-]
Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD
kbelder 3 hours ago [-]
They tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea.
We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.
mapt 10 hours ago [-]
On the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements.
Solar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.
jeltz 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure this is just a lie to increase the value of Space X before the IPO. Not sure why people still trust Elon after all his hype and lies.
u8080 12 hours ago [-]
Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
This sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.
jeltz 9 hours ago [-]
Why? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.
UltraSane 8 hours ago [-]
Musk isn't an idiot, he is an utterly shameless conman who will tell any lie however often he needs to to keep share prices high.
damnitbuilds 11 hours ago [-]
Elon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know.
I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.
sschueller 10 hours ago [-]
Like the hyperloop?...
AntiUSAbah 6 hours ago [-]
The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.
Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:
xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.
I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.
his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.
If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.
He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker
whamlastxmas 6 hours ago [-]
That's a lot of alleged failure for one of the richest people in history. Maybe you should go start a car company and launch company and show us how it's done
jeltz 5 hours ago [-]
So your comment is just appeal to authority?
whamlastxmas 5 hours ago [-]
it's an appeal to net worth and the argument that you don't become the richest person on the planet by being a massive idiot that everyone likes to paint him out as. he's problematic and sucks but he's not an idiot (in business)
Geof25 10 hours ago [-]
Like point to point rocket travel?
le-mark 9 hours ago [-]
Just shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?
Radiators need to be flat and thin - not really good for radiation shielding.
But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.
Fordec 17 hours ago [-]
The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing.
I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.
mekdoonggi 7 hours ago [-]
From my understanding, they have been intentionally sabotaging the heat shield to test the limits of the ship. They are putting the shield through the ringer to find the extreme boundaries to design around.
If they needed land a payload, they could stuff a dragon capsule in the starship, but the point is building something new.
db48x 7 hours ago [-]
I think you’re overstating the problem. All of the tests flown so far were deliberately crippled just to see how much they could get away with. They installed fewer tiles than were really needed, leaving gaps in large surfaces and even leaving the hinge areas of the flaps unprotected. The resulting damage was spectacular and terrible for reusability, but the ships still functioned. That actually bodes well for human spaceflight! Losing a tile crippled the Space Shuttle, but the Starship looks to be much more robust.
fwipsy 17 hours ago [-]
It's okay, Mars doesn't have much atmosphere. We can figure out how to bring them home later.
hparadiz 19 hours ago [-]
Close ups of the tail fins and the hull exterior have little hex tiles covering the entire tail fin assembly. There's also different sizes of tile. Exciting to see if that will be enough structural reinforcement.
randallsquared 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the tile complexity is worrying. I hope they're able to simplify that or fully streamline the manufacturing and attachment. From the outside, the tiles seem like a Shuttle re-run, and refurbishment of those was one of the long poles in reuse.
larusso 18 hours ago [-]
But for the shuttle each title was kinda unique and had a specific spot. If they managed to find a shape where you don’t have to mark each tile but can just pull them from a box for replacement is a huge win. Maybe even have some spares and allow them to be replaced during an EVA. This was all not really feasible with the Spaceshuttle.
hgoel 10 hours ago [-]
The other aspect is the stainless steel hull that can take more punishment, mechanical mounting of tiles rather than glue (though iirc some places still ended up having to use glue) and more developed automation tech making it realistic to get a machine to do the installation and inspection work.
Also, the ability to fly without crew and the willingness to have highly visible failures means they can actually exercise the heat shield to understand what works.
randallsquared 10 hours ago [-]
Indeed! On Starship v1, that's what they started out doing: each tile was the same, and there was awkward placement and notable gaps, especially along the fins. I think they were hoping that this would be good enough, but that dream was dashed. I just hope that it can be completely standardized to provide the benefits you mentioned. I suppose it really helps that they'll be building thousands of these things instead of single digits!
xnx 10 hours ago [-]
> awkward placement and notable gaps
The places that are awkward to tile are the spots that need tile the most.
a34729t 18 hours ago [-]
The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!
Paradigma11 15 hours ago [-]
"My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space"
Soooo, how much did he put on that outcome on polymarket?
geertj 10 hours ago [-]
If you mean whether he’s putting his money where his mouth is, he is doing that by risking the future of the company that is his biggest asset on it. It may not be exactly 3 years. But is will very likely happen.
Paradigma11 7 hours ago [-]
The point is that he is not putting his money where his predictions are and we should not put any more stock in them than he does.
Gys 10 hours ago [-]
Why would he do that? A successful IPO is the goal. His shares will go sky high. That is where his money is.
dmix 19 hours ago [-]
One more week
> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)
Yes, the linked space.com article has an error. The launch is happening Tuesday the 19th.
dingaling 14 hours ago [-]
If they'd just left it in UTC there wouldn't have been an error and the 'rest of World' could easily calculate in their local timezone.
mcbits 19 hours ago [-]
I prefer to call it an unplanned calendar learning opportunity.
arjie 16 hours ago [-]
Incredible to get insight into the new things they're trying. Back in the day of the old Space Race this kind of thing was impossible and now an enthusiast can just follow along as incredible feats of engineering are performed. Great stuff!
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
ghtbircshotbe 8 hours ago [-]
If a decision is smart due to having access to non-public information, that is more a question of ignorance than intelligence.
I can think of all sorts of successful decisions that would definitely be stupid for a normal person to try, due to lack of connections, access to money, high risk, etc.
And maybe to expose my own lack of intelligence, I've always thought eg Robinhood was incredibly dumb. I never in a million years would have thought of the idea of creating an investing app, since there are already many of them, from far more reliable and trustworthy sources. And yet Robinhood has made its founders billions.
kyriakos 19 hours ago [-]
Page banned in my country apparently
adastra22 10 hours ago [-]
What is your country?
kyriakos 8 hours ago [-]
Cyprus
I get "The owner of this website (spacex.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (CY) from accessing this website."
adastra22 6 hours ago [-]
Cyprus is on the proscribed countries list for ITAR.
kyriakos 5 hours ago [-]
Don't want to get into political discussions but isn't ITAR about defence tech?
chainingsolid 3 hours ago [-]
Rockets are classified ITAR. There 1/2 of a ballistic missile.
senordevnyc 2 hours ago [-]
Prediction: SpaceX will launch a handful of GPU-equipped satellites. Maybe they’ll even include some token GPUs on each Starlink satellite so they can throw out some bullshit stats about the vast size of their AI supercluster in space, etc.
They’ll be vague about capacity for a few years, and they’ll be building and acquiring data centers on earth “just while we wait for <breakthrough> that will unlock overnight massive scaling of the space data centers”. The timeline will always be “in the next year”, but no real workloads will run on the space GPUs for a decade. Then, finally, maybe, it’ll happen. Or maybe not, just like FSD. Always around the corner, never quite here.
And it’ll work for meme stock purposes, just like his other companies.
19 hours ago [-]
gok 18 hours ago [-]
It's a fascinating design but it's been 14 years since the concept was first announced and it's never really completely worked. If it ever was possible, it's not clear the talent for it still works for SpaceX.
Melatonic 17 hours ago [-]
Definitely some cool photos of Starship V3 - how much of this is new info vs just a press release style announcement? I havent been following the latest rocket news much
croix 11 hours ago [-]
Architecture in 68K. ROM. VII Design. Complex machines.
Your daily reminder that there is no scenario in which putting data centers in space is easier than putting them in Texas, or Morocco, or literally anywhere else.
The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
geertj 10 hours ago [-]
The problem putting them in space solves is the approx 5X more solar energy without needing batteries for day and night cycles, along with some smaller wins due to less structural support needed due to microgravity.
xnx 10 hours ago [-]
> The problem putting them in space solves is
There are a lot of problems that can be solved by creating 20 other, much bigger, problems.
Geof25 10 hours ago [-]
And then it creates problem with radiation (energy dense particles travelling close to the speed of light ripping holes into 2nm chips) and heat (it turns out that coffee stays hot in a thermos for very long time)
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
100kW of solar and a massive battery is going to be easily cheaper than a 20kW satellite. Especially in somewhere like Texas.
19 hours ago [-]
ivolimmen 16 hours ago [-]
Saw some photo's and the first thing that stands out: the American flag. What's up with that? If you see a product launch in Europe there will be no flag in the photo's (non that I ever saw).
chrisco255 16 hours ago [-]
Almost any average factory floor in the U.S. has an American flag hanging somewhere. Sorry Europe doesn't have any pride in itself!
ivolimmen 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think showing a flag is a sign of pride, and as I watch the news it is currently a very misplaced pride in America.
chrisco255 13 hours ago [-]
Your biggest problem is watching the news. It is designed to make you angry. Meanwhile, I've never been prouder to be American.
10 hours ago [-]
tstrimple 9 hours ago [-]
Ignorance really is bliss I guess.
inglor_cz 14 hours ago [-]
"Europe" does not have a unified stance on this, don't paint our entire continent as The Borg.
If you are Dutch, just take a one-hour flight to Copenhagen to see how a city can be absolutely plastered with national flags.
If Poland or France were introducing a new nationally produced rocket, they would certainly show their national flags around it as well. They definitely do so when displaying new weapons. So does Ukraine etc.
Accidentally, I remember the Dutch colors on every package of Dutch cheese I ever bought.
bean469 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but this is not a national project, but a private one
sixothree 16 hours ago [-]
The flag has been coopted as a symbol of right wing nationalist politics. It's the easiest way to identify the right - their very strange love of the flag.
mdeeks 16 hours ago [-]
What? There are three flags flying in my street alone and I'm in the middle of the liberal bay area.
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
I presume they meant in Europe.
St. George's Cross has long been a symbol of racism in the UK and they've recently been trying to do the same with the union jack.
One of the dumbest things ever was the left giving up on the flag. The only way this makes sense is if much of the left actively disdain most of the nation (ie Stanford vocabulary guide around American flag being a triggering symbol or something ridiculous). I dont see how the left and patriotism are incompatible...
imtringued 14 hours ago [-]
>The only way this makes sense is if much of the left actively disdain most of the nation
That's basically what the logical conclusion of anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism is. If you don't think your culture is worth spreading, possibly through violence, you can't be very fond of it.
You can't say that the US should return the land to the natives and then say that US culture had a positive influence on north america. It's mutually incompatible.
archagon 15 hours ago [-]
The left (or center) did not "give up" on the flag. It's all over the place in protests.
nicole_express 5 hours ago [-]
I would say the center-left didn't, but the left did. Not particularly relevant to SpaceX, though, since the left doesn't run many defense contractors.
7e 16 hours ago [-]
V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cases by the end of April.
johnsimer 9 hours ago [-]
Tesla Semi is in production
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
Just! Apparently they started two weeks ago.
sergiotapia 18 hours ago [-]
Spacex may be the most important company on the planet. What greater goal is there than expanding humanity to the stars!
AlexErrant 17 hours ago [-]
Is this rhetorical? Feeding the hungry. Healing the sick. Educating the masses. Etc, etc.
I'm a big space fan, don't get me wrong. But your exuberance uh, needs tempering.
sergiotapia 17 hours ago [-]
I meant unobtained goals.
More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.
mathisfun123 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kortilla 13 hours ago [-]
A company isn’t going to fix stupidity.
nilkn 17 hours ago [-]
We have about 600 million years before we'd need to perform serious planetary engineering to remain on Earth and about a billion years before humanity must leave Earth to survive.
Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and prosperity is humanity itself.
tfyoung 18 hours ago [-]
Looking after the humanity we already have?
imbusy111 18 hours ago [-]
Figuring out a way to coexist peacefully before expanding any further.
ivandenysov 6 hours ago [-]
Those goals can be achieved in parallel.
api 10 hours ago [-]
Then we never go.
What if expanding helps us coexist peacefully? Maybe being in a crab bucket with no frontier is part of the issue.
imtringued 14 hours ago [-]
Ok, but most of Blue Origins plans rely on off planet infrastructure so SpaceX can have earth and Blue Origin the rest of space.
spankalee 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pveierland 17 hours ago [-]
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
pibaker 15 hours ago [-]
> In the long term
In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has nothing to do with business. They are selling you a vision — which can also come in a pill form, labeled "salvia" and sold at gas stations.
I still see people say the cybertruck is built for mars environments, conveniently ignoring the vast technological and economical barriers stopping us from driving commercially produced vehicles on mars. This space data center thing is the same deal. It doesn't matter how long it will take to solve the technical issues with cooling, radiation, maintenance. It doesn't matter if it will make economical sense or not. It doesn't matter if spacex will be the one to actually do it. You just have to believe, and give them some time — a lot of time, so much time that a monkey can type out Hamlet and type it out again backwards.
See also the buffoonery coming out of Bay Area "effective altruist" and "longtermism" communities.
pveierland 15 hours ago [-]
I fully agree on the reality distortions and valuation chaos surrounding Tesla. This does also follow from the company being very volatile and chaotic, which becomes harder to price. How do you accurately price in e.g. Optimus - it seems really hard to tell at this point - which I guess is also one of the motivators for these strategies.
However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.
philipallstar 14 hours ago [-]
All share price fundamentals are based on the long term. Short term trading is why some shares are very briefly high or low.
notahacker 13 hours ago [-]
All share price fundamentals based on the long term have this pesky thing called discount rate which means your [hypothetical] earnings from something expected to happen in 2050 get weighted a lot lower than your 2028 earnings and your 2100 earnings barely figure in it at all though.
That's the case on a pure "I could invest my money in something that makes a bigger profit now, and use that money to buy shares in the longer term bet afterwards" basis, but is even more the case when you factor in uncertainty. And "SpaceX's 2026 near monopoly of launch and the 2026 datacentre build rush will still be relevant once we're far enough into the future for inference chips to not need regular replacement and orbital megastructures to be cost competitive with ground ones due to the amount of orbital recycling going on" is pretty uncertain...
philipallstar 12 hours ago [-]
I doubt anyone is doing earnings analysis 75 years out. It'll be "this is our best guess of the size of the market over time, and here's what percentage of the market SpaceX will get, factoring in the US taxpayer being a large funder of space and preferring a local company."
The large variance is in the projected market size, but I can see why people might be optimistic. Especially given SpaceX's success in Falcon 9 launches, gradually stealing stats away from the record-holders, who have been mostly Russia/USSR-based[0].
Well yes, nobody doing earnings analysis 75 years out is my point. We're downthread of someone pointing out that most mass and energy is outside earth so in the long run we'll run out if we don't rely on space[1].
That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.
[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...
sigmoid10 14 hours ago [-]
Well, at least that is what they teach you in college when you learn about the efficient market hypothesis. In reality, investors are getting less rational every year. The modern stock market has become pretty much decoupled from reality.
red75prime 13 hours ago [-]
"Everyone is crazy" is a well-measured stance that I can respect. /s
On a serious note, if you think that everyone else loses contact with reality, it's a signal to check and recheck your assumptions.
sigmoid10 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe check your own knowledge on the topic you're commenting on before talking down on others. Musk for example has famously said himself on several occasions that he thinks Tesla is overvalued. But any company with a >1000x P/E ratio is less screaming "sensible investment" and more "get on the train before it moons" meme-stock. Regardless, none of this is rational anymore. It is mostly hype (and a little bit of insiders rug-pulling each other).
robocat 13 hours ago [-]
> believers
If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense.
However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).
munksbeer 11 hours ago [-]
A lot of institutional investors get caught out all the time when they make mistakes about the fundamentals.
levanten 13 hours ago [-]
They also care about networking and connections.
rf15 11 hours ago [-]
Secondary effects can also make this a good investment decision: if you have enough other delusional people to buy into it, you still gain from it, even if you believe it's bullshit.
madaxe_again 14 hours ago [-]
I love how in today’s quarter-based world a decade is now a “literally astronomical timescale”.
cryo32 12 hours ago [-]
Chipping in here. There's a lot of speculation on this subject matter, all of which entirely wrong.
Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.
The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.
regularfry 12 hours ago [-]
Not only that! First mover advantage is mostly bunk. Even if none of what you say was true, valuing this on a horizon far enough out to solve all the technical problems gives a lot of space for competitors to emerge. So even if the idea was both technically and financially workable, there is no guarantee that an investment in SpaceX specifically would be the right move over the same evaluation term as the tech will take to play out. It only makes sense from a speculative angle because you know that if they present any more concrete excuse to believe that the tech works, the price will temporarily go through the roof.
dnautics 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, beyond the three things that are the hard parts it's easy.
pveierland 14 hours ago [-]
As problems go, radiation and cooling seem to have relatively low dimensionality compared to the other problems. It seems to be mostly a question of optimizing within the dimensions of dissipation / structure / deployment / service / cost / weight. When all is said and done, the cooling solution will end up being a module that can deal with some power dissipation, cost X amount, weight Y amount, have structural interface Z. This seems like something a relatively low number of engineers can iterate on largely isolated from other concerns. SpaceX does have 5000+ of them.
Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.
With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.
notahacker 12 hours ago [-]
Radiators are raised because it's a known constraint and we know that Stefan Boltzmann implies a lot of radiator mass to be launched even at 100% cooling efficiency and there are also theoretical limits to launch efficiency which Starship is rapidly approaching.
Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more cost-effective cooling solution than pumping local water because "space is cold" are talking nonsense. Potential solutions don't look like trying to get 5000 engineers to invent radiators which defy the laws of physics, they probably look like amortising the costs over multiple decades of operation and ideally assembling the radiator portion of the datacentre from mass that's already in orbit, but that's not a near term profit pitch....
pveierland 12 hours ago [-]
I read the comment that I replied to as these challenges being a large prohibitor to this development, and I pointed out that these seem like challenges that can be dealt with mostly in isolation from other challenges and in particular not require a large number of engineers to deal with.
Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".
notahacker 12 hours ago [-]
The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiator tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem. Cutting edge stuff like in-space refuelling and modular in-space reassembly and patient capital are crucial to making those work because the radiators aren't getting beyond 100% radiative cooling efficiency however well designed they are.
Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
pveierland 11 hours ago [-]
> The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiators tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem.
I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.
> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.
notahacker 11 hours ago [-]
> I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.
Sure, but you're missing the point which people familiar with spacecraft systems engineering are actually making, which isn't "radiators are a problem because they're hard to design" but that "radiators are a problem because it's hard to design everything else to offset their relatively large mass budget, and thus every other aspect of designing and operating an ODC as a profitable alternative to terrestrial ODCs is coupled to the theoretical limits to how low the radiator launch mass can be". The number of engineers required to design radiators themselves is totally irrelevant, but you can't isolate the radiators' required launch mass from the overall concept of operations and operating economics.
pveierland 11 hours ago [-]
One issue with this argument is that there are very few engineers that have had the opportunity to design satellites that are; this large, are designed for mass manufacturing, rapid iteration, failure allowance, and with access to a reusable launch vehicle with the capability of Starship (where it's also unknown what launch mass capability they will end up reaching).
The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.
Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.
echoangle 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone is saying that it's impossible to build a datacenter in space. Of course you can do that if you really want to.
But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.
rob74 11 hours ago [-]
Space is cold. Space is also an excellent thermal insulator - there's a reason why Thermos bottles use vacuum for insulation...
grumbelbart2 12 hours ago [-]
Isn't the question more an economic one: Is it cheaper to put some solar cells into the desert and to buy some batteries, or to launch things into space (plus the premium for radiation hardening and ensuring it survives long enough because you cannot service it).
Given the current trajectory of battery and solar prices I just don't that space-based systems are cheaper in any way.
Of course there is a long-term aspect should we climb the ladder in the Kardashev scale: Once we used all solar radiation reaching earth we must move to space to grow. But that is decades if not centuries away.
bvcp 11 hours ago [-]
you are ignoring the scale factor, approvals for this much infrastructure is really hard and slow
AntiUSAbah 12 hours ago [-]
Just go to Google Maps. Just do it. Type in Arizona, or new mexico, texas whatever. Do you see all this brownish stuff? Yeah thats just empty land with A LOT of solar.
So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?
Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.
Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.
Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.
Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.
squidbeak 12 hours ago [-]
> Just go to Google Maps. Just do it. Type in Arizona, or new mexico, texas whatever. Do you see all this brownish stuff? Yeah thats just empty land with A LOT of solar.
'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems.
> So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisioning, cooling, automated scaling in space, and off-planet mining are all solved problems, that shitting on our planet will still be the cheapest most maintainable option?
AntiUSAbah 12 hours ago [-]
Whats your critisism with 'brownish stuff'? That space is free? Space doesn't disrupt anything?
Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly?
But the natural ecosystem thats your issue?
Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG. I would say we have enough space on our planet for a few hundred more years. Especially as we as a society are struggling anyway to expand as we are not even remotely able or capable of educating and handling enough people properly anyway.
'once provisioning' -> Until then lets provision on earth
cooling -> yeah lets just leverage the heat produced by these data centers as an affordable distant heating for housing first? What do you think how much people would enjoy a DC close by if they would get very cheap heating?
automated scaling in space -> how about we start automating earth?
off-planet mining -> you watched to much scifi at this point. Do you even understand how big the machines on earth are for mining? How much we have to transport them away? If you mine anything with a little bit of gravity, the more you mine, the more energy you need to move it around.
Do you even know how to refine minerals in space?
Yeah i think 'shitting' on our planet will be the most maintanbale and cheapest option as long as Musk is alive. Easily.
myrmidon 11 hours ago [-]
Agree 100%. Another point that people love to neglect is that for earthbased hardware, you keep all the material, and can recycle/reuse all the copper and trace metals somewhat easily.
Even if space was cost competitive (which it really isn't), you basically throw away all the stuff up there (because retrieval is too expensive). Copper prices are already up by 300-800% since the nineties even without dumping the stuff in space.
illiac786 16 hours ago [-]
It’s like saying within 2-3 years the sun will go out.
Almost correct, yes.
GuB-42 12 hours ago [-]
Compute in space is doable, we already send plenty of computers up there, technologically, it is not even a challenge. It just doesn't make sense economically, even with Starship, it is making things harder for no good reason.
Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.
cameronh90 12 hours ago [-]
It’s trading political difficulty for engineering difficulty.
There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.
GuB-42 10 hours ago [-]
It is another common argument, but again trading a problem for a much harder one.
If politicians ban datacenter construction projects, do you think they will take kindly of the process of building them in space? Rockets are really bad from an environment perspective. We tolerate them because we don't do that many launches and the negative effects are small on a global scale.
cameronh90 6 hours ago [-]
People oppose data centres mainly for local reasons.
We already have more than 10k Starlink satellites, and there’s almost no outcry about that outside of astronomers, who are justified in their concerns… but politically irrelevant.
Plus, you can technically launch a satellite from almost anywhere if you’re not picky about the orbit, so you just need to find a single country willing to give you a logistically viable launch site. There are no international laws that would prevent, e.g., India launching 1 million satellites.
bvcp 12 hours ago [-]
how does the economics compare at scale building a persistent 24/7 supply of 1,000 gw isnt easy or cheap
GuB-42 10 hours ago [-]
It is certainly not easy or cheap, but doing it in space is harder and more expensive.
skybrian 17 hours ago [-]
> all mass and energy available is outside of Earth
Manufacturing capabilities are quite lacking, though, in the short and medium terms, so this doesn't seem all that relevant.
Maybe a self-contained, modular solar panel / radiator / compute unit could be built, but it will be manufactured on Earth. (Where the fabs are.)
And it still seems easier to put solar panels and batteries near the data centers that SpaceX is already building on Earth.
cm2187 12 hours ago [-]
> In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error.
Define “long term”. Nuclear energy is practically unlimited, plus fusion (if it ever works).
rf15 11 hours ago [-]
I still don't get why so many people who watch/read scifi conclude "yes this is a legitimate and realistic vision of the future, and not Wizards and Dragons but with Technology"
Going to mars or staying on the moon will be a Darwin Award-level adventure.
munksbeer 11 hours ago [-]
> What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute?
Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.
Schiendelman 7 hours ago [-]
Having a space program is extremely difficult, much more difficult than blowing up basically anything on earth.
crvdgc 14 hours ago [-]
In the long term, the biggest problem is that space data centers are very hard to defend against missiles.
orwin 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I don't see (sea?) it. Every advantage of space are found in oceans/seas, especially if we use dead zones where aquatic life is already dead. The cooling is cheaper, tide+wind+solar is cheaper than space solar (I know someone who worked on a lens to observe the sun, the satellite was launched but due to being cheap on the solar panels, the sunlight and radiation chipped away the coating that found itself attracted to the most massive object in the area, the lens). Anti-corrosion is cheaper than light radiation protection, and servicing is way easier and cheaper.
YetAnotherNick 14 hours ago [-]
But if solar panel is significantly cheaper and latency doesn't matter you can have servers in any part of the world. Even if they are not up 50% of the time due to limited battery it would still be cheaper.
bvcp 11 hours ago [-]
whose wasting 50% of their silicon production capacity to save on power. doesnt make alot of sense even with money silicon is hard to buy at scale
YetAnotherNick 10 hours ago [-]
The thesis of the space datacenter is that energy is the expensive thing not silicon. If it's silicon it doesn't matter anyways if you run it on ground or space. And energy might be cheaper on space.
jatora 17 hours ago [-]
biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling that is comparable if not more impactful
you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.
you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.
speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?
but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex
'all mass and energy available is outside of earth'
Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.
I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.
joha4270 16 hours ago [-]
Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens.
Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.
I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements
I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.
throw310822 15 hours ago [-]
> Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production
But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
ben_w 14 hours ago [-]
They're talking about launching a million satellites, not one massive satellite.
I don't think they can avoid a
Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.
throw310822 12 hours ago [-]
The thing is, the infrastructure needed to power and cool each of those satellites makes it economically absurd given that what they collectively do can also be done by a few data centers on earth.
Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at.
It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.
Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
benj111 14 hours ago [-]
You can put computers underground. Cheaper than launching into space.
Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.
b112 13 hours ago [-]
There are literally enormous problems powering AI data centers on the Earth right now. No, we don't have the power on Earth.
In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.
Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the building codes required to build a data center on Earth. These things all still apply underground, and underground is going to require additional shoring and structural engineering, to ensure that the structure is not crushed, damaged, and so forth.
yourusername 13 hours ago [-]
>In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.
So in this world vision obviously companies will start shipping iron ore and coal by starship from one coast to the other because it will be cheaper than trains. In fact all trucking worldwide would be replaced by space ships because they would be cheaper than trucks by far.
I can't see how it will ever be cheaper to build a literal space ship and launch it than to put stuff on a train. This all reads like some super optimistic early 50's scifi.
b112 11 hours ago [-]
I didn't say it was cheaper to ship coast to coast by starship. I said some estimates predict it cheaper to ship to orbit, than train coast to coast.
You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
To orbit
Think of how short a distance "to orbit" is.
yourusername 11 hours ago [-]
>Think of how short a distance "to orbit" is.
7.8 km/s delta-v, that's quite a lot.
>You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
Even if both are reusable a train will last decades and a starship will be lucky to get a few dozen launches, which is still amazing mind you.
Maybe it is my lack of imagination but i just can't see how a diesel engine that pulls a metal box at 60mph will cost more per trip than a rocket that has to accelerate to 18000 mph.
Even just fueling: a train runs on diesel which is easy to handle and everywhere. Starship requires cryogenic fuel and oxidizer which is inherently more difficult to handle.
ben_w 13 hours ago [-]
> There are literally enormous problems powering AI data centers on the Earth right now.
Political, not technical.
Going to space replaces a domestic problem of angry locals with an international problem of angry governments.
> No, we don't have the power on Earth.
The power problem isn't meaningfully improved by going to space.
For every GW you put in a sun synchronous orbit to get permanent light, you need around 6 GW in the major world deserts given their cloud cover. But! The ones on the ground last 30-40 years, while the satellites are currently expected to get replaced every 5 years, so the quantity which need to be manufactured each year to maintain fixed useful output is actually about the same.
For scale:
The world installed 445 GW in 2024, and this number has a long term growth trend in the range of 25-35% per year.
If SpaceX's proposed million satellite constellation are each 25 kW modules, the total they need to launch is 25 GW, the ground equivalent is 25*6 GW = 150 GW, so we could deploy something of this scale on the ground three times over in 2024, and probably around 11-18 times in 2030 if trends continue.
And to pre-empt someone what-abouting night, between cars and PowerWall Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year, so provided they didn't need replacing more often than every four years on average this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, long enough to wait for the sun to return and supply enough to be charging rather than draining batteries.
Of course, America only controls one such desert. China has another, makes most of the PV and far more batteries, but America wants to treat this situation as a race against China.
bvcp 11 hours ago [-]
now try to build this infrastructure project and get approvals at all levels of government in a time frame that doesnt see you fall behind
ben_w 10 hours ago [-]
Which needs more government approval, an unprecedented million satellites that impacts every nation, not just America but also several actively hostile to the US, or a very precedented million things with batteries in them (making them grid independent) on very cheap desert land? They don't need to be fixed buildings, they don't need humans inside (would suck if they did given the alternative is putting them in space), they don't need water (ditto), or AC (ditto).
Teever 17 hours ago [-]
All of this may be true but the scale that Musk is talking about would require an immense amount of solar panels -- and if he has the means to produce so many solar panels why not use them to solve our climate and energy crisis on Earth?
Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
cameldrv 17 hours ago [-]
I’m not saying the math checks out, but the argument is that you get full sun with no atmospheric losses 24/7, so you produce way more energy per panel, and you don’t need batteries, because the power production is consistent and predictable.
robertjpayne 16 hours ago [-]
Problem wont be energy input it'll be heat dumping. You can't transfer heat in a vacuum effectively -- just go google how large the International Space Station's radiators are just to ensure its electrical systems are cooled adequately.
Unless someone figures out how to break the laws of thermodynamics there's never going to be a cost effective DC in space.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
To keep everything under 100C (or 50C), your radiator surface area is in the same ballpark as your solar panel surface area. No laws of thermodynamics need to be broken. But you do need very low launch costs.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_equilibrium_temperat... A blackbody sphere near Earth's orbit balances out to almost exactly 0C. A sphere has about 4x as much radiating surface as capturing surface. A flat surface facing the sun that would have 2x, front and back.
ben_w 14 hours ago [-]
ISS needs its radiators for the humans rather than for the electronics, which can run hotter than we can remain alive. However, main thing is compare them to the size of the ISS's solar panels: both are big, but similarly big.
ActorNightly 17 hours ago [-]
>These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations.
They can. But in Elons case, its going to be his style of sending failure after failure up in the space, getting something working part time, lying about it and exaggerating how good it is, and then making fun of others for not using his inferior product.
Pretty much like everything else he has done.
ulfw 17 hours ago [-]
> Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of land to farming, restaurants and transportation of food it would be so much better if everyone just had a Star-Trek style food replicator in their house.
None of the tech exists but fuck it. Why bother with realities of life?
I am raising 200 Trillion Dollars for AI Space FoodX. Who is in?
slimebot80 17 hours ago [-]
"aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things"
yawn, people keep making this excuse on behalf of the South African investor with poor technical expertise.
ryzvonusef 16 hours ago [-]
> Yes, Elon is very sane.
tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession.
He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
grey-area 15 hours ago [-]
He didn’t found Tesla, he bought it then called himself founder.
throw310822 14 hours ago [-]
That's pointless nitpicking, when he bought it it was so early you can easily say he made everything of it.
ben_w 13 hours ago [-]
The other side of the coin of praising him personally for success like that, is blaming him personally for everything that goes wrong, like Cybertruck being simultaneously late and far more expensive than announced and far worse than announced and that even the announcement itself wasn't well done, or the majority of this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make
it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.
throw310822 13 hours ago [-]
Musk's accomplishment was absolutely astonishing in betting on a completely immature market and bringing a tiny startup to the giant that is today. Then stuff like the cybertruck for me mark the moment when he completely lost it.
fulafel 16 hours ago [-]
Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.
illiac786 16 hours ago [-]
You are saying he got lucky? That doesn’t necessarily mean he will continue to be lucky.
onehair 16 hours ago [-]
They mean, to attempt things that seem very difficult to normies like you and me, and be successful at it, one needs to be insane.
kamaal 14 hours ago [-]
I think Elon Musk is quite literally the living example of what high agency lifesytle would look like.
One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it.
That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps.
Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.
marcus_holmes 13 hours ago [-]
I think you mean "luck"
kamaal 7 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that is also how luck works as well.
You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).
neuronexmachina 18 hours ago [-]
I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
Enginerrrd 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive.
Well, that likely already exists as Starshield - not to mention all the pubmic SAR sats everyone has by this point.
trothamel 17 hours ago [-]
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
gpm 17 hours ago [-]
> It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments
It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine.
The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.
trothamel 16 hours ago [-]
So, that's generally not something local governments do in the US. They do things like increasing taxes on data centers, denying water rights, electric interconnection rights, etc. (At least, all of this has been threatened against data centers.)
gpm 16 hours ago [-]
The US government, and sub-governments routinely exercise control over data centres, typically by the simple act of issuing a subpoena or warrant or weird national security document. They will entirely retain this power. And the power to force compliance with force if they need to (though they typically don't).
Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.
runako 15 hours ago [-]
PRISM[1] has been publicly-documented for over a decade. China, Iran, Russia, among others obviously also intervene in electronic communications at a low level.
I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.
Local, state and international governments who wanted to crack down on AI could just arrest and execute the owners. None of whom plan on living in space anytime soon.
rasz 16 hours ago [-]
>hostile ... international governments
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?
trothamel 16 hours ago [-]
SpaceX's launch capacity is an order of magnitude larger that all four of those put together.
gpm 16 hours ago [-]
Which is irrelevant because offensive launches can destroy many orders of magnitude more launches worth of payloads. Even with simple kinetic means. Though these days I think I'd expect to see directed energy weapons adding even more zeros to that.
inglor_cz 15 hours ago [-]
Have you done the math? "Many orders of magnitude" means, IMHO, at least three. A regular Falcon 9 carries 60 Starlinks IIRC, so three orders of magnitude means destroying 60 thousand at once.
What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.
gpm 6 hours ago [-]
I admittedly hadn't done "math", but doing so the claim checks out.
Retrograde launch, with 20 tons of small objects (say 1mm radar absorbing ceramic ball bearings to cause maximum chaos and minimize even the theoretical ability to avoid the oncoming disruption). Dispersed into a wide variety of LEO orbits by ejecting them as the rocket changes orbit. You wouldn't deny the orbital sphere for very long, because small objects would drop out quickly, but everything in it would be destroyed.
There's 10k starlink satellites alone that could all be destroyed by this. Which is the right number of orders of magnitudes.
Admittedly you can't get far above that currently though, since there are only about 15k satellites in orbit... but a single directed energy weapon could destroy practically every satellite in every orbit instead of only the low earth orbit ones so as a log-of-portion-remaining weapon it gets those extra orders of magnitude.
Space is not a safe place - if you want to keep things safe you keep them on firm ground protected by the atmosphere. If you want to keep them really safe you put them below the ground.
SXX 12 hours ago [-]
No idea about 60,000, but it's not impossible to make whole orbits unusable by launching piles of small junk.
Its will ruin it for everyone, but Russia or China is certainly able to do that.
m4rtink 11 hours ago [-]
The Starlink orbits are so low that stuff deorbits quite quickly withou active propulsion. So while this might work for a while, you woul need to replenish that junk for it to continue working, in all the many orbifs you would want to deny.
noddybear 12 hours ago [-]
An EMP from a high altitude nuclear detonation would do the trick.
gpderetta 9 hours ago [-]
you do not need an orbital capable launcher to carry an anti-satellite weapons. Modified SAMs are sufficient.
inglor_cz 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but any of those attacking US satellites means an apocalyptic war, and the provenance of the attack would be clear. You cannot exactly hide a suborbital rocket launch.
Even in Russian nationalist circles, the occassional idea of shooting down current Starlink satellites is usually met with derision from the rest of the discussion group (see, for example, topwar.ru comments). That is just step too far, too dangerous.
Meanwhile, on Earth, you have a lot of plausible deniability. "Some terrorist group sneaked in and planted a bomb, totally not our people."
rasz 8 hours ago [-]
>any of those attacking US satellites means an apocalyptic war
or a tweet calling it "very weak response" and lying about being warned in advance.
wahnfrieden 17 hours ago [-]
A cover is going to have a plausible enough sounding justification that you’ll believe and defend
Fordec 17 hours ago [-]
I assume because the Mars goal is as good as dead with what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one.
This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.
inglor_cz 15 hours ago [-]
"what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one."
I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.
What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.
"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"
True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...
If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.
weregiraffe 16 hours ago [-]
SpaceX perfected Falcon 9 reuse, they perfected Dragon, they perfected Starlink. Are you seriously going to bet they can't improve on the Space Shuttle? Which is what Starship/Super Heavy is, Space Shuttle idea implemented correctly.
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
> they can barely get it back down to this planet
Being the first rocket in history where both parts reached the ground ready to land is a pretty good start.
And if Starship can't land then any space datacenters are just as or even more unlikely, so that explaition makes no sense what so ever.
dnautics 17 hours ago [-]
The math works out if you project certain macro trends out a sufficient amount of time.
I think if fusion is real, it might not be so advantageous until space mining is a thing.
gpm 16 hours ago [-]
The more straightforward explanation is that it's a story that Elon (probably correctly) thinks will sound good to wall-street and enable him to take a ton of the publics money when SpaceX IPOs and gets added to the S&P for himself.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
notahacker 12 hours ago [-]
As an investment narrative it was ideal to justify rolling Elon's unprofitable second tier AI company and the debt-ridden mess he made of Twitter into his highly successful space company, ensuring the investors in those get paid off by the SpaceX IPO...
euroderf 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe coverage is directed outward from Earth ? It could be quite an upgrade to the "UFO" TV series SID (Space Intruder Detector).
gct 17 hours ago [-]
They'll put up thousands more starlinks and track every mobile device on the planet simultaneously, might as well have a homing beacon in your pocket.
yellowbkpk 17 hours ago [-]
Check out this video that goes into a very deep technical explanation about how the satellites can be used as a Synthetic Aperature Radar to build a realtime representation of the entire globe at meters of resolution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
piloto_ciego 17 hours ago [-]
Oooh, yeah, this is going to be a key to it too, Gorgon Stare on steroids.
17 hours ago [-]
legitster 17 hours ago [-]
One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.
My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
dopa42365 16 hours ago [-]
Before LEO internet constellations, even the leading nations had just ~20-25 launches per year each, and a good chunk of those were for ISS services.
Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
squidbeak 12 hours ago [-]
This really isn't true. Infrastructure build outs, space mining, the power generators and datacenters needed by the world's current best funded and most energetic sector all depend on more launches and larger cargo holds.
fragmede 16 hours ago [-]
I, and I'm not alone, would pay a giant pile of money to go into space for a holiday.
verzali 15 hours ago [-]
And yet space tourism ventures consistently struggle to be viable. Even SpaceX barely bothers with that market.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
People have been pointing to space tourism for decades, but I've never thought it viable. You quickly run out of people with enough money to pay what it costs to run the service.
Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Having a computer in your pocket that's connected to a world wide web of other devices wasn't viable until the technology too support it was there. If it cost the same as a family vacation to another continent, I'm sure there's no shortage of people that want to experience the weightlessness of space. Think of having drinks (alcohol or not) in space. A simple thing as that would be such an experience. It wouldn't be for everybody, just like cruise ships aren't for everybody, yet that industry manages to stay afloat.
illiac786 16 hours ago [-]
That ought to be the most CO2 heavy holiday I can think of. I wish it could be made illegal, but I am certain there will always be one country allowing it.
elbasti 16 hours ago [-]
This is correct. The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
jjmarr 16 hours ago [-]
I don't know why space marines aren't a thing yet. The USA could put a rapid reaction force of Tier 1 Special Forces onto a space station and deploy them through atmospheric re-entry anywhere on Earth within 30 minutes.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
illiac786 16 hours ago [-]
The cost would be insane. And it wouldn’t be near 30min, you’d need lots of teams to reach this, driving the cost further up. Need to rotate them on a regular basis. And soldier without gravity for months at a time are definitely not fit for combat.
jjmarr 15 hours ago [-]
> The cost would be insane.
Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
But it doesn't make sense for the marines. For the same money you could spin up a bunch more QRFs and scatter them over the globe.
myrmidon 10 hours ago [-]
The whole kinetic strike concept is 100% complete idiocy.
There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.
Problems are:
1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.
2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.
3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.
patagurbon 13 hours ago [-]
Kinetic strikes sure. It seems like space marines would be incredibly easy to shoot down. They would be on a ballistic re-entry and must slow down without extreme g-forces before they reach the ground.
euroderf 12 hours ago [-]
> Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.
dzhiurgis 17 hours ago [-]
> potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
scared_together 16 hours ago [-]
I think for travel around Earth, supersonic passenger aircraft are more feasible than rockets. Even if we consider sonic booms, a lot of routes where rockets would be desirable are across uninhabited oceans.
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
Somewhat agree. Boom has demonstrated something, but Starship looks more ready than them. Plus it's going to be vastly more faster and more impressive.
Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
dingaling 14 hours ago [-]
> Boom has demonstrated something
They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.
xboxnolifes 14 hours ago [-]
Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
iamgopal 17 hours ago [-]
He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space
verytrivial 14 hours ago [-]
He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
novok 18 hours ago [-]
He is talking about energy costs.
Enginerrrd 17 hours ago [-]
Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
toasty228 13 hours ago [-]
Grifter gonna grift
Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce.
Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
-George Bernard Shaw
piloto_ciego 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
MattDamonSpace 17 hours ago [-]
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
piloto_ciego 17 hours ago [-]
I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow.
I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.
A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.
And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
runako 15 hours ago [-]
> the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now
Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
The history of international oil companies is instructive here. It takes many billions to build out oil infrastructure, and they're always one election/revolution away from losing it all.
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago [-]
Not arguing that this is “good” rather that this is the way things are now.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
> And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago [-]
You don’t get it. Sorry, this is an “is-ought” thing. Sure we could mandate this. But are we going to? Do the systems exist that would actually mandate this?
Looking at things right now? I would say no. We will see, maybe in up my own ass on this, but I see a pretty big set of changes coming down the pike. Adapt or die (as unpalatable as that may seem).
Dylan16807 15 hours ago [-]
If you don't mandate anything, then they're going to build the dirty one.
So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago [-]
Well, arguably from the get go an orbital datacenter would be better. If launch costs were low enough I would say that as much industry as possible should be moved off planet, and we should make earth into a garden?
Dylan16807 15 hours ago [-]
We're still doing all the mining and manufacturing on Earth, and there's so much empty land. The final product of self-powered datacenter is among the lowest priority of things to get away from us, and not an effective place to spend environmental mitigation money. And then when they re-enter they pollute pretty badly.
kelnos 16 hours ago [-]
It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
inglor_cz 14 hours ago [-]
I think Prospera and its kerfuffles with Honduras put a definitive end to the "islands" idea.
Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.
Admittedly it is not my field, but back of the envelope calculations in a sun synchronous orbit with the radiators pointed towards deep space seem pretty plausible with about 1.3 to 1.7 ratio of solar area to radiator area.
Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.
ccozan 9 hours ago [-]
Also, you have to iradiate towards a space area which is not occupied by Earth. Ideally you go to Lagrange points with the datacenter but not around the earth.
xboxnolifes 14 hours ago [-]
Is that ratio just for collecting the sun's energy. Or does it include using it?
Tostino 17 hours ago [-]
But you need a lot of fluid or gas to move the heat in that radiator system, whereas solar has the benefit of extremely efficiently moving power around at great distances through wiring or integrated bus bars.
And you need to get the heat away from the central point to the extremities of the radiator as much as possible. So you can maximize how much energy can be radiated away.
Seems like the weight of the system would be an issue with whatever gas or liquid you used to fill those radiators, but maybe I'm wrong...
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago [-]
Scott Marley’s got a video on it. The numbers work out.
"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley
tl;dr -> not impossible.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that was kind of a surprise. I always thought heat would be the big show stopper, but apparently not.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago [-]
You still have to ask someone permission on the ground. It’s not about the money.
Dylan16807 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, someone. Just a couple have to say yes out of so so many municipalities.
So I'll just say the same sentence again. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents.
bvcp 11 hours ago [-]
now scale it ti 1 terrawatt
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
Sure.
The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites).
The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter.
They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.
idiotsecant 17 hours ago [-]
Building datacenters in a medium where the main waste product (heat) is incredibly difficult to get rid of, there is zero opportunity for maintainance, and the fuel to get to site costs more than the site does. Makes perfect sense, spot on!
ericd 17 hours ago [-]
Does the fuel cost that much? Just doing some back of the napkin doesn't seem to bear that out. Looks like the fuel load is about $2M, and gets you 100 tons to orbit. I think an inference-optimized NVL72 GB300 rack costs around 3x that, >$6M. That thing eats about 150kw, call it 10 pallets of 30 500W solar panels. Each pallet's about a ton, and costs about $10k. Let's be conservative and say the radiator's about the same weight. In reality, they're not going to be using commercial panels with heavy glass facing designed to resist hail, so should be better than this.
But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.
ActorNightly 17 hours ago [-]
The model 3 was Elons last great idea (if it was even his). Since then, he has been wrong pretty much about everything.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
vanviegen 14 hours ago [-]
Starlink?
ActorNightly 13 hours ago [-]
Starlink wasn't technically Musks, Space X acquired a few companies IIRC. It also was developed around 2016, before Musk went crazy.
nailer 17 hours ago [-]
This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?
gamblor956 17 hours ago [-]
We had all those things without Elon Musk and the alternatives do it better.
senectus1 17 hours ago [-]
long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around.
you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol
My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
tsimionescu 16 hours ago [-]
Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators.
Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.
In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
Melatonic 17 hours ago [-]
I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere
But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.
drivingmenuts 16 hours ago [-]
Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.
We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
inglor_cz 15 hours ago [-]
"We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them."
US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous.
Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp.
Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
bvcp 11 hours ago [-]
elon musk isnt a nazi
drivingmenuts 8 hours ago [-]
Granted that he is not a member of the NSDAP, but he does support and encourage hard right-wing groups which attempt to fulfill roughly the same mission. His actions certainly meet the more modern definition of nazi than they do any other political description. While he has considerable wealth, his value as a human being is near-zero, in my opinion.
ulfw 17 hours ago [-]
I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.
parasubvert 16 hours ago [-]
What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws.
For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
thelastgallon 11 hours ago [-]
> What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws.
Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
flanked-evergl 14 hours ago [-]
Elon musk is not a scam artist.
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aaron695 17 hours ago [-]
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jiggawatts 18 hours ago [-]
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orwin 12 hours ago [-]
Solar panels in space are 5 time more expensive to build than on earth (not talking into account launching them to space), while being 5 to 10 time more efficient. They also degrade 5 to 10 time faster, not accounting for solar flares. Deorbiting solar panels (and satellites) is also a huge environmental issue, as I dislike heavy metal in my food (and you should too). It isn't a real issue yet because we didn't send enough up there for the quantities to be an issue, but idiots seems persuaded we should increase the quantity of heavy metal sent in orbit without fixing this issue first.
AlotOfReading 17 hours ago [-]
Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware as your chips fail (wasting that part of the resource budget) and the land hardware gets upgraded.
derektank 17 hours ago [-]
>why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead
The number of political actors that can stop you from building in Morocco (or confiscate/damage your invested capital once you deploy it) are numerous. The number that can do so in space? Maybe a half dozen. We’re already seeing states and municipalities in the US moving to ban data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them. Building in space faces no such procedural roadblocks.
The economics still seem like an open question, but if the demand for compute is high enough, space based data centers might be the only option
AlotOfReading 16 hours ago [-]
Let's not forget that physics confiscates satellites pretty quickly too. I realize I didn't say it explicitly, but I was assuming that this hypothetical land-based hardware would have access to only the same resources available to the satellites, namely sunlight and a network connection. That makes it somewhat less politically charged than a DC tied into local infrastructure.
notfried 17 hours ago [-]
If AGI were to happen, or if AI became a trillions-of-dollars-generating industry, you wouldn't want to have your data-centers which might be the most valuable thing on Earth be located in a foreign country. All this investment in infrastructure is not purely based on where the industry is now, but predicated by where those who are bullish about it think it will be in 5-10 years.
Paradigma11 14 hours ago [-]
How do you protect your datacenters in space from thrown stones?
MattDamonSpace 17 hours ago [-]
You need permission to do that in Morocco
Melatonic 17 hours ago [-]
I think Elons version is totally crazy but the idea of edge computer (maybe for latency or something) on each satellite above your head could make sense. It could even integrate well with larger terrestrial datacenters (like your example of Morocco) depending on use case
magicalist 16 hours ago [-]
> "We'll need thousands of them!
> Yes, they know.
> Starlink is already planned for a scale of tens of thousands of satellites.
Meanwhile Google installed that many TPUs yesterday afternoon. The idea is still stupid.
magicalhippo 16 hours ago [-]
So it'll be more like Hertzner[1] in space. Each node just doing its own thing.
Not sure about the cost perspective but, at least that makes more sense than a giant brick floating around.
issue is land based will still be cheaper. there are lot of cool things we can do in space, i’m not convinced putting data center is one of them.
jiggawatts 17 hours ago [-]
Elon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available.
The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
dullcrisp 17 hours ago [-]
Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
ericd 17 hours ago [-]
In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer.
Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
dingaling 14 hours ago [-]
> In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight
Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.
ericd 14 hours ago [-]
Right, sorry, I meant in the orbits they're considering for these - I think they're mainly considering sun-sync.
dullcrisp 17 hours ago [-]
How big is it? I have some space I’m not using, no pun intended.
ericd 17 hours ago [-]
How big are panels? If you get 60 cell panels, about 68x45 inches/1.7m x 1.1m. Our home array is 60 of those, 24kw.
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
piloto_ciego 17 hours ago [-]
You have to ask permission to build it somewhere. Nobody is going to stop you in space.
dzhiurgis 17 hours ago [-]
> Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.
troyvit 17 hours ago [-]
What are the benefits of a solar panel in space vs a solar panel here on Earth? I get that there's less "night" up there, and there's less interference from the atmosphere so the solar is more efficient, but is it that much more efficient that it actually makes more sense than solar panels on earth?
shaewest 17 hours ago [-]
Admittedly asked Claude, but improvements are estimated to be x6-8 improvements on energy collection
01100011 18 hours ago [-]
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
avmich 17 hours ago [-]
> despite his lack of engineering or technical skills
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
verzali 15 hours ago [-]
I have a physics degree. It is not at all the same thing as an engineering degree.
laughing_man 14 hours ago [-]
Presumably (hopefully) you don't stop learning when you leave school, though. A physics degree has always been viewed as a good basis for advanced engineering.
And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
avmich 17 hours ago [-]
I agree, but the idea that he doesn't have skills is still incorrect.
avmich 8 hours ago [-]
Correction: I agree he got into Stanford for material sciences. Still can not be characterized as having no skills.
tzs 16 hours ago [-]
> and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less
I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school.
Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
wahnfrieden 15 hours ago [-]
Yes that's why I said it matters less. Musk represents it as a BSc because it sounds more impressive even if it doesn't matter in his case which one it is. It's still something he misrepresents for clout though.
nomel 18 hours ago [-]
> Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no.
How much did he bring in that timeline?
dodu_ 17 hours ago [-]
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit.
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
inglor_cz 14 hours ago [-]
People fuck up. I fucked up three things yesterday. Fortunately I am not as known as Musk, so no one tears into me at Hacker News and my fuckups remain hidden.
Nevertheless...
"underdelivery."
Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
Forgeties79 18 hours ago [-]
Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense.
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
JackFr 17 hours ago [-]
I think it’s tough to stay grounded when you’re as rich as he is. (To be clear, my intent is to explain and not excuse the path he’s taken.)
fragmede 16 hours ago [-]
Not getting invited to the EV summit would have pissed me off if I were in his place. The Trump thing; it sounds like the government was going to go after him for various violations, and hitching his wagon to Trump was his way of getting out of that jam.
Forgeties79 5 hours ago [-]
I don't really care about what motivated him to behave this way if I'm being honest. He has poor impulse control and terrible social/political values. The damage and chaos he brought to the federal government is nearly impossible to overstate. Two of my family members lost their jobs for nothing because of their wild cutting, and they didn't even work for the federal government. A good friend lost a million dollar AI research grant because they had the word "accessibility" in their initial proposal (accommodating screen readers on computers, how woke and awful!) That's how far reaching his farcical "efficiency" endeavor was.
He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
Petersipoi 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Forgeties79 17 hours ago [-]
> Before he bought Twitter, you could be banned from essentially all the big social networks for bullshit such as "misgendering"
If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass.
You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.
whattheheckheck 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
christkv 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.
choilive 17 hours ago [-]
Stefan-Boltzmann law means radiative heat transfer in space is approx. to the 4th power of the hot side of your radiator. Typical space based radiators operate around 350K. If you can increase the hot side of the refrigeration cycle by 4x (1400K) you increase heat transfer by 256x. Create a radiator design that can operate at this temp (multi-stage Brayton loops, heat pumps, possible liquid metal final stage) with a large enough surface area and now a datacenter in space seems possible.
It's a difficult engineering challenge but physically possible, and Elon is no stranger to engineering challenges.
Some numbers: assume an emissivity of 0.85, assume no absorption from the sun, assume heat rejected from both sides of a panel, a 1m^2 panel will reject 1.45kW/m^2 @ 350K.
At 900K its 62 kW/m^2. Not a trivial amount of heat.
danbruc 9 hours ago [-]
How much energy does it take to pump the heat from a primary loop at a temperature tolerated by the silicon to a secondary loop at 900 K? If we pick 300 K for simplicity, would we not need twice as much energy as we want to get rid of just to raise the temperature? 2 MW to raise 1 MW from 300 K to 900 K?
choilive 5 hours ago [-]
Yep, the COP goes down as the temperature goes up, and at a certain point it's not worthwhile increasing the temperature.
tekno45 5 hours ago [-]
ELON IS NOT AN ENGINEER.
"Rockets should land themselves" is not a grand theory of physics. He had money and told smarter people to do it.
coppsilgold 14 hours ago [-]
I was actually curious about this myself back when everyone was chiming in about how it was physically impossible.
This is first and foremost an engineering problem as you need to design a system that will both tolerate high heat and be able to pump even more heat to the radiators. The high temperature seems to be the primary objective to design for unless launch costs become absurdly low.
saberience 10 hours ago [-]
It's not "impossible" but so hard, complex, and expensive that any "gains" you get from being in space are nothing compared to the costs you pay for being in space.
I.e. it's not worth it.
The cost of launching 100K servers, each of which needs 20m^2 each of radiator (for a single H200 server), or 250 m^2 for a GB200 rack!
Ok but these numbers are for a single server or single rack, now what about a standard cluster size of like... 50k GPUs?
You would need (with optimal idealized efficiencies) roughly 64000 m^2 of space to cool down your space data-center. That's 9 American football fields of double sided radiator panels! For a single data-center, and realistically there would be inefficiencies and wastage so it could end up more like 20 American football fields of cooling needed.
How's that going to work?
phren0logy 18 hours ago [-]
I was disappointed when this was not the command line prompt library
analog_daddy 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah same here. Isn’t it weird, thet i used to be a lot more excited about space travel however, as I grow older I am excited about things more closer to me. Still curious, but focus has shifted from great for humanity to will make my life easier.
Just feels more closer and impactful (to me).
icosahedron 18 hours ago [-]
Same!
similarboy 12 hours ago [-]
also first thing that crossed my mind!
danpalmer 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gpt5 18 hours ago [-]
Why is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like.
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
nomel 18 hours ago [-]
My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.
I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
ryandrake 17 hours ago [-]
People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.
ianburrell 18 hours ago [-]
This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.
Paradigma11 10 hours ago [-]
As a European my problem is that any additional success by Musks means more support for far right extremists that want to destroy the EU. Being against that is not moralizing or Tribalism.
philipbjorge 18 hours ago [-]
This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.
A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.
Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.
--
Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."
Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.
danpalmer 17 hours ago [-]
I hoped to get across that I still find this to be a nuanced issue. I like the content, I just dislike the discourse around it, which makes it hard for me to get excited about the content.
I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
stickfigure 18 hours ago [-]
Musk is not just "one of them"; the financial success of SpaceX is extremely unevenly distributed.
Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.
tastyface 15 hours ago [-]
Well, Musk illegally wrecked half the federal government and killed tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Now he spends his days boosting and funding white nationalists and far-right politicians around the world. Why does everything have to be "good" or "bad"? Because some things are just pure evil and need to be called out as such, as well as thoroughly boycotted if the wheels of justice are too slow to turn.
This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.
bigyabai 18 hours ago [-]
If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.
The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
Mars008 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
qsera 18 hours ago [-]
>people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits.
"People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you.
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it...
The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...
ghshephard 17 hours ago [-]
Just realize that Gwynne Shotwell is the driver for 99% of the day-day at SpaceX and you can ignore everything else.
danpalmer 17 hours ago [-]
This used to be my rationalisation, but my understanding is that Shotwell is the driving force behind the commercial and Falcon sides of the business and that there's a quite strong cultural divide between that and the Starship/Starlink side of the business which is driven by Musk. Apparently there's a lot of culture clash there.
kortilla 13 hours ago [-]
Culture clash between starlink and falcon has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard. Falcon only exists in its current form because of starlink and starlink only exists because of falcon. Starlink is by far falcon’s biggest customer and starlink enables falcon to iterate and try things nobody that cares about their payload would.
mrandish 17 hours ago [-]
It's funny because I when realized it was signed by Elon I immediately wished it had been signed by Gwynne instead (although I'm sure she reviewed it anyway). I just knew being signed by Elon would push responses to being (even) more about Elon and divided along partisan political lines.
Which, at this point, has already been beaten to death and is just... tiresome. While discussing the broad concept of space-based compute in general (outside of SpaceX, Elon, etc) can still actually be interesting.
GroksBarnacles 18 hours ago [-]
I'm with you. Everything government that at least still pretended to serve the public interested and greater good has been openly captured by individuals and movements concerned with some more selfish agenda.
nilamo 18 hours ago [-]
Weird AI photos on this article, too. Like, it's cool. Take pictures of the cool thing you actually have.
fragmede 17 hours ago [-]
Those aren't AI.
BenFranklin100 18 hours ago [-]
The after effects of DOGE has left the NIH in tatters. Staff has been gutted, grants are months and months behind causing research groups and startups to go under.
Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.
bigyabai 18 hours ago [-]
> the increasing use of NASA as US propaganda
NASA has been propaganda since Operation Paperclip, sadly. It's hard to politicize something that's always been political, even if Musk gives Peenemünde optics a run for it's money.
danpalmer 17 hours ago [-]
Of course, which is why I said "increasing". NASA is propaganda, but when the focus is on scientific advancement I can get behind that (as a non-American).
The problem is the recent shift away from science towards a more performative roadmap – getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around, at least that's how it's being messaged. Many pure science endeavours have been canned. And the Artemis missions have a strong vibe of propaganda to them with slick marketing designed to emphasise America.
I guess to sum it up: doing good stuff and being seen to be good because of it, is fine, but making a show of doing good stuff explicitly for show, while behind the scenes doing as little as you can get away with, is not.
ordu 16 hours ago [-]
> getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around
The first time around it was also about showing off US might. I don't think that something has changed much. Maybe wild Musk's lies are the only thing that was added.
18 hours ago [-]
narrator 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
emkoemko 18 hours ago [-]
umm we all helped? its called taxes... how do you think Starship is being funded ?
eagerpace 18 hours ago [-]
By an already super profitable SpaceX. The moon stuff is a drop in the bucket and only came well after success.
What other company would you rather see funding go to?
overfeed 18 hours ago [-]
> What other company would you rather see funding go to?
I'd rather not give any welfare-queen company another taxpayer dime.
eagerpace 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
overfeed 17 hours ago [-]
The framing was BS. "I protest being groped without consent by this one guy". "Oh, which other goateed, gold-chain wearing pervert would you rather do it?"
"None" is a full, and adequate answer.
eagerpace 17 hours ago [-]
We’re talking about rockets, not politics.
overfeed 15 hours ago [-]
I have zero interest in continuing this conversation if you think government spending is not "politics"
BoxedEmpathy 18 hours ago [-]
Mostly starlink
moralestapia 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brcmthrowaway 18 hours ago [-]
Found an investor in the IPO
BoxedEmpathy 18 hours ago [-]
I don't like Elon and I'm still going to buy into the SpaceX IPO
stickfigure 17 hours ago [-]
Why? Have you run the math and genuinely belive the future profits justify the valuation, or is your thesis that there will be greater fools?
Do you actually believe this data centers in space nonsense?
brcmthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
How does one do this?
TheServitor 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AntiUSAbah 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
slac 18 hours ago [-]
Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
mrandish 17 hours ago [-]
I was initially very skeptical about the viability of space-based data centers but after a couple hours reading papers, studies and summary technical assessments I realized there are a range of credible expert viewpoints from, "pretty unlikely" to "it could actually work". There at least appear to be plausible, though unproven, solutions to the most obvious drive-by objections I had off the top of my non-expert head.
Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
luke5441 12 hours ago [-]
I think what often gets confused is people saying it isn't viable with "it is not physically possible".
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
geertj 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think people are confused between the two. What’s happening is that drive by objections have no real way to assess viability. That calculation you ask for has line items in it that greatly depend on engineering optimizations that, unless you work in the field, are hard to estimate accurately.
luke5441 8 hours ago [-]
On those line items make the most optimistic assumption. E.g. use Elons Starship cost to orbit. Assume useful GPU lifetime of 6+ years. Assume max physical possible radiators etc.
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think you really need those calculations to know that it is always going to be less viable than a traditional data centre. It's like the idea about putting data centres under water.
I'm sure you can do it and you can come up with estimates over how much it will cost... but it's always going to cost more than not putting your data centre underwater.
xnx 10 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of things that are possible that make no financial sense.
saalweachter 7 hours ago [-]
If you spot Datacenters In Space as making sense, why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it?
Why not have SpaceX build datacenter satellites and lease them to XAi et al, or XAi design and manufacture satellite datacenters and pay SpaceX to launch them? Heck, why not start a third company which focuses exclusively on datacenters in space, buying services from one company and selling them to another, so they can concentrate on this rather specialized skillset without distraction?
How does SpaceX acquiring XAi help anything but Elon Musk's personal portfolio?
mrandish 4 hours ago [-]
> why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it?
I never said it did. My post didn't even mention SpaceX, Elon or XAI. I just shared that my initial drive-by opinion on space-based compute, as a general concept (regardless which company does it, when or how), was reflexively dismissive but after a tiny bit of research, it's now risen to the lofty epistemic level of "not completely ridiculous." And I discovered it's a much more interesting and complex question than I assumed, involving highly uncertain estimates of rapidly evolving technology, physics and economics.
For me the question starts more akin to "could a Dyson sphere ever be viable for human civilization in this solar system" than "should grandma invest her life savings in SpaceX this afternoon." But it seems some can't reason about the potential future viability of space-based compute independent of current politics, personalities, culture war or whether AI is a bubble inflated by circular deals. To be clear, I do think AI valuations are wildly over-inflated and propped up by financial engineering bordering on fraud likely to trigger a huge economic crash. But it can be simultaneously true that there will be hugely profitable AI businesses in 2035 and it's possible space-based compute might be viable for some company in 2040.
As for Elon, ever since I met him a couple times closer to the Paypal days, I've felt he's an eccentric, impulsive nut but that he's also a savvy, technically-minded entrepreneur with a sharp eye for opportunity who's compelled by obsessive, visionary zeal. And everything he's done since has been consistent with that assessment, from the successes of Tesla and SpaceX to his bizarre, self-destructive detours into politics, social media and AI. I don't understand why so many can't deal with the reality that a person can be deeply flawed and wildly irrational in some ways while simultaneously being highly effective and immensely valuable in other ways. Steve Jobs was a brilliant visionary entrepreneur yet also an asshole in his personal life who believed some crazy shit so deeply it contributed to his early death.
Teever 17 hours ago [-]
Putting a datacentre in space may be feasible but the scale that he's suggesting is really unbelievable.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
mrandish 17 hours ago [-]
> but the scale that he's suggesting...
Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"
johnsimer 9 hours ago [-]
Permitting/regulation issues
saberience 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah you would need 10-20 American football fields worth of radiators for a single data-center... so yes, it "can" work, but it's completely inefficient and unrealistic.
geertj 10 hours ago [-]
The plan is to launch a constellation of smaller AI sats not a monolithic large data center. The calculations I have seen actually have a smaller radiator area than solar panels. Scott Manley’s has a video on this where he goes into some numbers.
saberience 10 hours ago [-]
Scott Manley's video uses 20kw as a reference number which isn't even half of the power usage of a modern GB200 rack. I.e. not even close to the power usage of an actual datacenter. In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter...
Also, how is a constellation of satellites any easier in this case? They all need extremely large radiators, they all need maintenance, they all need high bandwidth communication.
If you calculate the actual cooling requirements for megawatts of server, you end up with needing many, many football fields of cooling.
It's nonsensical. Sure you can make the numbers sort of work for a single server, but a single server on earth costs MUCH MUCH less to launch, maintain, etc. So why bother doing it in space? We just end up with loads of unusable space servers as they gradually breakdown and cannot be repaired.
randallsquared 8 hours ago [-]
In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter...
Right, but SpaceX has already filed plans with the FCC to launch a million of them, which is to say, 10K of your datacenter units. Tying back to the article, this plan is definitely going to require Starship and airline-like operations.
Symmetry 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I don't have any doubts that this is something that can be done. But doing it cheaply enough to be worth while is the difficult bit. Elon does have reputation for delivering impressive things, but not for finishing them on the deadlines he sets.
saberience 8 hours ago [-]
Ok, how many Starship launches have there been so far? Ok, 11 tests, of which only one has sent a dummy payload. Of the 11 tests, you can say that the latest one was closest to a final (sort of) working version. So we're still very early in the Starship launch program.
Let's do the math on "millions of datacenters" worth of launches.
In fact, let's try and do it for a single 50k GPU datacenter:
50,000 GPUs at GB200 density = 695 NVL72 racks at 1360 kg (1.36 tonnes) each, so the racks are roughly 950 tonnes.
GPUS = 950 tons
85MW of power needed for the GPUs. Latest solar power panels give roughly 120-150 watts per kg. Let's be generous and say 150 W/kg. So 85 MW / 150 W/kg = 570 tonnes of solar arrays
Power = 570 tons
Thermal management (radiators). Real space radiators are around 12 kg/m² for a heavy deployable radiator and its support structure, though ISS radiators are 8 kg per square meter, or 2.75 kg/m² if we only consider the exposed panels. (Using 8 kg/m² for an estimate). 200,000 m² × 8 kg/m² = 1,600 tonnes of radiators
Plus working fluid (ammonia or similar), pumps, manifolds, redundant loops: 150 tonnes.
Radiators Total: 1750 tons.
Structure, Propulsion, Comms, Avionics, Attitude Control Systems, plus Margin. Hard to estimate but conservatively several hundred tons extra. (Actual spacecraft programs always add roughly 20-30% mass margin).
Extras: 750 tons. (being very conservative).
Total = 950+570+1750+750 = 4020 tons.
And note, this is for a single 50k GPU datacenter with all the numbers being skewed to most optimistic.
That would be 40 (!!!) Starship launches. So far we've had 11 launches total with none being successful (100% successful I mean). Each of those launches currently costs 90M dollars. And note, we are assuming a fully working 100 ton payload for Starship of which none of the launches so far have been close to at all.
So our full datacenter to space would cost 3.6B dollars (at current SpaceX prices)... (just to launch it, not to actually buy the equipment). And realistically would cost far more than that...
Note, this is for (by today's standards) a small datacenter with only 50k GPUs and I haven't included any testing, R&D costs, costs of "maintenance", station keeping, replacements, etc etc.
Let alone the question of huge amounts more satellites in orbit, risks of space junk, Kessler syndrome, etc etc.
db48x 6 hours ago [-]
You’re way overestimating the size of the radiators needed. Then you overestimate their mass, because the ISS has huge heavy radiators that operate at <30°C. A rack of computers can run at much higher temperatures and therefore need much smaller, lighter radiators. The radiators would be smaller and lighter than the solar panels.
randallsquared 6 hours ago [-]
I have a lot of miscellaneous quibbles with your assumptions and numbers, but even if you grant many of them, 40 launches is not many for Starship's planned cadence. HLS is going to require 10-16 Starship launches just to get it fueled enough for one landing, and they have to be close enough together to minimize boil-off.
saberience 4 hours ago [-]
BTW, for these numbers I was very much skewing them to be MOST favorable for SpaceX!
Happy to debate though! I love this topic.
amoss 9 hours ago [-]
Later in the video he runs through the changes needed for 100kw per rack.
saberience 8 hours ago [-]
Wow, one 100kw rack!
Dude, you realize that right now there are 100+s of data centers in construction around the world often in the 500MW to 1PW range? I.e. there are many, many datacenters (100s) in construction, right now, with 100s of MW up to multiple PW?
Scott's analysis is out by several orders of magnitude!
Everyone knows its "theoretically" possible to have a single server or a single rack in space.
The big and most obvious glaring miss is, how would it be economically viable and operationally viable to have datacenters in space which compete with datacenters on the ground.
We are experts are creating economically profitable (very profitable) datacenters on the ground, which work really well for inference and training, which are cooled really well, can be maintained easily, etc. The idea that we are going to have 100s of MW clusters or 1PW clusters in space, and they are going to be competitive economically, and we are going to be able to maintain them, and they are going to actually WORK (i.e. how will the networking be competitive with datacenters on earth), is frankly laughable.
Scott is totally talking rubbish on this.
foxylad 17 hours ago [-]
Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.
Tesla has been out competed in Batteries, EV's and Robots so this is his new move. He did something similar with his solar panel company put it inside Tesla and then it has almost disappeared from the news. He puts the AI company inside of Spacex makes up a lot of unrealistic numbers to pump up price and captures most of the stock gains from Spacex IPO by diluting others people shares.
Valakas_ 14 hours ago [-]
You make it sound like Tesla was a failure and he's only interested in capitalistic success, where if you've been following him for years you'd know this has been his plan all along. He built Tesla when electric cars were mocked and his plan was to push electric cars to be mainstream. To now say "Tesla has been outcompeted and so now he's doing something else [implied- to keep his power]" is to simplify and misinterpret the situation. Tesla has successfully lit a fire under the car manufacturer's world, to the point all of them started making electric cars.
msk-lywenn 8 hours ago [-]
He is so good at rewriting history. People buy it so much, it’s incredible. He didn’t build Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning did.
grey-area 15 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget solar city. There is precedent for this, it is how Musk operates and it’s far more about protecting his investments and letting him use the company for his own enrichment than what makes sense for the company.
etchalon 18 hours ago [-]
You forget that Musk has to make all the idiots who gave him capital for Twitter whole, somehow.
childintime 13 hours ago [-]
These datacenters in space will become space junk. Doesn't seem to be sustainable. With a million of these it's hard to imagine why this would be a good idea, and it starts looking like insanity.
msuniverse2026 10 hours ago [-]
The data centres are for the secret radar constellation masquerading as an ISP company that is Starlink
You are watching the slave grid being erected over your head
Shouldn't we be able to detect radio coming from SAR satellites? If SpaceX were to launch a cover SAR constellation, why can't they just use starlink as an excuse, why do they have to invent a new businessline?
kortilla 13 hours ago [-]
Nope, they will be in a low earth orbit that will decay and enter the atmosphere without maintenance burns
Oh, wow. I was assuming it might be about toxins released when they burn up, which seems implausible, but radio waves fry your brain? Seriously?
childintime 10 hours ago [-]
They'll all have a sun synchronous polar orbit.. I don't think they'll be very low orbit, unless they are like trains, at every 1km a satellite.
xiphias2 11 hours ago [-]
Not really, if you look at the plans, only a few hundred thousand satellites were planned in LEO, and millions over the Chinese satellites.
There will be a collision at some point, there's no real-time communication between USA and China satellite launches.
vzaliva 19 hours ago [-]
Reading reports of people objecting datacenters build in their states I wonder how Florida residents feel about the Spaceport ? It will certainly be more distruptive than datacenters.
chrisco255 16 hours ago [-]
Florida residents are extremely proud of space coast and have loved hosting rocket launches for 60+ years. Absolutely no problems at all with it. Will be great to see Starships launch from Cape Canaveral soon.
nik282000 18 hours ago [-]
There's only one Spaceport.
gpm 18 hours ago [-]
SpaceX has openly advertised their intent to turn starship into a faster long distance travel alternative to airplanes. Their intent, should all go well, is to have many, many, spaceports.
For their conventional space launch operations they also want multiple... to target different orbits, and to parallelize the high volume operations they anticipate.
There's already two Starship launch sites. The one in use in Texas, and one (LC-39A) in development at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. And there's good reason to believe they've begun planning a third in Louisiana. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64900.0
vjvjvjvjghv 18 hours ago [-]
Some people close to their facility in Texas aren’t too happy with the noise.
r14c 18 hours ago [-]
From what I understand about the Texas facility, SpaceX has also not honored their agreements regarding protected wildlife zones in the area. Damage from explosions is understandable, but they apparently not taken sufficient precautions to protect the surrounding area from their regular operations.
chrisco255 16 hours ago [-]
Noise never stopped people from moving to Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Cape Canaveral, etc in Florida. They been blasting rockets from there since the 1950s.
18 hours ago [-]
jdw64 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tristanj 18 hours ago [-]
A spaceport will probably use less water /s
On a more serious note, the Cape Canaveral area / Kennedy Space Center has a large amount of empty land to build space infrastructure. The island has been dedicated to space facilities since the 1960s. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have facilities there.
V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've streamlined the production, moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine (the first iterations looked like something out of the steampunk era), and they've simplified lots of fire/heat protection.
The Booster and Ship also got some major redesigns in the way they're handling fuel, the "thrust puck" (the area where the engines get mounted) and so on. It's also a bit taller, helped by the engine upgrades. TWR has also improved, with estimates at 1.6. This should be visibly faster to clear the tower and "jump" the launch.
They are also adding ~44tons of simlinks (starlink simulators, dumb payloads). So they seem to have improved the margins for orbital payload a lot. New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them. Hopefully we'll get to see outside shots of Starship from these things, on orbit. They've filed FCC paperwork for this, and they'll likely use it to inspect the health of the heatshield on orbit.
They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.
This flight will be still suborbital, testing payload deployment, booster return to a fixed point somewhere in the coastal waters, and the ship aiming for somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They've also removed some parts of hte heatshield, to test how it handles that. (on a previous flight the ship still nailed its simulated landing with huge gaps in it, from multiple tiles missing intentionally).
If everything works on this flight, the next one is planned to be orbital.
The level that they managed to fit everything inside of a simple-looking package was so high that the CEO of ULA (the Boeing/Lockheed Martin rocket company) thought they were lying when they first showed pictures [1].
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/08/40279896/spacex-presiden...
I'm not some kind of insider, though.
Just continual tweaks and refinement to keep slimming down the packaging.
First time I see it!
Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.
> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship.
This is from the dedicated flight 12 page, not this article. https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars
> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation.
> Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
Well - it's a tricky one because that is susceptible to slippery slopes. If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS, for example. We can always spend more on Earth to achieve a temporary boon for the current population. We could have not spent money on developing Golang and used the salary to dig wells in Africa, for example.
Spending a tiny amount on space for the chance of a permanent upgrade for the species does sound like quite a good idea, and I'm personally glad the American taxpayer is doing it.
For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.
I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.
But there are a few who have bothered. Here is one of the better ones: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas
None of those are self sustaining.
According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. But it was not, in fact, expected by anyone to be a permanent station; It is made of non-replaceable parts that age and fail (decade scale), it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#:~...
> It is made of non-replaceable parts
Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
> it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale)
I still don't see why self-sustainability is a part of being "permanent".
Since the ISS end of life is scheduled for 2030 - just four years from now - I really would not call it "permanent". Even if gets a few years reprieve, that's quite temporary.
> Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
Or can we at least agree that it was permanent at some point of its life?
> There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
Sure, but that's the case for everything, including permanent things. My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent housing.
No, the ISS never was permanent. It had a limited lifespan from the outset. It's actually beyond the original 15-year life. But it is not indefinite.
> The ISS was originally intended for a 15-year mission, but the mission has been repeatedly extended due to its success and support
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#En...
> My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent
That's true, in the sense that "A word means whatever I choose it to mean". If you were in a flat in an apartment building scheduled for demolition in 2030, would you call that "permanent housing" ?
I’m not sure the bases in Antarctica all have a set lifetime so it doesn’t really matter for the original point.
No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.
You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.
If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone
(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.
When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one.
To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.
However put a reason to go to Mars, i.e. alien shipwreck and there is going to be multiple cities within end of the decade.
Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.
We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).
But we don't know anything about the long term effect of 0g on human fetuses, which live in a very different environment than the humans we have tested. They live in an environment that combines fluid immersion and surface support, with buoyancy playing a major role -- which could (or could not -- absence of evidence etc) seriously change the importance of gravity for development.
I'd be more concerned about the impact of zero and low gravity on newborns than fetuses.
That's how reason works. "You can't prove there isn't a silver, bubblegum-farting unicorn living on the asteroid belt" doesn't make it true. Nor more plausible.
The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.
They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.
Competition does improve products.
I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.
I suspect BO not as far behind as you think.
Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:
Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.
snicker
And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.
Or lets say they are joining already anyway.
Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.
Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments?
I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection.
[0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-am...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
[3] https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constel...
Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.
Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.
But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons.
I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date
You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.
If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.
It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.
It's the same way that Sam Altman talks about the risks of AI deciding to kill humanity: because that's dramatic and attention grabbing, and also the most unlikely outcome. Talking about it keeps us from talking about the real, ground level problems like the massive, unplanned-for disruption in jobs and education.
They just need to keep the money tap flowing, and tomorrow can worry about itself. Who's going to hold them accountable for data-centres-in-space five years from now, when they don't exist? Has Musk suffered any blowback from his hyping the Hyperloop that never materialized?
Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.
You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.
One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.
The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.
Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.
250.000 * 5 square meter of area.
This alone increases the potential debris in space.
And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.
Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you’ll find that it must reject about 22kW of heat. That’s a fair amount, but at 65°C it can radiate it all away just using it’s own surface area! No radiator required at all!
Of course the power density of computer racks has been going up over the years. If you want to reach 100kW per satellite then they will need a modest radiator, but nothing extravagant. It would still be smaller than the solar panels, and far smaller than the ones on the ISS. And don’t forget that because radiated heat goes up as the fourth power of temperature, raising the temperature of the system by even a small amount raises the radiation emitted by a lot. If you design the system to run hotter you can minimize the size of the radiator. Most chips these days are designed to max out at 100°C to 110°C without lasting damage, although running them at that temperature 24/7 may reduce their lifespan. There will be some sweet spot in the middle.
And it turns out that a Starlink v3 already has a volume somewhat larger than a 48U rack. You talk about launching 250k satellites in order to have 250k GPUs in orbit, but that’s ridiculous. A real compute swarm will be hundreds or thousands of satellites each equivalent to a whole rack of GPUs.
But you’re not wrong to be skeptical. The economics might not work out even if the cooling is easy enough. It’s just that rejecting the idea takes a lot more than back–of–the–envelope calculations.
If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.
The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.
A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.
I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.
In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.
Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard.
This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to continue climbing, or give up and quit.
Your mileage may vary.
We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.
Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.
Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.
His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.
The first line of the post that you are supposedly replying to is:
> Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.
Unless is cost-comparable to a data centre on Earth, and I am told that it very much is not, then there is no financial feasibility for space datacentres.
And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.
If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.
The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?
And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.
You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.
Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous
The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive
This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.
A few datacenters could occupy some slots, but it would be difficult to accept a large number of datacenters obstructing such orbits.
If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately.
Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a physically-enforced type of commons, inextricably tied to tragedy if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.
Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.
Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.
SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.
When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.
Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.
This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.
In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.
We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A and specifically for the economics of AI vs surveillance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4
I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.
Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:
xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.
I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.
his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.
If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.
He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker
But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.
I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.
If they needed land a payload, they could stuff a dragon capsule in the starship, but the point is building something new.
Also, the ability to fly without crew and the willingness to have highly visible failures means they can actually exercise the heat shield to understand what works.
The places that are awkward to tile are the spots that need tile the most.
Soooo, how much did he put on that outcome on polymarket?
> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
I can think of all sorts of successful decisions that would definitely be stupid for a normal person to try, due to lack of connections, access to money, high risk, etc.
And maybe to expose my own lack of intelligence, I've always thought eg Robinhood was incredibly dumb. I never in a million years would have thought of the idea of creating an investing app, since there are already many of them, from far more reliable and trustworthy sources. And yet Robinhood has made its founders billions.
I get "The owner of this website (spacex.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (CY) from accessing this website."
They’ll be vague about capacity for a few years, and they’ll be building and acquiring data centers on earth “just while we wait for <breakthrough> that will unlock overnight massive scaling of the space data centers”. The timeline will always be “in the next year”, but no real workloads will run on the space GPUs for a decade. Then, finally, maybe, it’ll happen. Or maybe not, just like FSD. Always around the corner, never quite here.
And it’ll work for meme stock purposes, just like his other companies.
[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona...
The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
There are a lot of problems that can be solved by creating 20 other, much bigger, problems.
If you are Dutch, just take a one-hour flight to Copenhagen to see how a city can be absolutely plastered with national flags.
If Poland or France were introducing a new nationally produced rocket, they would certainly show their national flags around it as well. They definitely do so when displaying new weapons. So does Ukraine etc.
Accidentally, I remember the Dutch colors on every package of Dutch cheese I ever bought.
St. George's Cross has long been a symbol of racism in the UK and they've recently been trying to do the same with the union jack.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c626vxyxgj6o
That's basically what the logical conclusion of anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism is. If you don't think your culture is worth spreading, possibly through violence, you can't be very fond of it.
You can't say that the US should return the land to the natives and then say that US culture had a positive influence on north america. It's mutually incompatible.
I'm a big space fan, don't get me wrong. But your exuberance uh, needs tempering.
More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.
Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and prosperity is humanity itself.
What if expanding helps us coexist peacefully? Maybe being in a crab bucket with no frontier is part of the issue.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has nothing to do with business. They are selling you a vision — which can also come in a pill form, labeled "salvia" and sold at gas stations.
I still see people say the cybertruck is built for mars environments, conveniently ignoring the vast technological and economical barriers stopping us from driving commercially produced vehicles on mars. This space data center thing is the same deal. It doesn't matter how long it will take to solve the technical issues with cooling, radiation, maintenance. It doesn't matter if it will make economical sense or not. It doesn't matter if spacex will be the one to actually do it. You just have to believe, and give them some time — a lot of time, so much time that a monkey can type out Hamlet and type it out again backwards.
See also the buffoonery coming out of Bay Area "effective altruist" and "longtermism" communities.
However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.
That's the case on a pure "I could invest my money in something that makes a bigger profit now, and use that money to buy shares in the longer term bet afterwards" basis, but is even more the case when you factor in uncertainty. And "SpaceX's 2026 near monopoly of launch and the 2026 datacentre build rush will still be relevant once we're far enough into the future for inference chips to not need regular replacement and orbital megastructures to be cost competitive with ground ones due to the amount of orbital recycling going on" is pretty uncertain...
The large variance is in the projected market size, but I can see why people might be optimistic. Especially given SpaceX's success in Falcon 9 launches, gradually stealing stats away from the record-holders, who have been mostly Russia/USSR-based[0].
[0] https://spacestatsonline.com/rockets/most-launched-rockets
That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.
[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...
On a serious note, if you think that everyone else loses contact with reality, it's a signal to check and recheck your assumptions.
If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense.
However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).
Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.
The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.
Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.
With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.
Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more cost-effective cooling solution than pumping local water because "space is cold" are talking nonsense. Potential solutions don't look like trying to get 5000 engineers to invent radiators which defy the laws of physics, they probably look like amortising the costs over multiple decades of operation and ideally assembling the radiator portion of the datacentre from mass that's already in orbit, but that's not a near term profit pitch....
Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".
Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.
> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.
Sure, but you're missing the point which people familiar with spacecraft systems engineering are actually making, which isn't "radiators are a problem because they're hard to design" but that "radiators are a problem because it's hard to design everything else to offset their relatively large mass budget, and thus every other aspect of designing and operating an ODC as a profitable alternative to terrestrial ODCs is coupled to the theoretical limits to how low the radiator launch mass can be". The number of engineers required to design radiators themselves is totally irrelevant, but you can't isolate the radiators' required launch mass from the overall concept of operations and operating economics.
The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.
Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.
But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.
Given the current trajectory of battery and solar prices I just don't that space-based systems are cheaper in any way.
Of course there is a long-term aspect should we climb the ladder in the Kardashev scale: Once we used all solar radiation reaching earth we must move to space to grow. But that is decades if not centuries away.
So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?
Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.
Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.
Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.
Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.
'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems.
> So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisioning, cooling, automated scaling in space, and off-planet mining are all solved problems, that shitting on our planet will still be the cheapest most maintainable option?
Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly?
But the natural ecosystem thats your issue?
Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG. I would say we have enough space on our planet for a few hundred more years. Especially as we as a society are struggling anyway to expand as we are not even remotely able or capable of educating and handling enough people properly anyway.
'once provisioning' -> Until then lets provision on earth
cooling -> yeah lets just leverage the heat produced by these data centers as an affordable distant heating for housing first? What do you think how much people would enjoy a DC close by if they would get very cheap heating?
automated scaling in space -> how about we start automating earth?
off-planet mining -> you watched to much scifi at this point. Do you even understand how big the machines on earth are for mining? How much we have to transport them away? If you mine anything with a little bit of gravity, the more you mine, the more energy you need to move it around.
Do you even know how to refine minerals in space?
Yeah i think 'shitting' on our planet will be the most maintanbale and cheapest option as long as Musk is alive. Easily.
Even if space was cost competitive (which it really isn't), you basically throw away all the stuff up there (because retrieval is too expensive). Copper prices are already up by 300-800% since the nineties even without dumping the stuff in space.
Almost correct, yes.
Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.
There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.
If politicians ban datacenter construction projects, do you think they will take kindly of the process of building them in space? Rockets are really bad from an environment perspective. We tolerate them because we don't do that many launches and the negative effects are small on a global scale.
We already have more than 10k Starlink satellites, and there’s almost no outcry about that outside of astronomers, who are justified in their concerns… but politically irrelevant.
Plus, you can technically launch a satellite from almost anywhere if you’re not picky about the orbit, so you just need to find a single country willing to give you a logistically viable launch site. There are no international laws that would prevent, e.g., India launching 1 million satellites.
Manufacturing capabilities are quite lacking, though, in the short and medium terms, so this doesn't seem all that relevant.
Maybe a self-contained, modular solar panel / radiator / compute unit could be built, but it will be manufactured on Earth. (Where the fabs are.)
And it still seems easier to put solar panels and batteries near the data centers that SpaceX is already building on Earth.
Define “long term”. Nuclear energy is practically unlimited, plus fusion (if it ever works).
Going to mars or staying on the moon will be a Darwin Award-level adventure.
Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.
you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.
you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.
speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?
but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex
'all mass and energy available is outside of earth' Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.
I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.
Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.
I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements
I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.
But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.
Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at.
It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.
Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.
In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.
Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the building codes required to build a data center on Earth. These things all still apply underground, and underground is going to require additional shoring and structural engineering, to ensure that the structure is not crushed, damaged, and so forth.
So in this world vision obviously companies will start shipping iron ore and coal by starship from one coast to the other because it will be cheaper than trains. In fact all trucking worldwide would be replaced by space ships because they would be cheaper than trucks by far. I can't see how it will ever be cheaper to build a literal space ship and launch it than to put stuff on a train. This all reads like some super optimistic early 50's scifi.
You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
To orbit
Think of how short a distance "to orbit" is.
7.8 km/s delta-v, that's quite a lot.
>You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
Even if both are reusable a train will last decades and a starship will be lucky to get a few dozen launches, which is still amazing mind you. Maybe it is my lack of imagination but i just can't see how a diesel engine that pulls a metal box at 60mph will cost more per trip than a rocket that has to accelerate to 18000 mph. Even just fueling: a train runs on diesel which is easy to handle and everywhere. Starship requires cryogenic fuel and oxidizer which is inherently more difficult to handle.
Political, not technical.
Going to space replaces a domestic problem of angry locals with an international problem of angry governments.
> No, we don't have the power on Earth.
The power problem isn't meaningfully improved by going to space.
For every GW you put in a sun synchronous orbit to get permanent light, you need around 6 GW in the major world deserts given their cloud cover. But! The ones on the ground last 30-40 years, while the satellites are currently expected to get replaced every 5 years, so the quantity which need to be manufactured each year to maintain fixed useful output is actually about the same.
For scale:
The world installed 445 GW in 2024, and this number has a long term growth trend in the range of 25-35% per year.
If SpaceX's proposed million satellite constellation are each 25 kW modules, the total they need to launch is 25 GW, the ground equivalent is 25*6 GW = 150 GW, so we could deploy something of this scale on the ground three times over in 2024, and probably around 11-18 times in 2030 if trends continue.
And to pre-empt someone what-abouting night, between cars and PowerWall Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year, so provided they didn't need replacing more often than every four years on average this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, long enough to wait for the sun to return and supply enough to be charging rather than draining batteries.
Of course, America only controls one such desert. China has another, makes most of the PV and far more batteries, but America wants to treat this situation as a race against China.
Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
Unless someone figures out how to break the laws of thermodynamics there's never going to be a cost effective DC in space.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_equilibrium_temperat... A blackbody sphere near Earth's orbit balances out to almost exactly 0C. A sphere has about 4x as much radiating surface as capturing surface. A flat surface facing the sun that would have 2x, front and back.
They can. But in Elons case, its going to be his style of sending failure after failure up in the space, getting something working part time, lying about it and exaggerating how good it is, and then making fun of others for not using his inferior product.
Pretty much like everything else he has done.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of land to farming, restaurants and transportation of food it would be so much better if everyone just had a Star-Trek style food replicator in their house.
None of the tech exists but fuck it. Why bother with realities of life?
I am raising 200 Trillion Dollars for AI Space FoodX. Who is in?
yawn, people keep making this excuse on behalf of the South African investor with poor technical expertise.
tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession.
He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.
One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it.
That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps.
Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.
You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine.
The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.
Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.
I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?
What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.
Retrograde launch, with 20 tons of small objects (say 1mm radar absorbing ceramic ball bearings to cause maximum chaos and minimize even the theoretical ability to avoid the oncoming disruption). Dispersed into a wide variety of LEO orbits by ejecting them as the rocket changes orbit. You wouldn't deny the orbital sphere for very long, because small objects would drop out quickly, but everything in it would be destroyed.
There's 10k starlink satellites alone that could all be destroyed by this. Which is the right number of orders of magnitudes.
Admittedly you can't get far above that currently though, since there are only about 15k satellites in orbit... but a single directed energy weapon could destroy practically every satellite in every orbit instead of only the low earth orbit ones so as a log-of-portion-remaining weapon it gets those extra orders of magnitude.
Space is not a safe place - if you want to keep things safe you keep them on firm ground protected by the atmosphere. If you want to keep them really safe you put them below the ground.
Its will ruin it for everyone, but Russia or China is certainly able to do that.
Even in Russian nationalist circles, the occassional idea of shooting down current Starlink satellites is usually met with derision from the rest of the discussion group (see, for example, topwar.ru comments). That is just step too far, too dangerous.
Meanwhile, on Earth, you have a lot of plausible deniability. "Some terrorist group sneaked in and planted a bomb, totally not our people."
or a tweet calling it "very weak response" and lying about being warned in advance.
This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.
I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.
What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.
"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"
True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...
If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.
Being the first rocket in history where both parts reached the ground ready to land is a pretty good start.
And if Starship can't land then any space datacenters are just as or even more unlikely, so that explaition makes no sense what so ever.
I think if fusion is real, it might not be so advantageous until space mining is a thing.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.
My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.
Problems are:
1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.
2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.
3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.
Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce.
Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
-George Bernard Shaw
I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.
A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.
And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.
Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.
Looking at things right now? I would say no. We will see, maybe in up my own ass on this, but I see a pretty big set of changes coming down the pike. Adapt or die (as unpalatable as that may seem).
So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.
And you need to get the heat away from the central point to the extremities of the radiator as much as possible. So you can maximize how much energy can be radiated away.
Seems like the weight of the system would be an issue with whatever gas or liquid you used to fill those radiators, but maybe I'm wrong...
"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley
tl;dr -> not impossible.
So I'll just say the same sentence again. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents.
The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites).
The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter.
They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.
But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.
In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous.
Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp.
Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
The number of political actors that can stop you from building in Morocco (or confiscate/damage your invested capital once you deploy it) are numerous. The number that can do so in space? Maybe a half dozen. We’re already seeing states and municipalities in the US moving to ban data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them. Building in space faces no such procedural roadblocks.
The economics still seem like an open question, but if the demand for compute is high enough, space based data centers might be the only option
> Yes, they know.
> Starlink is already planned for a scale of tens of thousands of satellites.
Meanwhile Google installed that many TPUs yesterday afternoon. The idea is still stupid.
Not sure about the cost perspective but, at least that makes more sense than a giant brick floating around.
[1]: https://lafibre.info/hetzner/over-200-000-servers-in-one-pla...
The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.
Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school.
Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
How much did he bring in that timeline?
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
Nevertheless...
"underdelivery."
Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass.
You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.
It's a difficult engineering challenge but physically possible, and Elon is no stranger to engineering challenges.
Some numbers: assume an emissivity of 0.85, assume no absorption from the sun, assume heat rejected from both sides of a panel, a 1m^2 panel will reject 1.45kW/m^2 @ 350K.
At 900K its 62 kW/m^2. Not a trivial amount of heat.
"Rockets should land themselves" is not a grand theory of physics. He had money and told smarter people to do it.
This is first and foremost an engineering problem as you need to design a system that will both tolerate high heat and be able to pump even more heat to the radiators. The high temperature seems to be the primary objective to design for unless launch costs become absurdly low.
I.e. it's not worth it.
The cost of launching 100K servers, each of which needs 20m^2 each of radiator (for a single H200 server), or 250 m^2 for a GB200 rack!
Ok but these numbers are for a single server or single rack, now what about a standard cluster size of like... 50k GPUs?
You would need (with optimal idealized efficiencies) roughly 64000 m^2 of space to cool down your space data-center. That's 9 American football fields of double sided radiator panels! For a single data-center, and realistically there would be inefficiencies and wastage so it could end up more like 20 American football fields of cooling needed.
How's that going to work?
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.
Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.
--
Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."
Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.
I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.
This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.
The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
"People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you.
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it...
The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...
Which, at this point, has already been beaten to death and is just... tiresome. While discussing the broad concept of space-based compute in general (outside of SpaceX, Elon, etc) can still actually be interesting.
Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.
NASA has been propaganda since Operation Paperclip, sadly. It's hard to politicize something that's always been political, even if Musk gives Peenemünde optics a run for it's money.
The problem is the recent shift away from science towards a more performative roadmap – getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around, at least that's how it's being messaged. Many pure science endeavours have been canned. And the Artemis missions have a strong vibe of propaganda to them with slick marketing designed to emphasise America.
I guess to sum it up: doing good stuff and being seen to be good because of it, is fine, but making a show of doing good stuff explicitly for show, while behind the scenes doing as little as you can get away with, is not.
The first time around it was also about showing off US might. I don't think that something has changed much. Maybe wild Musk's lies are the only thing that was added.
What other company would you rather see funding go to?
I'd rather not give any welfare-queen company another taxpayer dime.
"None" is a full, and adequate answer.
Do you actually believe this data centers in space nonsense?
Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
I'm sure you can do it and you can come up with estimates over how much it will cost... but it's always going to cost more than not putting your data centre underwater.
Why not have SpaceX build datacenter satellites and lease them to XAi et al, or XAi design and manufacture satellite datacenters and pay SpaceX to launch them? Heck, why not start a third company which focuses exclusively on datacenters in space, buying services from one company and selling them to another, so they can concentrate on this rather specialized skillset without distraction?
How does SpaceX acquiring XAi help anything but Elon Musk's personal portfolio?
I never said it did. My post didn't even mention SpaceX, Elon or XAI. I just shared that my initial drive-by opinion on space-based compute, as a general concept (regardless which company does it, when or how), was reflexively dismissive but after a tiny bit of research, it's now risen to the lofty epistemic level of "not completely ridiculous." And I discovered it's a much more interesting and complex question than I assumed, involving highly uncertain estimates of rapidly evolving technology, physics and economics.
For me the question starts more akin to "could a Dyson sphere ever be viable for human civilization in this solar system" than "should grandma invest her life savings in SpaceX this afternoon." But it seems some can't reason about the potential future viability of space-based compute independent of current politics, personalities, culture war or whether AI is a bubble inflated by circular deals. To be clear, I do think AI valuations are wildly over-inflated and propped up by financial engineering bordering on fraud likely to trigger a huge economic crash. But it can be simultaneously true that there will be hugely profitable AI businesses in 2035 and it's possible space-based compute might be viable for some company in 2040.
As for Elon, ever since I met him a couple times closer to the Paypal days, I've felt he's an eccentric, impulsive nut but that he's also a savvy, technically-minded entrepreneur with a sharp eye for opportunity who's compelled by obsessive, visionary zeal. And everything he's done since has been consistent with that assessment, from the successes of Tesla and SpaceX to his bizarre, self-destructive detours into politics, social media and AI. I don't understand why so many can't deal with the reality that a person can be deeply flawed and wildly irrational in some ways while simultaneously being highly effective and immensely valuable in other ways. Steve Jobs was a brilliant visionary entrepreneur yet also an asshole in his personal life who believed some crazy shit so deeply it contributed to his early death.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"
Also, how is a constellation of satellites any easier in this case? They all need extremely large radiators, they all need maintenance, they all need high bandwidth communication.
If you calculate the actual cooling requirements for megawatts of server, you end up with needing many, many football fields of cooling.
It's nonsensical. Sure you can make the numbers sort of work for a single server, but a single server on earth costs MUCH MUCH less to launch, maintain, etc. So why bother doing it in space? We just end up with loads of unusable space servers as they gradually breakdown and cannot be repaired.
Right, but SpaceX has already filed plans with the FCC to launch a million of them, which is to say, 10K of your datacenter units. Tying back to the article, this plan is definitely going to require Starship and airline-like operations.
Let's do the math on "millions of datacenters" worth of launches.
In fact, let's try and do it for a single 50k GPU datacenter:
50,000 GPUs at GB200 density = 695 NVL72 racks at 1360 kg (1.36 tonnes) each, so the racks are roughly 950 tonnes.
GPUS = 950 tons
85MW of power needed for the GPUs. Latest solar power panels give roughly 120-150 watts per kg. Let's be generous and say 150 W/kg. So 85 MW / 150 W/kg = 570 tonnes of solar arrays
Power = 570 tons
Thermal management (radiators). Real space radiators are around 12 kg/m² for a heavy deployable radiator and its support structure, though ISS radiators are 8 kg per square meter, or 2.75 kg/m² if we only consider the exposed panels. (Using 8 kg/m² for an estimate). 200,000 m² × 8 kg/m² = 1,600 tonnes of radiators
Plus working fluid (ammonia or similar), pumps, manifolds, redundant loops: 150 tonnes.
Radiators Total: 1750 tons.
Structure, Propulsion, Comms, Avionics, Attitude Control Systems, plus Margin. Hard to estimate but conservatively several hundred tons extra. (Actual spacecraft programs always add roughly 20-30% mass margin).
Extras: 750 tons. (being very conservative).
Total = 950+570+1750+750 = 4020 tons.
And note, this is for a single 50k GPU datacenter with all the numbers being skewed to most optimistic.
That would be 40 (!!!) Starship launches. So far we've had 11 launches total with none being successful (100% successful I mean). Each of those launches currently costs 90M dollars. And note, we are assuming a fully working 100 ton payload for Starship of which none of the launches so far have been close to at all.
So our full datacenter to space would cost 3.6B dollars (at current SpaceX prices)... (just to launch it, not to actually buy the equipment). And realistically would cost far more than that...
Note, this is for (by today's standards) a small datacenter with only 50k GPUs and I haven't included any testing, R&D costs, costs of "maintenance", station keeping, replacements, etc etc.
Let alone the question of huge amounts more satellites in orbit, risks of space junk, Kessler syndrome, etc etc.
Happy to debate though! I love this topic.
Dude, you realize that right now there are 100+s of data centers in construction around the world often in the 500MW to 1PW range? I.e. there are many, many datacenters (100s) in construction, right now, with 100s of MW up to multiple PW?
Scott's analysis is out by several orders of magnitude!
Everyone knows its "theoretically" possible to have a single server or a single rack in space.
The big and most obvious glaring miss is, how would it be economically viable and operationally viable to have datacenters in space which compete with datacenters on the ground.
We are experts are creating economically profitable (very profitable) datacenters on the ground, which work really well for inference and training, which are cooled really well, can be maintained easily, etc. The idea that we are going to have 100s of MW clusters or 1PW clusters in space, and they are going to be competitive economically, and we are going to be able to maintain them, and they are going to actually WORK (i.e. how will the networking be competitive with datacenters on earth), is frankly laughable.
Scott is totally talking rubbish on this.
Is a good start
You are watching the slave grid being erected over your head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A See 1:38:00
https://engineerine.com/starlink-satellites-harming-human/
There will be a collision at some point, there's no real-time communication between USA and China satellite launches.
For their conventional space launch operations they also want multiple... to target different orbits, and to parallelize the high volume operations they anticipate.
There's already two Starship launch sites. The one in use in Texas, and one (LC-39A) in development at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. And there's good reason to believe they've begun planning a third in Louisiana. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64900.0
On a more serious note, the Cape Canaveral area / Kennedy Space Center has a large amount of empty land to build space infrastructure. The island has been dedicated to space facilities since the 1960s. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have facilities there.