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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 every 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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"
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Noise never stopped people from moving to Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Cape Canaveral, etc in Florida. They been blasting rockets from there since the 1950s.
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.
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.
> 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].
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/08/40279896/spacex-presiden...
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.
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.
I'm not some kind of insider, though.
"New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them."
Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.
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.
This is from the dedicated flight 12 page, not this article. https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12
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.
There's a whole book positing that a permanent settlement on Mars is unlikely to work, and I have not seen their arguments debunked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars
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.
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.
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.
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
We don't even have permanent settlements on Antarctica. Don't hold your breath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas
Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere.
None of those are self sustaining.
> 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".
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).
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
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.
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.
Plus insane storms and winds that I’m not sure Antarctica will properly simulate.
Antarctica might be okay as a demo site on that front; https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QK5M_UfofRU
Those "insane storms and winds" in an atmosphere with 2% of the density of earth's atmosphere won't be much of a problem.
> Permanent means self sustaining.
No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.
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.
There's an argument that Earth, as a biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere, also isn't self sustaining.
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.
America still isn’t self sustaining and it’s been hundreds of years.
And the planet is dying
The planet cannot die since it doesn't live. Planet life isn't dying either.
Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...
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
A single metal piece that contains plumbing inside it is simpler than a metal piece with attached pipes for that plumbing.
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 outcome is guaranteed to be entertaining
The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.
Competition does improve products.
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.
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.
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.
They'll remain behind as long as they keep copying SpaceX's concepts since they need to wait and see before they can copy.
I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.
Simple is harder than complex.
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...
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.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
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!
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?
How hot do you think black objects in space get? Something like 10°C. Look up thermal equilibrium of an ideal black body.
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.
So you can have datacenters in space, you are just not allowed to use them
But are they doing work internally that generates heat? Genuine question.
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
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.
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.
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. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely.
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.
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.
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.
Starlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.
I don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.
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.
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.
Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD
Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
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.
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.
Like the hyperloop?...
Like point to point rocket travel?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> awkward placement and notable gaps
The places that are awkward to tile are the spots that need tile the most.
Architecture in 68K. ROM. VII Design. Complex machines.
[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona...
The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!
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.
It's okay, Mars doesn't have much atmosphere. We can figure out how to bring them home later.
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.
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.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A See 1:38:00
Nope, they will be in a low earth orbit that will decay and enter the atmosphere without maintenance burns
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.
And it will impact negatively humanity's health.
https://engineerine.com/starlink-satellites-harming-human/
Not a single source to a claim in sight.
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?
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.
"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?
Why would he do that? A successful IPO is the goal. His shares will go sky high. That is where his money is.
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.
Page banned in my country apparently
What is your country?
One more week
> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
isn’t Monday the 18th?
Yes, the linked space.com article has an error. The launch is happening Tuesday the 19th.
I prefer to call it an unplanned calendar learning opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
[flagged]
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.
> 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.
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.
All share price fundamentals are based on the long term. Short term trading is why some shares are very briefly high or low.
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...
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].
[0] https://spacestatsonline.com/rockets/most-launched-rockets
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...
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.
"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.
> 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).
A lot of institutional investors get caught out all the time when they make mistakes about the fundamentals.
They also care about networking and connections.
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.
I love how in today’s quarter-based world a decade is now a “literally astronomical timescale”.
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.
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.
Yes, beyond the three things that are the hard parts it's easy.
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.
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....
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Space is cold. Space is also an excellent thermal insulator - there's a reason why Thermos bottles use vacuum for insulation...
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.
you are ignoring the scale factor, approvals for this much infrastructure is really hard and slow
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
how does the economics compare at scale building a persistent 24/7 supply of 1,000 gw isnt easy or cheap
It is certainly not easy or cheap, but doing it in space is harder and more expensive.
It’s like saying within 2-3 years the sun will go out.
Almost correct, yes.
> 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).
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.
> What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute?
Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.
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.
In the long term, the biggest problem is that space data centers are very hard to defend against missiles.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://terafab.ai/ has a diagram of the proposed satellites
"1 billion Tesla Optimus robots"
Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
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.
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.
As per another comment, power is a wash either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119298
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.
You can put computers underground. Cheaper than launching into space.
Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
"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.
> 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.
He didn’t found Tesla, he bought it then called himself founder.
That's pointless nitpicking, when he bought it it was so early you can easily say he made everything of it.
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.
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.
Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.
You are saying he got lucky? That doesn’t necessarily mean he will continue to be lucky.
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.
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.
I think you mean "luck"
I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
Well, that likely already exists as Starshield - not to mention all the pubmic SAR sats everyone has by this point.
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
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.
>hostile ... international governments
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?
SpaceX's launch capacity is an order of magnitude larger that all four of those put together.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An EMP from a high altitude nuclear detonation would do the trick.
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."
A cover is going to have a plausible enough sounding justification that you’ll believe and defend
Maybe coverage is directed outward from Earth ? It could be quite an upgrade to the "UFO" TV series SID (Space Intruder Detector).
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Oooh, yeah, this is going to be a key to it too, Gorgon Stare on steroids.
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.
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.
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.
I, and I'm not alone, would pay a giant pile of money to go into space for a holiday.
And yet space tourism ventures consistently struggle to be viable. Even SpaceX barely bothers with that market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 every 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.
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.
> The cost would be insane.
Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
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.
Not arguing that this is “good” rather that this is the way things are now.
> 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.
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).
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
How do you cool them?
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
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.
Is that ratio just for collecting the sun's energy. Or does it include using it?
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...
Scott Marley’s got a video on it. The numbers work out.
https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley
tl;dr -> not impossible.
Yeah, that was kind of a surprise. I always thought heat would be the big show stopper, but apparently not.
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.
You still have to ask someone permission on the ground. It’s not about the money.
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.
now scale it ti 1 terrawatt
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!
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.
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.
Starlink?
Starlink wasn't technically Musks, Space X acquired a few companies IIRC. It also was developed around 2016, before Musk went crazy.
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.
He is talking about energy costs.
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.
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.
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).
His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.
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
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.
"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.
elon musk isnt a nazi
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.
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.
> 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.
Elon musk is not a scam artist.
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?
We had all those things without Elon Musk and the alternatives do it better.
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.
> 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.
I have a physics degree. It is not at all the same thing as an engineering degree.
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.
The physics degree is a deception and perhaps fabricated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 (and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less)
And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
I agree, but the idea that he doesn't have skills is still incorrect.
> 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.
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.
> Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no.
How much did he bring in that timeline?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
Aerospace vessel, not terminal prompt.
I was also disappointed to discover this.
I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.
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.
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.
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?
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).
"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.
Almost any average factory floor in the U.S. has an American flag hanging somewhere. Sorry Europe doesn't have any pride in itself!
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.
Your biggest problem is watching the news. It is designed to make you angry. Meanwhile, I've never been prouder to be American.
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.
What? There are three flags flying in my street alone and I'm in the middle of the liberal bay area.
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c626vxyxgj6o
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...
>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.
The left (or center) did not "give up" on the flag. It's all over the place in protests.
Yay, go Elon!
What SpaceX has accomplished is just phenomenal.
Found an investor in the IPO
I don't like Elon and I'm still going to buy into the SpaceX IPO
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?
Spacex may be the most important company on the planet. What greater goal is there than expanding humanity to the stars!
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.
I meant unobtained goals.
More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.
What kind of echo chamber do I need to live in to be this ignorant?
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/measles-is-making-a-come...
A company isn’t going to fix stupidity.
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.
Figuring out a way to coexist peacefully before expanding any further.
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.
Looking after the humanity we already have?
Ok, but most of Blue Origins plans rely on off planet infrastructure so SpaceX can have earth and Blue Origin the rest of space.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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...
Just realize that Gwynne Shotwell is the driver for 99% of the day-day at SpaceX and you can ignore everything else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Weird AI photos on this article, too. Like, it's cool. Take pictures of the cool thing you actually have.
Those aren't AI.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I was disappointed when this was not the command line prompt library
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).
also first thing that crossed my mind!
Same!
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.
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."
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.
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.
There are a lot of things that are possible that make no financial sense.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.'"
Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.
https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
Is a good start
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.
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.
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.
You forget that Musk has to make all the idiots who gave him capital for Twitter whole, somehow.
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.
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.
There's only one Spaceport.
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
Some people close to their facility in Texas aren’t too happy with the noise.
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.
Noise never stopped people from moving to Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Cape Canaveral, etc in Florida. They been blasting rockets from there since the 1950s.
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.