SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

cbc.ca

60 pointsbillybuckwheat145 comments

Starlink has been so successful, it is facing a lot of competition in the next few years. Every major power wants their own, national starlink network.

China's state-backed starlink competitor GuoWang is putting 13,000 satellites in orbit by 2030. They've already started launching satellites.

China's Qianfan plans 15,000 satellites by 2030.

AST SpaceMobile is building their own network.

Amazon Leo plans for 3,000 satellites in orbit, and is already launching satellites.

The EU is building IRIS², explicitly as a Starlink alternative.

Russia, after realizing how critical starlink is on the battlefield, is building its own Rassvet network. They've already launched satellites.

Circa 2032: "Remember when everybody was going to launch constellations of thousands of satellites?" "Yeah, just like the data centers, only about 10% of that got built."

Sovereign ones are definitely going to happen. Direct to cell 5G (aka global IMSI catcher) and SAR decoy is just too good to pass up.

I'm a layman in this field, and I always thought that satellites were supposed to take a very small space in orbit... until I saw a GIF made from Artemis 2 ship. Satellites were big enough that could see the queue of them orbiting Earth in the GIF. Maybe they were the bigger ones and I'm confusing them with Starlink?

Small things can reflect large numbers of photons :)

The Artemis gif you are referring to only shows the satellites because the earth is eclipsing the the sun and they did a long exposure.

Those satellites showing up in the gif are briefly catching the sun at the perfect angle.

> Most people likely don’t think about how often they use satellite communications. But that Instagram post you made? You used a satellite.

This article seems to confuse Starlink with ordinary cellular communications

They also might confuse Starlink with GPS satellites which are completely different things.

Also some, or even many, people think that intercontintental communications use satellites rather than cables.

Facebook Messenger already works with Starlink - https://one.nz/faq/one-nz-satellite-frequently-asked-questio... so Instagram is probably not far off.

Edit: wow even apple music is included in this.

But this covers only a tiny fraction of people who use those apps. Most people don't send anything via satellite when using messenger.

The people who want to put data centers in orbit must be either much smarter than me, or much dumber than me, because I just don't get how that makes any technical or economic sense.

Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")

From what I've seen (Google paper, IIRC), it only makes sense economically if Musk's stretch goals for price/kg to orbit for Starship become true.

Technically it's fine, just take something like Starlink and use most of the power for compute rather than for comms.

But financially, it depends on price to orbit being extremely low; not just lower than Falcon, but as low as Musk's best public claims about what may be coming at some point.

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"

Land is expensive, water is scarce, people don’t want sound pollution anywhere near them.

Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.

Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.

You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.

If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.

With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.

In the Sahara there is plenty of space and plenty of solar. Any heat you can radiate away in space, you can radiate away on Earth. Or, more simply, dig into the ground and pump heat into the cool earth.

I wish you good luck in building a datacenter in the middle of Sahara.

It would be a hell of a lot easier than placing one in space. Much less thousands of them.

Remember that one satellite doesn't represent a data center, it represents maybe 0.1% of a data center.

In theory it "should" be much easier to build on earth, but in some ways it's just different challenges. On earth you're forced to deal with those pesky government things and in the Sahara not a lot of them are exactly reliable or good-faith actors. Then there's night time. So out of the gate, you're dealing with needing massive power storage for the night time.

So you invest $5b into a solar farm and data center outside of Tunis and 5 years after you finish construction a popular uprising topples the government and now you're dealing with new management? Nah, nobody is going to do that. And who's going to work there? How are you going to get data out of there? You're going to end up using satellite comms anyway. It's not 1953 any more and (thankfully) nobody is in a position to "Operation Ajax" your popular uprising when that happens too. I mean, maybe, but yeah, I would not do it.

Even in relatively stable places like the US or the EU, let's say you bought some random parcel of land in the New Mexico or West Texas desert region. Or even in Southern Spain or something. Even if you get the land cheap, with relatively easy fiber access (doubtful, but whatever), you're still beholden to the communities there. You think they have spare water to cool your facility? How are the schools for the kids of the engineers working there? You think that people are going to be head-over heels in love with Amarillo or Extremadura? The land is cheap because people don't want to live in these places, so picky people are going to steer clear. And at the end of the day, you're still going to have to get everything permitted, approved, stamped 80 times, and the project will grind on for months.

No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. You can park the satellites in a sun synchronous halo that lives about on the terminator, and just pull in power constantly and radiate directly away from the sun in the other direction. It's going to be expensive, it's going to be technically challenging but we will do it. Also, think about the California high-speed rail stuff. If you try to build on earth you're going to be permitted and social-media'd to death anywhere on earth you decide to build one of these. For better or worse people hate Elon. I mean, I understand it, he's kind of insufferable and his dalliance with politics was a bit of a disaster (seriously, USAID cuts are killing people), but he's certainly no moron and I do not think he's entirely un-selfaware. He knows that people aren't going to let him build these wherever he wants. You're going to have to ask for permission thousands of times, there's going to be social media campaigns to stop him, literally any screw up (his fault or not) is going to be loudly shouted to everyone. If he decides he wants to expand his facility, that's more permits, more restrictions, more permissions.

So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. Initially that was red states or at least relatively "non-hostile" states like where Tennessee, but even there people will squawk about it. I don't mean to say "squawk" to dismiss those folks, well, maybe I do, but I just think it's a bit silly in the context of us burning gazillions of gallons to bomb the Iranians. Nobody is going to do a damn thing about the climate or anything right now, and stopping data centers from getting built feels like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, but I digress.

Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. The technicians and engineers can live in California, or work remotely from anywhere really, and you won't have to deal with increasingly well funded and clever NIMBYs. The real challenge is going to be finding optimal launch sites for this stuff. Hilariously, my neck of the woods up here in Alaska is uniquely suited to launch into inclinations that would allow for constant sunlight. It's what, 98 degrees inclination for an SSO? So you can launch launch north out of Poker Flat and south out of Cape Chiniak. Though we don't have the infrastructure up here to support that out of Poker Flat yet. And nobody will squawk too loudly about it up here. I think those lunatics trying to slingshot satellites into space are trying to launch out of Adak too, so, hypothetically, that's an option as well other than the logistics of getting vehicles up here.

Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a book report, but these companies are not optimizing for cost savings right now, they're optimizing to avoid people telling them no.

>> No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there.

>> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone.

>> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical.

This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage. There is also no defense in space.

You think Grand Forks ND or Tempe Arizona is going to say, “we’re going to shoot down your datacenters?”

Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities?

Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t stand in the way.

Destroying a satelite is much easier than launching one, even with existing systems. Worse, given rate of improvements, I think we're going to get ground-to-orbit anti-satelite lasers before 10% of this constellation gets launched.

And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.

I do not think this is true? I mean, the point seems valid, but how many countries have ASAT capabilities? Then how many countries actually want to use that? Then even if we could get ground-to-orbit ASAT lasers (obligatory "pew pew"), then what countries will push that particular button?

I'm sorry, at least in this exact moment I don't see it. Even if france wants to bring charges against Musk, are they going to start downing his satellites? That seems like a leap. This kind of further illustrates my point. In space, you're literally kind of "above" the fray...

Solar capacity factor is 10-20%. So your state of the art chips are utilized 10-20%. That just makes no sense. Adding batteries help, but does not solve it entirely.

Batteries can solve it entirely, but they have a price for doing so which you can then simply compare to launch costs.

Almost entirely depends on how much it costs to deal with the ground having night, and if this is more or less than the cost of putting it somewhere that doesn't have night.

Both are already things that can be done in principle, the question is just how expensive the solutions are.

For scale: if these million satellites were 25kW each, that's 25 GW total; Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year between cars and PowerWall units, so provided they didn't need replacing more than every four years this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, so you'd just need to put this all somewhere without much cloud cover.

787 is vastly more expensive than Starship, but Starship uses 7x more fuel to get to orbit than a typical 787 flight. _IF_ Starship can achieve same re-usability as 787, then cost to orbit will be like $7.5/kg.

Perhaps the reasons are not technical. Perhaps it has more to do with jurisdiction, not being physically dependent (or susceptible) to any physical state.

It probably makes economic sense for a company on the scale of Google/Alphabet to spend something like $100M per year on the technology. There's relatively little downside (that amount is a rounding error compared to annual spending), the research involved might yield discoveries that benefit other projects, and the investment pays off if launch costs go down by 10x and/or the situation for terrestrial datacenters in terms of grid access, water, permitting, local opposition, etc. gets significantly worse.

There's economic case (or rather economics is not factor) for space force edge computing, but who knows how big demand that is. But it is 100% going to happen, and market can be fooled into conflating military economics with civilian economics.

The list of people saying they're going to put compute in space is getting long. Unlikely they're all dumb or faking it. It is clearly technically feasible but how the economics will develop is still unknown.

   Starcloud
   Axiom Space
   SpaceX (Starlink orbital data center constellation)
   Google (Project Suncatcher)
   Lonestar Data Holdings
   Blue Origin (TeraWave/Project Sunrise)
   Aetherflux (Galactic Brain)
   Kepler Communications
   Sophia Space
   Madari Space
   Adaspace / ADA Space / Guoxing Aerospace (China)
   Orbital (LA-based AI inference constellation)
   Atomic-6
   Planet Labs (with Google)
   Crusoe (partnership with Starcloud)
   Edge Aerospace
   Rotonium
   Lux Aeterna
   Star Catcher
   Loft Orbital
   Cowboy Space
   OrbitsEdge
   Galaxia (Canada)
   China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)
   Beijing Orbital Twilight / Orbital Chenguang
   Astro-Future Institute
   Space Compass (NTT + SKY Perfect JSAT JV, with JAXA support)
   NASA + HPE (Spaceborne Computer)
   European Union / ESA / ASCEND (Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, ArianeGroup, HPE, Orange)
   UNOOSA (with Madari Space)
   Canada’s Department of National Defence (with Galaxia)

Dumb and faking it and trying to sell the project to even dumber people.

How long until they turn a constellation into a giant LED billboard, showing commercials for Tesla?

Isn't that a scene in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy?

Red Dwarf.

A little more destructive pushing suns into supernova to write "Coke is Life" across the sky.

ASAP.

https://futurism.com/russian-scientists-huge-advertisements-...

Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it - the thought, at least.

Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon

I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism.

Let's assume two premises:

1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).

If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

But if you buy the two premises above, then what matters is whether orbital or terrestrial datacenters are better for the environment. And it turns out that, given the current energy generation mix, the CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters far outstrip the CO2 from launch.

A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.

So, if you care about the environment, and you believe/fear that AI will demand a lot of compute, then you should hope that orbital datacenter work out. If you really care, you might even help to develop them.

I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial. And assuming that the current mix of electric generation isn't going to become cleaner over time is an interesting take.

Current mix of electric generation is not going to get 37 times cleaner in 10 years. That's the ratio we're talking about right now.

But I do agree that the economic math is not a slam dunk. A lot of things have to go perfectly right for it to make sense economically.

But that's the irony: Orbital datacenters are much cleaner than terrestrial ones, and if we don't deploy them, it will only be because corporations care more about profit than the environment. You would think environmentalists would be the ones pushing for orbital datacenters.

> Current mix of electric generation is not going to get 37 times cleaner in 10 years. That's the ratio we're talking about right now.

Doesn't need to: because data centres are already power-constrained, the correct question is marginal new supply in each case.

If you build 25 GW of new data centres (which seems to be roughly the scale being proposed here), the options are (1) build more power plants or (2) have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts.

What are those new power plants going to be? Even though Trump hates renewables, they're now the cheapest new power source, which was already necessary to be even considering putting 25 GW of PV onto satellites in the first place.

This makes it a question of what's cheaper: over-provisioning and storage, or launch costs?

> I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial.

An orbital DC makes fiscal sense when the cost to launch one to space is lower than the cost to build one on Earth.

Key point: The cost of building on Earth will inevitably trend upwards as more restrictions & costs are (~80% rightfully) placed onto Earth-bound datacenters.

More restrictions and costs are going to have to be placed on satellites, too.

At present it's like railroad building across the Wild West; get some notional national 'permission' and then chuck them up there into a globally-shared space. That's not sustainable as the important orbits become crowded.

And that will never be true, so it’s meaningless.

It would also be cheaper to build one on the moon, if it was free to build them on the moon.

> And that will never be true, so it’s meaningless.

The math is simple: The total cost for building on Earth is X, the total cost for building in space is Y.

If X > Y, building in space makes fiscal sense.

To say that it never happens, MagicMoonlight, requires X to always be less than Y, which cannot hold true forever. Eventually, X will grow to be more than Y, simply due to (rightfully placed) increased regulations for building on Earth.

> It would also be cheaper to build one on the moon, if it was free to build them on the moon.

Arguably, that should be the original goal: Build the DC on the moon.

The first premise is reasonable. The second premise is so outlandish as to require dozens of other assumptions, optimistic outcomes for launch, and pessimistic views on the cost of earthbound systems.

I care about the environment and I think we can keep earthbound systems, and also reduce their impact. Making assumptions about the feasibility of launch and the economic absurdity of orbital compute, but not affording the same assumptions for what could be done for earthbound systems, is confusing?

And no, orbital compute is absolutely not far lower than earthbound in co2 cost. Because it doesn't exist at any scale. All orbital compute is solely dedicated to switching where it is best served. If you were to spitball numbers, are we even willing to assume orbital matches earthbound in compute total, dollar cost, uptime, or any beneficial metric?

The only metric I see is just slinging silicon into space.

I get skepticism that orbital datacenters will make sense economically. It would not surprise me if they never happen.

But if they made economic sense, then they would be much more environmentally friendly. On CO2 emissions, we're talking about a factor of 37. That's not a small amount. Even a factor of 10 would be a major issue multiplied by terawatts of power. Sure, maybe Earth-bound energy gets cleaner, but it's not going to get 10 times cleaner before 2036.

> Even a factor of 10 would be a major issue multiplied by terawatts of power. Sure, maybe Earth-bound energy gets cleaner, but it's not going to get 10 times cleaner before 2036.

Currently we’re not on that trajectory but if we don’t get there we might be too busy with civilizational collapse to need space data centers.

It would require doubling the rate of 2025 renewable deployments on average for the next 11 years so technically and economically it’s feasible.

What aspect of an orbital data centre makes it more environmentally friendly than a terrestrial one?

There is already some trash flying around in space from decommissioned satellites. Reentering the atmosphere needs some energy to initiate the process and that was/is not always planned for. The combustion during reentry is producing CO2. This CO2 emission will scale up when the number of satellites is scaled up.

The alternative of collecting debris in space is discussed by some space agencies. I really don't think it is a good behavior from SpaceX to put more trash in space and let public money take care of the cleanup later.

Satellites below 500 km do not need energy to reenter. Their orbits will naturally decay from friction with the upper atmosphere.

CO2 emissions from reentering satellites is far lower than CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters. If you need 1,000 tons of satellite for a 100 MW of compute, you're not going to get more than 1,000 tons of CO2. In fact, you'll get much less since metal doesn't release CO2 when it melts.

1,000 tons of CO2 is negligible compared to 40,000 tons at launch and invisible compared to 1.5 million tons for a terrestrial datacenter.

orbital datacenters are the new vertical farming

> 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms)

That is one wild, batshit insane assumption. So much so that I did not bother to read the rest of your post.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thequantumcat/p/data-centres-i...

> A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2.

How did you come to 10 launches / 1000 tons as what it takes to launch a 100MW data centre in space?

> Let's assume two premises:

> 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).

> If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

I'm glad you said the final quoted paragraph; while it has always been difficult to tell which websites are accurate vs. slop, and moreso today with fully automated slop, I see claims the current rate is doubling between 15 and 3 months. Even at the slowest of these, 15 months, this gets 2^(120/15) = 256x growth in 10 years, which would raise it significantly above current total global electrical demand: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...

Not so: given that existing power capacity is already a constraining factor for new ground-based data centres, the alternative to be considered is not the CO2 emissions of existing average USA energy sources, but the CO2 emissions of new energy sources. This may be many things, but given that renewables are now the cheapest new energy, if politics stops renewables in the US it just means the data centres (especially at this kind of scale) aren't going to be in the US, but it doesn't say that they'll be in space specifically.

>>I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism.

The opposition is from people who have a brain and like to use it. And dont engage on Musk next cheap trick to sustain his chimerical stock valuations. A 100 MW datacenter in vacuum takes from you "put a man on the Moon" to "lets host Kubernetes on the Sun" :-))

Just to start, a 100 MW datacenter is a 100 MW toaster. On Earth, the waste heat would go into into air or water. In orbit, it can only leave by radiation. So you need a massive radiator area, plus pumps, coolant loops, structure, pointing, redundancy, and micrometeorite protection...

Then you need radiation hardened GPUs, DRAM, SSDs, optics, and power electronics and those are not going to magically become space rated because the pitch deck has a Mars picture on it. Also on earth datacenters these parts constantly fail. There was even some recent study of about 20% of GPUs failing within 3 years, and humans constantly have to replace them. In orbit, you would have space mission to swap the bad PSU...

If you make the calculations, at normal electronics temperatures, rejecting the amount of heat needs a radiator field on the order of 500 m x 500 m under ideal assumptions... Then you neede power, and that has the same scale problem. Meaning you need an enormous solar farm, but wait...what about the scenario of a eclipse? For 30 minutes without sunlight you need about 50 MWh of storage.

Musk is a moron, and this video of him explaining it as simply radiative is proof number 256 you can be an idiot, and a billionaire. And shame on Jensen Huang for not calling him out: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc?t=140

Who is paying for all this? Starlink revenue? I don't think so. To 100x what they've done over the last ten years and also fund it with money they're not being paid by others is implausible. They've got money, but they don't have THAT much money. They'd need to significantly juice up the whole rest of their business to not just be substantially more profitable, but also launch far more payloads. Does that much demand (for SpaceX) to get stuff into space even exist?

Satellites for surveillance purposes. Budget is infinite.

More than they're launching now? It's not like a surveillance payload costs dramatically more to launch than a non-surveillance payload. Even the US doesn't have that many satellites to launch.

And Europe isn’t going to buy surveillance from a company that will pull the plug if we end up in a shooting war with Russia.

> Budget is infinite.

A fantastic way to break your economy. Even the extra half trillion/year Trump wants to spend on the military is increasing investor concern about buying US treasury bills.

isn't the IPO a way to get tons of money?

I've seen it suggested that the IPO they're targeting (plus the similarly-timed ones from OpenAI and Anthropic) may be so high as to break the financial system. Investors need to have a trillion dollars available to invest if the stuff being added to the market is going to be worth a trillion dollars.

(Phrased that way because while I hear they're targeting 1.5T valuation that doesn't mean they'll be selling 1.5T of shares).

Not a million satellites of money

Relevant : https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

March 8th story OP?

Some previous discussion:

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598415

Part of this announcement:

xAI joins SpaceX

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

So there must be a big story for the IPO….Remember that Tesla is still not selling actual/real self driving cars. I would say stock wise it would worth it to gable b/c Tesla did so well but SpaceX is being IPO-ed as it would have already have datacenters in space and ride hailing to Mars

Let me fix your title:

SpaceX wants investors to think that they will be able to launch millions of satellites.

Yeah I remember reading that what killed the space industry in the 90s-2000s other than the collapse of the USSR and cessation of great power competition was the massive move to digital communications, particularly satellite TV - which mean that a smaller number of satellites could serve the expected demand.

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

They launched a grand total of ~10k starlink satellite, there is a long road between 10k and a million.

Musk would be "the most credible" at claiming he'll have 1000 trillion dollar by 2050, it doesn't mean it's credible at all.

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today.

10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

> They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit

They seem to have constructed a rocket that consistently gets heavier and more complex and more expensive and farthrt behind schedule and hasn't demonstrated specified payload.

IOW it ain't better than falcon heavy.

I checked the publicly released stats over Starship's development, and this is what I found: compared with the initial ~5,000 t / ~73.5 MN concept, the latest V3-class Starship/Super Heavy is trending toward roughly 35%+ more loaded propellant mass and about 40% more maximum liftoff thrust if you use the FAA’s ~103 MN figure. Payload capability has also moved upward from the early 100+ t reusable LEO baseline to SpaceX’s current public claim of up to 150 t fully reusable and 250 t expendable.

When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.

You got a different rocket equation?

Pretty sure they mean that Starship is not working reliably yet

Starship has never met claimed specs and capabilities. It is so far behind schedule that it won't meet specs in time to remain relevant. Which is a generous way of saying it never will.

It's always a good laugh when I run into some old comment or video talking like this about Falcon. Thunderfoot is a hoot.

I'd say Starship is already priced in. That's the step to go from 10k (1%) to 10%.

Wonder what will be the next step.

Agreed. They're already stretching starship. And there's long been talk of a wider version yet. Starship is already pretty impressive considering it's just about exactly the size of Sea Dragon.

While true, this is insufficient to make the new claim credible. If the proposed satellites only weighed 100kg and remain on orbit for 3 years, to keep a million up requires:

  (150 metric tons/100kg) = 1500 satellites per Starship launch
  1e6/1500 = 666 launches per MTBF (3 years)
  666/(3 years) = 222 Starship launches/year

This is significantly higher than even the current cadence of Falcons.

If the proposed satellites are to be 1 ton, the required launch cadence would be ten times higher.

They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

Approval doesn't mean achievable.

At this point, 160 Starship launches in 2026 would be close to every weekday.

They already have three launch sites for Falcon and can't do 200.

(Also see edit, my first post relied on Apple's autocomplete for maths and it used a short ton, plus point about these numbers corresponding to a mere 100 kg per satellite).

The 160 launches figure includes falcons. Seems like Starship fuels and flight tests faster than Falcon though. And if they manage to reuse second stages, then that eliminates a significant manufacturing bottleneck.

If you're counting Falcons, you are making my point for me: even with those, on three launch sites, they still can't get close to the minimum for an extremely small, to the point of being unreasonable, target satellite mass.

Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for space based data centres to be worthwhile.

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon.

If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.

The competition isn't other launch providers, it's not going to space at all.

According to Google, the price threshold to make space make more sensible than building on the ground is $200/kg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468

Without full reusability, the estimated cost for Starship to LEO is kinda hard to find (necessarily, given the design isn't yet finalised), Wikipedia says $100m/launch in expendable mode, and the SpaceX website* says 250 metric tonnes in expendable mode, which is $100e6/250 metric tonnes = $400/kg.

* at least it does at time of writing: https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship

They have launched zero times this year. 160 next year is not even slightly credible.

> ... data centres that won’t have an environmental impact here on Earth.

Really? I wonder how they are going to get them up there without rocket launches?

And getting them down. Or allowing them to come down on their own... I doubt that is entirely environmental impact free.

I wonder about the impact on our health of all the metals that will be present in the atmosphere after several months. For example, it is well known that lead in gasoline has increased crime.

LEO satellites come down on their own in a few months/years. 100 tons of metal burning in the atmosphere seems a lot, but it's barely the total mass of meteorites falling in 24-48 hours, actually.

Totally sidestepping the issue and refuting the words.

Regardless of how they fall, they still fall on the planet.

And this still ignores the massive atmospheric pollution of chemical rocket launch.

Space elevator would be a big help with launch, but the trash is still dropped on the ground, or in the ocean, in the end.

We're only starting to see and understand the damage. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/... https://www.science.org/content/article/burned-satellites-ar...

Leave it to the chainsaw man who has already become the millenium's worst killer, to wreak yet more sad havoc and ruin upon the sphere. What absolute trash, what a mad frivolous pointless ambition meant only to crowd out anyone from thinking of this enormous mass stupidity, destruction. Taking up/taking over of space, for no clear stated reason or value except to steal from us all, to deny & claim from the rest. Madness. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

Must has clearly stated the reason and value. You know that. You're just trying to be wrong because the internet told you you'll be a good person for hating him.

Giant space data centers, up where what couple particles there are bouncing around are already 1000 degrees.

It seems like an incredible amount of pollution to make, to go lord over everyone's heads. This isn't a plan that has any empathy for the earth or reason, except to just deny everyone else access, to burn as much rocket fuel as conceivably possible. So no one else can. Just go build some terrestrial solar, please, thanks.

The man is the bloodiest butcher of the millennium and this is a vile stealing of shared human space. Your lack of actually saying anything and throwing random jabs my way to defend him is ignoble & distracting, adds 0 engagement.

His stated reasons for SpaceX and Starlink are to colonize Mars. Starlink is to generate money to pay for the rest of it. Whether that's true or realistic doesn't matter. It is what he said his reason is, disproving your claim of "for no clear stated reason or value".

A million satellites isn't going to be 100 tons; even if they're all on the small side, say 100 kg each, the total is 100,000 tons, therefore by your numbers if they last on orbit for 3 years they'd double to triple the mass rate burning up on aero entry. I think SpaceX actually talking about 1-10 tons/satellite making this more like 10-100x if they last 3 years, but between AI hallucinations getting and Musk's increasing disconnect from reality (let alone political toxicity) this is basically irrelevant. SpaceX won't reach these higher masses to orbit spread over this number of satellites regardless.

Aggravatingly, I have seen research estimating that even the much smaller number of satellites currently in orbit is already enough to be unstable with regard to a Kessler cascade, and any question about the realism of Musk's goals from finance and engineering limits is clearly not enough to prevent this kind of scenario. Which may result in other governments interfering with his ketamine supply to make sure their satellites aren't caught up in one.

Simplest helpful thing for the Kessler problem is "just"* have fewer larger satellites, and if Starship actually delivers the launch costs necessary to make space-based data centres worth the bother vs. just buying some cheap desert land, I anticipate Musk getting managed upwards by his staff in this regard.

* nothing in space is "just"

Misleading, because satellites are made of different materials to meteors. Satellites are the dominant injection source of 24 elements into the atmosphere, including Al, Cu, Ti, Nb, Co, Zn, Sn, Pb, Ag, Li, V, Hf, W, Ge, Mo, Zr, B, and Ba. This list includes many transition metals, whose catalytic effects on ozone and cloud nucleation are mostly unknown.

Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...

Sorry, you're right. My assumption was that, given meteorites are metal rich, and two orders of magnitude more mass, the human contribution was negligible. It turns out I was wrong.

Why are so many people just desperate to imagine environmental, economic, or social harm from any new technology or ambitious projects? Are you all just too old to enjoy the thought of an amazing future that's better than today? Or are you too brainwashed by the negativity in the media and think disasters are the only things that can happen? Or are you just bitter about life and can't have any hope? Or do you just feel smug being a nay-sayer to anything ambitious?

> Why are so many people just desperate to imagine environmental, economic, or social harm from any new technology or ambitious projects?

Rockets aren't new technology and they are not imagining the environmental harm. It has been known for a long time. It is just that with only ~300 launches per year (and about 35000 launches ever) the harm has not risen to the level of something that has to be limited.

A million data center satellites is a significant increase in that harm. Furthermore data center satellite are expected to have a service life of maybe 3-5 years so there will be an ongoing 200-370k replacements needing to be launched. That's 3.3-6.2k launches per year at 60 satellites per launch.

You need to quantify this "significant" amount of harm otherwise all you're saying is "doing any activity causes harm to something so doing more of that activity causes more harm" which applies to absolutely every activity. You would only point that out if you're feeling negative, not because it means something.

100 tons is quite a lot of gpus. If they manage to solve such "minor" problems as powering and cooling them they could run for a decade or so without consuming or polluting. The methane burned to get mass into orbit is trivial - a 500MW powerplant burns that much in under a day.

Yeah, that response trivializes the massive burn that power plants perform each day.

When I worked in a midstream gas company, I recall a meeting when we were explaining the business to some new IT folk, and talking about the plants that process 100K barrels. One new guy in particular literally dropped his jaw and said, "you process 100K barrels of gas a year??" The room looked at him like he was insane and the woman running the meeting politely replied: "No, per day."

So acting as if "it burns less than a power plant" somehow means it is trivial is just a really odd take.

Besides, the methane burn is one piece of the puzzle. There is more to environmental impact than just methane.

Yes it is trivial when humanity is burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and 300 tons of coal per second and 100 tons of natural gas per second.

The problem isn't GPUs the problem is cooling them.

Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.

Also they are not building them in 3D space with current tech. We clearly don't have it. Cars barely drive themselves in cities, they are decade behind building and maintaining a. datacenter in space.

ISS is not comparable, we don't have to keep GPUs in human-habitable temp ranges, and radiation speed goes way up with increased temps.

The difference in cooling rate between 290K and 370K isn't as large as you think.

About 2.6x? Making a radiator >60% smaller is a pretty big diff.

60% smaller than 'orders of magnitude way too bloody big to ever make a lick of sense' is still 'orders of magnitude too bloody big'.

You know what makes an even bigger difference?

Having a planet-sized place to dump all your waste heat into.

Do you think the radiator will need to be bigger than the solar panels?

> 100 tons is quite a lot of gpus

Is it? 100 tons of gb300 rack is ~0.04% of the expected 30GW of new data centers they want to build by 2030... 100 tons of gb300 gives you a measly 10MW data center, it's not even considered a medium sized data center at that point.

Not counting the hundreds of square meters of solar panels and cooling panels you'd need for each rack, you can easily multiply the total weight by 2-5x

They won't run a decade or two either, the failure rate at 3 years is ~50%.

And of course all of that ends up burning down and is completely un recyclable. It just doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how you look at it really.

It won't be possible to keep the solar panels in full sunlight 100% of the time, so you need batteries too.

The math don't math. Too many young dudes watched too much space opera with big heavy armored spaceships that rumble when they fly. Real space is lightweight and fragile. We don't make data centers out of that stuff.

At what point does the LEO space become too crowded? Is there some optimal density beyond which things are problematic?

This seems like a recipe for Kessler syndrome.

SpaceX wants to self-deal artificial demand for launches.

Well smarty-pants have you got any better ideas for selling the worst IPO the 21st-century?

Oh ffs ... how is the homebrew laser defense industry coming along?

Spec Priority: ability to attach said laser defense instrument to home telescope ... and enable user to blast those madafakkas out of the sky.

There is an upside: this may be the shortest route to eliminating any future launches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Sorry Buck Rogers fan bois, should have left this fantasy in the 1950s...

Mentioning Kessler syndrome, especially in the case of Starlink LEO satellites, is the classic midwit signal.

What makes you think they are talking about Starlink satellites? The 1 million satellites in the article are data center satellites.

They are supposed to placed on SSO, to avoid the need for energy storage, and that means LEO.

So, IEEE is midwit?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-space-debris

> ...space junk orbiting between 400 and 1,000 kilometers—where most low Earth satellites operate—is already unstable. And between 520 and 1,000 km, the researchers found, debris concentrations are at or near levels that might sustain runaway growth.

With regard to starlink:

> Starlink satellites orbit between 540 and 570 km altitude in multiple orbital shells

I'm sure it'll be fine once there are a million 8-/

I would have to say, elon fanbois are the most classic midwits...

Spacex will cause Kessler syndrom and bring the world economy down.

Meh. It's more like how else are you gonna set 10X the money on fire that Zuckerberg did with the metaverse?

As long as those satellites are in a self-clearing orbit (below about 300 miles of altitude), Kessler is not a concern.

I like that “not being able to use space for 25 years or more” is not a concern.

It is a concern. We have to ensure those satellites are in a self clearing orbit.

I think we agree but 300 seems too high to me. Maybe 250.

Should be banned. These companies are destroying a piece of the environment that belongs to all of us - the night sky.

Along that line people should look into BUG ratings [1] for outdoor lighting, especially city operated lights. [1]

[1] - https://www.landscapeforms.com/ideas/bug-rating-system-101

If you people were in charge in the 1800s, you'd ban the industrial revolution and we'd still need slaves for everything.

You don’t think there might be a better solution than having a dozen or more companies all launching thousands of satellites which all perform the same function?

Is there one organization you trust to run the space internet for everyone on earth?

Maybe the entire approach is inappropriate.

Jesus dude

Right, because not wanting the night skies polluted for someone else’s profits, with no fair compensation to me, is somehow the same as banning the Industrial Revolution? What exactly are we not able to do with terrestrial internet?

Banning Starlink is inadequate and won't change anything. China is building its own larger version with 25,000+ satellites. Russia is building its own network. The EU is building its own network.

Let's ban ads too, while we're at it.

Where do we sign?

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