Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:
Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part.
Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.
snicker
And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.
For reference: Starlink is <$20bn yearly revenue (a bit over $1k/customer).
Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.
Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).
You need a cell tower every 20 miles or so, less for a performant one. There's not dark fiber at that density in remote regions (remote is, by definition, lacking infrastructure). There's a better chance of power, and for the cases there's not, solar/battery is fine for a cell tower, especially one designed for lower power remote installations.
Packet loss is an assumption with cellular, so accommodations are built into all stages, including the variable rate vocoders used! And, a bit of packet loss is still better than literally no service, which was the previously, economically driven, state for these places.
There's a 20% increase in satellites planned, with possible 300% increase in the future, so it should reduce.
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.
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...
So you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]?
Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments?
I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection.
For china its a future investment. Its R&D, an image topic and its the job of a state anyway to do fundamental R&D.
Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.
Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.
I suspect it would be maintained at the same quantization that it's delivered: pods. Pod has some unresolvable issue (things would have to go real bad), then eject it.
What maintenance do you have in mind, specifically, in a modular system like this would necessarily be?
If the argument is that off the shelf systems, designed within a context where humans are a Jira ticket away, won't work well in space, then I can agree with that. But, I don't think anyone is attempting that. Datacenter in space doesn't necessarily mean "standard rack computer in space". Keep in mind that redundant and self-correcting systems already exist in modern GPUs, with active rerouting around dead cores, detected with a BIST, at boot! These kinds of things are standard in financial systems.
And you are right that is possible. But the question is not, 'can you build a data-center in space', but rather is it cheaper to build it in space?
A data-center no matter where has 100'000s of connections, each connection is a failure point. And things that go on rockets that shake to an insane degree need to have lots of special attention paid to each such connection.
Heating again is 10-100x more difficult in space, again, it could be solved, but again, is it cheaper.
Same for transport, transporting stuff into space is 10-100x more expensive.
Same for lifecycle management, 10-100x more expensive in space. You need fuel and move around avoiding collisions and so on.
Same for mechanical complexity overall, a standard server rack on earth is complex (see Oxide) a 'space server rack' is likely 10x100x more complex.
So basically you have to re-engineer literally everything from the ground up for a new environment.
So the question is what is the argument for why you should bare this cost. The only argument seem to be constant sunlight, and maybe regulatory. Regulatory is not looking like it will be much easier in space, launch alone is a huge regulatory burden.
So really we are comparing setting up enough batteries to survive for a night or getting another constant source of power with all the cost mentioned above. I know what side I would be on.
> active rerouting around dead cores
That still means you have a dead core in your system. All you are saying is 'lets pay even more to launch extra capacity in case part of it fails'. And that goes for every part from the smallest core all the way up to the largest subsystems on the sat.
Or you can just order a replacement when you actually need it, like when you have a data-center on earth.
It'll be neat watching someone try, to see what kind of innovations come out of it. I suspect the same learnings would apply to more remote terrestrial datacenter (icy regions, ocean, etc, where people don't like to be).
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!
So you are comparing putting up slightly more solar panels and some batteries, both things that are mass produced commodity with re-engineering the whole computing ecosystem and how data-centers have been done for decades, transporting them on the most expensive known transportation system and then operating it in a way where you need specially educated experts.
So my bet would be that just ordering a bunch of sodium batteries and a bunch of solar panels (or you know using a source of energy that is constant) is cheaper then going threw all the effort of putting things into space.
I have been following everything space for decades, and not once have I thought, wow putting super complex engineering things into space so easy and you should do it for things that have an easy alternative on earth.
while there may not be atmospheric weather, low earth orbit has its own "weather". Before you even reach LEO you start getting bombarded by all forms of energetic particles. None of these are things you want your computers saturated with
Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move some of the solar energy they absorb to a central location which presents problems in moving the waste heat back out so that spot doesn't get too hot. But that doesn't change the overall equilibrium temperature.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not? Any use of power turns useful work into heat (conservation of energy and all that), which raises the temperature of the satellite, until radiative cooling can equalize within incoming heat (solar irradiation).
You’re ignoring where the power comes from. Unless you take it up there with you (eg. nuclear material) it has to come from the sun, so you can’t use or emit more energy than the sun hit you with. You can move it around in space and time, but you can’t get on average hotter than a lump of rock in the same spot.
I didn't think of it like that. Does that mean all solar radiation is heat from when it hits a solar panel? I thought it would be something like solar -> chemical -> electrical -> heat.
You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.
If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.
It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.
I guess I'm curious: all the comments I see about this act as if the people proposing putting data centers in space are complete idiots. Do you believe they are complete idiots?
They're hucksters who know that adding "in space!" to a sales pitch is a free booster for tech enthusiasts.
It's the same way that Sam Altman talks about the risks of AI deciding to kill humanity: because that's dramatic and attention grabbing, and also the most unlikely outcome. Talking about it keeps us from talking about the real, ground level problems like the massive, unplanned-for disruption in jobs and education.
They just need to keep the money tap flowing, and tomorrow can worry about itself. Who's going to hold them accountable for data-centres-in-space five years from now, when they don't exist? Has Musk suffered any blowback from his hyping the Hyperloop that never materialized?
How many smart people worked quietly on Zuck's metaverse for years? How many knew it was never going to work at some point on the line to $70 billion wasted, but thought "hey, maybe I'm wrong, and it's an interesting job that pays well"?
How many smart people worked quietly at Theranos, knowing that a drop sample from a thumb was incapable of carrying sufficient blood volume for a legitimate sample, but thought "hey, maybe someone will figure something miraculous out that violates a basic tenet of my professional experience"?
Are there engineering reasons why the Metaverse wouldn't work? I thought it was more about the actual reality of the product, even in its perfect engineered form, still not being that appealing. Or most charitably being ahead of its time.
True, the Metaverse was a practical product failure, rather than an impossible-in-principle failure. Regardless, a lot of smart people worked a long time trying to make it work, and it was pretty obvious it wouldn't once Zuck demo'ed it and everyone saw a creepy cartoon world, which was all the bandwidth and compute at the time could support.
Grandparent is trying to argue that a lot of smart people working quietly on something confers plausibility upon the premise of their work (i.e., "they must know something you don't"). I've rebutted with two examples showing that large numbers of smart people working on something don't make plausible a premise that is obviously flawed for other reasons [*].
[*] (ETA) and is known at the time by the smart people.
I mean, if someone wants to pay you to do a lot of very interesting R&D that will never result in an alternative to ground-based datacenters, more power to you?
It might even be useful in other circumstances. Better radiative cooling systems, hardening commercial high-end compute for space, etc etc. R&D you can feel proud of, even if your bosses are only paying you to do it to fleece rubes who think it's the next trillion dollar industry.
If they’re actually serious about this, they could simply address the points about cooling that numerous experts have raised. But they haven’t done that, at least not that I’ve seen. I have no idea whether they’re complete idiots, and I don’t really care. Maybe it’s idiocy, maybe it’s hubris, maybe it’s a grift, I have no idea. But until I see a compelling solution to this known problem, or a compelling suggestion as to why they’re not sharing a solution, I’ll continue to think they aren’t particularly smart or serious about this.
What if it's actually not that hard to cool something in space, and y'all just have these beliefs about the people talking about this that make you think there must be something obvious they aren't thinking about?
The problem is, that person is deeply underinformed. For instance:
"you don't lose that much power through the atmosphere"
Assuming you can point the orbiting panels at the sun and remain direct, you lose 80% of your power through the atmosphere (from angle and day/night). On the ground you lose 25% even if your panel is directly below the sun pointed exactly at it, which is never the case in many latitudes.
And of course it's not trivial to radiate heat. But it's also a fairly simple mechanical problem. You pump the heat to spread it out, and radiate it. You've already got the surface area shaded by the panels (which is more than enough, because the panels don't absorb 100% of solar radiation).
Sure, you need a lot of them. Starship V3 is probably about to get us past 100 tons of payload capacity - even if they blow up a few first.
The key people miss is that you don't have to spend money on ongoing cooling once the thing is in space. This isn't going to save money now, but the cost lines are going to cross.
> Assuming you can point the orbiting panels at the sun and remain direct, you lose 80% of your power through the atmosphere (from angle and day/night). On the ground you lose 25% even if your panel is directly below the sun pointed exactly at it, which is never the case in many latitudes.
When people say "you don't lose that much power on the ground", it's in the context of cost.
So a solar panel is 5x more efficient in space. You solve that in the ground by buying 5x more solar panels.
Solar panels cost -- rounding up -- $10/kg.
Lifting things into space costs -- rounding down -- $1000/kg.
For the same amount of money, you can put 100X solar panels into a ground based array as a space based array. You don't lose that much power on the ground. You aren't overcoming that difference because solar panels are more efficient in space.
It's frustrating to talk to someone about this and get "they need to address these points" (which frankly, they have addressed) and then get "this will happen of course" when I point out that it will in fact happen. It feels like moving the goalposts to avoid saying "thanks for informing me of something new."
It's frustrating to try to have a discussion when any source contrary to the desired position is met with "this person is underinformed"; it's why I don't really bother with any "provide me sources or I won't believe you" on the internet. People don't believe you anyway, so why bother?
If you gather 1kW of power from the sun then you have to reject 1kW of heat once you are done with whatever computation you are doing. There’s a bit more heat absorbed from the environment since some sunlight strikes parts of your satellite that are not solar panels, but it’s not too bad. Starlink satellites, just to pick a relevant example, do not need a radiator at all because they stay mostly edge–on to the sun and they can radiate all the heat through their own surface area. The ISS needs big radiators because they want it to be comfortable for humans, but electronics can run significantly hotter than that.
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.
It’s very easy to overestimate the difficulty of cooling things in space, unless you actually run the numbers. So please follow along as Scott Manley runs the numbers: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.
Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you’ll find that it must reject about 22kW of heat. That’s a fair amount, but at 65°C it can radiate it all away just using it’s own surface area! No radiator required at all!
Of course the power density of computer racks has been going up over the years. If you want to reach 100kW per satellite then they will need a modest radiator, but nothing extravagant. It would still be smaller than the solar panels, and far smaller than the ones on the ISS. And don’t forget that because radiated heat goes up as the fourth power of temperature, raising the temperature of the system by even a small amount raises the radiation emitted by a lot. If you design the system to run hotter you can minimize the size of the radiator. Most chips these days are designed to max out at 100°C to 110°C without lasting damage, although running them at that temperature 24/7 may reduce their lifespan. There will be some sweet spot in the middle.
And it turns out that a Starlink v3 already has a volume somewhat larger than a 48U rack. You talk about launching 250k satellites in order to have 250k GPUs in orbit, but that’s ridiculous. A real compute swarm will be hundreds or thousands of satellites each equivalent to a whole rack of GPUs.
But you’re not wrong to be skeptical. The economics might not work out even if the cooling is easy enough. It’s just that rejecting the idea takes a lot more than back–of–the–envelope calculations.
What doesn't make sense to me here is that even on Earth, where we have an atmosphere to disperse heat into, we find that closed-loop cooling is too expensive and so use evaporative cooling.
If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.
Here in datacenters we use cooling systems to move heat away from the computers and out of the building. If each rack in the data center were outdoors and 100 yards away from every other then almost no cooling would be required. Just some fans to suck in air at the bottom and eject it out the top. Even less would be required if the individual GPUs were somehow separated from each other. Then we would truly be dispersing heat into the atmosphere with no cooling system at all.
Similarly, a satellite only needs a cooling system so that it can move the heat from the internal components outward towards the hull. A satellite containing a rack’s worth of GPUs might literally have heat spreaders that touch the chips on one side and the outer hull of the satellite on the other. Combine that with some heat pipes or something to spread the heat out efficiently and you hardly need anything else. A satellite the size and shape of a Starlink v3 already has enough surface area to dissipate something like 28kW at 80°C, and more if you run it hotter. If you want more than ~30–40 GPUs per satellite then you might need a small radiator to increase the surface area, or you might just make the thing thinner and wider instead. You’ll need more solar panel area anyway, so making the bus wider to match the wider solar panels is fine. The “closed–loop cooling system” you say is so unaffordable might be no more than a bunch of heat pipes. Or it might be an aquarium motor that pumps a few kilos of ammonia through some pipes or channels in the hull of the satellite.
I'm not rejecting the basic idea in itself. There is nothing in this idea which we as humans can't do today. No issues here. Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.
The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.
A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.
I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.
In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.
> The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently
True but not really relevant. All prior versions of Starlink worked well enough, so there’s no reason to suspect that v3 won’t.
> … it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small…
Irrelevant. Size is a weird measure here. You should ignore it because it is a marketing thing. All that is meant by it is that once the solar panels are extended they span a distance larger than the wingspan of a 737, nothing more. A Starlink v3 satellite has far less mass, interior volume, or complexity than a 737. I could get a long 30m rope and tell you that it was “larger than a 737”, but you wouldn’t be very impressed.
> A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.
Are you sure? That fits within the estimated power budget of a Starlink v3, but I was assuming that GPUs were denser than that these days. I’m not an expert though. I figured a rack would hold somewhere between 96 and 128 GPUs depending on whether they had to be in 3u or 4u servers. They would need between 60kw and 90kW of power, and would need a modest radiator. The solar panels would be far larger than the radiator.
> I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.
Ok, see, your problem is that you haven’t properly distinguished between different types of fiction. You put those three things in one category as if they were all equally fictional, but that cannot be true.
The first one is ambiguous, since the Space Shuttle was definitely a “spaceship in space”, so perhaps you just mean FTL travel like in Star Trek or Star Wars. By “travel gates” I assume you mean something like the eponymous gates from Stargate SG–1. Those are both ruled out by the laws of physics, and we can only tell stories about them because people willingly suspend their disbelief. Campbell said that a true science fiction story can only include one thing that requires the reader to suspend their disbelief. If it includes more than that then it is a fantasy instead.
But a Dyson sphere, or more accurately a Dyson swarm, is not an impossibility at all. If I can put one solar–powered satellite in orbit around the sun then if I am really industrious I could put ten, or a hundred, or a trillion. As many as I wanted and could afford, right? The laws of physics don’t say that a sun can only have 8 satellites around it, or any other number. Dyson knew that enough such satellites would eventually blot out the sun. They would absorb all the sunlight it could emit, and then the satellites would all emit infrared waste heat. If all of those satellites were doing something useful then whoever put them there would have a lot of useful work being done at their command. Even if it’s just trillions of GPUs making AI–powered cat memes, or simulating the minds of a bunch of human uploads, or even if they’re all just mirrors to redirect that light somewhere else, that’s a lot of power at our command. It is fictional only because it is an idea that nobody has actually gotten around to implementing yet. Once we’ve done it then it won't be fictional anymore.
> Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.
No one here is arguing that it isn’t. It might still be cheaper to build datacenters on Earth. But most of the people who say that it’s _definitely_ still cheaper to build them on Earth are overestimating the difficulties, and therefore the costs, of doing it in orbit instead. We’re getting to the point where launch costs are low enough that it is no longer a given that it is cheaper.
For one thing, actually building things in the desert is expensive. You have to build all the necessary infrastructure yourself. Roads, power, water, fuel, etc, etc. You might as well be launching everything into space! No, if you want it to be cheaper you need to build somewhere closer to home, like Ohio.
Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable. None of this is purely in the territory of 'known' impossible(like FTL travel).
Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard.
This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to continue climbing, or give up and quit.
My problem is not the doing thing but the economy of it.
We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.
Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.
Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.
His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.
> Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable
The first line of the post that you are supposedly replying to is:
> Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.
Unless is cost-comparable to a data centre on Earth, and I am told that it very much is not, then there is no financial feasibility for space datacentres.
More energy will be required than radiation absorbed by a spherical (ish) data center. You'll have massive solar panels piping energy in, and so the temperature would by higher than thermal equilibrium at that distance.
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.
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.
Yes they are crowded. There are engineering solutions to that, including formation flying based on absolute positioning and space tethers. It is a great time to be an engineer.
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 if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.
Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.
Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.
Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.
A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.
SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.
When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.
Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.
If COVID taught us anything, it's that logarithmic growth functions don't get no respect. They are so alien to so much of the population that you can't get real phenomena taken seriously, no matter how many grains of rice you pile on chessboards.
Every collision increases the chance of additional collisions.
"Weeks"? SpaceX is aiming to be within the guideline of 25 years for the intact spacecraft, with solar panels unfurled. The want at minimum five years of business operations out of it. Half a spacecraft is still going to be decades (if not centuries if they lose the panels), and small chunks of spacecraft years.
5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.
This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.
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.
They tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea.
We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.
On the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements.
Solar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.
The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.
Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:
xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.
I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.
his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.
If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.
He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker
That's a lot of alleged failure for one of the richest people in history. Maybe you should go start a car company and launch company and show us how it's done
it's an appeal to net worth and the argument that you don't become the richest person on the planet by being a massive idiot that everyone likes to paint him out as. he's problematic and sucks but he's not an idiot (in business)
I agree with you but he has also made many claims that are false. About hyperloop (where he also said it was validated by SpaceX engineers) but it turns out the original paper doesn't actually work. But Musk didn't try to do hyperloop of course so its kind of irrelevant.
The thing is, this is a massive expansion of AI investment. And AI has been the thing where Musk has failed consistently the most. Nothing he has done around AI indicates he has some special genius or insight.
The thing he had success with were things that were known to be good ideas, reusable rockets, electric cars and space based LEO communications. What he did is he brought together the finances and build a and lead a team to execute on them.
However, we are far away from that with xAI and Space data-centers.
"claims that are false" is such a broad statement and applies to basically 99% of business leaders, and probably 100% of anyone who's a household name. Elon gets that reputation 50x worse than, say, Larry Ellison, but only because when Elon says "revenues are up 12.5%" and it's actually 12.4%, there are 800 headlines the next day that he's lying and misleading investors and the SEC should investigate.
in the long term, elon has a very good track record for attempting to follow through with his stated intentions. sometimes things change, or he changes his mind, which is his right as much as it is anyone's. that doesn't mean "false claim".
"The thing he had success with were things that were known to be good ideas, reusable rockets, electric cars and space based LEO communications."
This is so outrageously not what history reflects. Elon started an electric car company when the entire industry very strongly believed both, individually (car and electric cars), are absolutely stupid, terrible ideas. And Elon did both at the same time anyway.
If you asked Hacker News 15 years ago if starting a rocket company was a "good idea" and a "good way to make a trillion dollars", you'd be hazed ruthlessly. Everyone in the establishment aerospace community said it was impossible or absolutely divorced from reality.
Elon, more than anyone alive, has been way ahead of the curve on good ideas when everyone else thinks they're idiotic. online payment processing, electric cars, reusable rockets
Just shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?
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.
Why? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.
Sry to say this, but I honestly just want a working shopping AI model.
I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.
I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.
Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)
If such an AI shopping thing existed, I wouldn’t trust it to do a good job. We consumers probably wouldn’t pay enough for it in enough volume to be the customers (Are you a Stitch Fix subscriber? Why not?). The fashion brands would be the customers and we’d be sold to them. The AI tools would tell you and show you that your skin tone really works well with a shirt from $BRAND who bid the highest that day, and the brand that can afford to do that won’t be one with low margins (aka: a good deal), it’ll be one with high margins, and that means some combination of cheap construction and high price.
I'm tall and thin. When i want to shop a sport shirt, i would go to Adidas (german company, german person) and would accept the brand markup just to get something 'stable' and more controlled quality control despite the shirt being a lot cheaper somewere else.
Despite this, adidas does not have a tall thin filter despite them selling tall thin shirts in shops.
I do not know why.
Now i have to start searching around what brands have this option to filter.
I do not know why ecommerce online is so shit at least it feels shit for me.
If AI would find something in that price range and it would just work, man i would be happy.
I actually worked in ecommerce, including clothing brands. In one company, we built our own bespoke ecommerce website, using third party software only for the fulfillment part. In another, we used Shopify.
Building your own is expensive, which is a stretch to cover with the margins of ecommerce and not go broke. And the off-the-shelf things are shockingly bad in their core functionality (e.g. Shopify, which may actually be the most developer-friendly and innovative, has no native concept of a color swatch that works the way you'd expect, nor does it have filtering other than by a single, painfully-manual, non-composable "tag" feature). Shopify's got a huge ecosystem of one-trick-pony "Apps" that add all the missing features, but running 50 "apps" doesn't fix things either - not only can they be fundamentally incompatible with each other, but nothing can fix the underlying deficiencies of the core data models (or if I'm being more charitable, their suitability for one's unique business domain).
Brands fit for the country of the store. For example, you won't find anything for a tall but not wide person in Singapore, except a few special stores, that won't be Adidas for sure. Unless ordering from overseas (and that costs nice money).
If giving the customer more filter/searching power was something companies wanted, Amazon's search result page wouldn't be like visiting a flea market.
I'm pretty sure what Decart is building does exactly what you want.
I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.
When i tried obsidian and discoverd that the data table thing was not build in but some plugin which has full access, i deleted Obsidian quickly after.
You're wasting your breath. It took me a long time to realize that folks on the other side of the isle had fully bought into the 'maximal short term interest' ideology of the business community. I no longer have very much to say to them at all.
I just think it's amusing that this is presented as a very bad thing in the context of Trump, but it's what climate activists have been seeking (only more so). When climate activists pursue this goal, it's presented as a laudable self sacrifice we must accept.
Because there is a gigantic difference between "I will now change the lives of everyone on the planet just because and in a very short period of time without thinking about any long term goals or consequences" vs. "we want the planet to be habital for our children and for everyone affected by this, lets start pushing for investing into renewable energy instead of just burning fossil fuels".
Even tarifs in general are not necessarily a bad idea, its a horrendes bad idea if you wiggle your thumb around, guess numbers from 0-100 and higher, let that be printed on a piece of cardboard and present it to the world as the current leader of the biggest co2 producer and military power on the whole planet affecting suddenly everyone.
Climate activists, as a whole, have not been able to materially affect costs positively or negatively, in any sector other than maybe TED talks and documentaries.
Inflation itself is not a good metric as soon as you leave the avg.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house.
The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for.
You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person.
You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
I contend any earnest 12-year old could ardently read this website for a month, do their own research on the side, and enjoy browsing this website. I dare say they probably make below the median income.
hey just because I am not making above median/average income doesn't mean I don't have the tech expertise. And HN is not that tech intensive. A movie recommendation for you - Good will hunting.
Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:
Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.
snicker
And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.
Or lets say they are joining already anyway.