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> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
Unless someone figures out how to break the laws of thermodynamics there's never going to be a cost effective DC in space.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_equilibrium_temperat... A blackbody sphere near Earth's orbit balances out to almost exactly 0C. A sphere has about 4x as much radiating surface as capturing surface. A flat surface facing the sun that would have 2x, front and back.
Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.
With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.
Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more cost-effective cooling solution than pumping local water because "space is cold" are talking nonsense. Potential solutions don't look like trying to get 5000 engineers to invent radiators which defy the laws of physics, they probably look like amortising the costs over multiple decades of operation and ideally assembling the radiator portion of the datacentre from mass that's already in orbit, but that's not a near term profit pitch....
Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".
Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.
> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.
Sure, but you're missing the point which people familiar with spacecraft systems engineering are actually making, which isn't "radiators are a problem because they're hard to design" but that "radiators are a problem because it's hard to design everything else to offset their relatively large mass budget, and thus every other aspect of designing and operating an ODC as a profitable alternative to terrestrial ODCs is coupled to the theoretical limits to how low the radiator launch mass can be". The number of engineers required to design radiators themselves is totally irrelevant, but you can't isolate the radiators' required launch mass from the overall concept of operations and operating economics.
The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.
Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.
But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.
Given the current trajectory of battery and solar prices I just don't that space-based systems are cheaper in any way.
Of course there is a long-term aspect should we climb the ladder in the Kardashev scale: Once we used all solar radiation reaching earth we must move to space to grow. But that is decades if not centuries away.
Manufacturing capabilities are quite lacking, though, in the short and medium terms, so this doesn't seem all that relevant.
Maybe a self-contained, modular solar panel / radiator / compute unit could be built, but it will be manufactured on Earth. (Where the fabs are.)
And it still seems easier to put solar panels and batteries near the data centers that SpaceX is already building on Earth.
yawn, people keep making this excuse on behalf of the South African investor with poor technical expertise.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of land to farming, restaurants and transportation of food it would be so much better if everyone just had a Star-Trek style food replicator in their house.
None of the tech exists but fuck it. Why bother with realities of life?
I am raising 200 Trillion Dollars for AI Space FoodX. Who is in?
you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.
you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.
speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?
but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex
'all mass and energy available is outside of earth' Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.
I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.
Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.
I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements
I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.
But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.
Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at.
It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.
They can. But in Elons case, its going to be his style of sending failure after failure up in the space, getting something working part time, lying about it and exaggerating how good it is, and then making fun of others for not using his inferior product.
Pretty much like everything else he has done.
Almost correct, yes.
In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has nothing to do with business. They are selling you a vision — which can also come in a pill form, labeled "salvia" and sold at gas stations.
I still see people say the cybertruck is built for mars environments, conveniently ignoring the vast technological and economical barriers stopping us from driving commercially produced vehicles on mars. This space data center thing is the same deal. It doesn't matter how long it will take to solve the technical issues with cooling, radiation, maintenance. It doesn't matter if it will make economical sense or not. It doesn't matter if spacex will be the one to actually do it. You just have to believe, and give them some time — a lot of time, so much time that a monkey can type out Hamlet and type it out again backwards.
See also the buffoonery coming out of Bay Area "effective altruist" and "longtermism" communities.
However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.
On a serious note, if you think that everyone else loses contact with reality, it's a signal to check and recheck your assumptions.
One of the assumptions I mentioned is "significant overhaul of economy is impossible."
That's the case on a pure "I could invest my money in something that makes a bigger profit now, and use that money to buy shares in the longer term bet afterwards" basis, but is even more the case when you factor in uncertainty. And "SpaceX's 2026 near monopoly of launch and the 2026 datacentre build rush will still be relevant once we're far enough into the future for inference chips to not need regular replacement and orbital megastructures to be cost competitive with ground ones due to the amount of orbital recycling going on" is pretty uncertain...
The large variance is in the projected market size, but I can see why people might be optimistic. Especially given SpaceX's success in Falcon 9 launches, gradually stealing stats away from the record-holders, who have been mostly Russia/USSR-based[0].
[0] https://spacestatsonline.com/rockets/most-launched-rockets
That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.
[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...
If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense.
However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).
Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.
In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.
Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the building codes required to build a data center on Earth. These things all still apply underground, and underground is going to require additional shoring and structural engineering, to ensure that the structure is not crushed, damaged, and so forth.
So in this world vision obviously companies will start shipping iron ore and coal by starship from one coast to the other because it will be cheaper than trains. In fact all trucking worldwide would be replaced by space ships because they would be cheaper than trucks by far. I can't see how it will ever be cheaper to build a literal space ship and launch it than to put stuff on a train. This all reads like some super optimistic early 50's scifi.
You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
To orbit
Think of how short a distance "to orbit" is.
7.8 km/s delta-v, that's quite a lot.
>You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.
Even if both are reusable a train will last decades and a starship will be lucky to get a few dozen launches, which is still amazing mind you. Maybe it is my lack of imagination but i just can't see how a diesel engine that pulls a metal box at 60mph will cost more per trip than a rocket that has to accelerate to 18000 mph. Even just fueling: a train runs on diesel which is easy to handle and everywhere. Starship requires cryogenic fuel and oxidizer which is inherently more difficult to handle.
Political, not technical.
Going to space replaces a domestic problem of angry locals with an international problem of angry governments.
> No, we don't have the power on Earth.
The power problem isn't meaningfully improved by going to space.
For every GW you put in a sun synchronous orbit to get permanent light, you need around 6 GW in the major world deserts given their cloud cover. But! The ones on the ground last 30-40 years, while the satellites are currently expected to get replaced every 5 years, so the quantity which need to be manufactured each year to maintain fixed useful output is actually about the same.
For scale:
The world installed 445 GW in 2024, and this number has a long term growth trend in the range of 25-35% per year.
If SpaceX's proposed million satellite constellation are each 25 kW modules, the total they need to launch is 25 GW, the ground equivalent is 25*6 GW = 150 GW, so we could deploy something of this scale on the ground three times over in 2024, and probably around 11-18 times in 2030 if trends continue.
And to pre-empt someone what-abouting night, between cars and PowerWall Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year, so provided they didn't need replacing more often than every four years on average this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, long enough to wait for the sun to return and supply enough to be charging rather than draining batteries.
Of course, America only controls one such desert. China has another, makes most of the PV and far more batteries, but America wants to treat this situation as a race against China.
So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?
Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.
Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.
Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.
Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.
'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems.
> So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisioning, cooling, automated scaling in space, and off-planet mining are all solved problems, that shitting on our planet will still be the cheapest most maintainable option?
Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly?
But the natural ecosystem thats your issue?
Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG. I would say we have enough space on our planet for a few hundred more years. Especially as we as a society are struggling anyway to expand as we are not even remotely able or capable of educating and handling enough people properly anyway.
'once provisioning' -> Until then lets provision on earth
cooling -> yeah lets just leverage the heat produced by these data centers as an affordable distant heating for housing first? What do you think how much people would enjoy a DC close by if they would get very cheap heating?
automated scaling in space -> how about we start automating earth?
off-planet mining -> you watched to much scifi at this point. Do you even understand how big the machines on earth are for mining? How much we have to transport them away? If you mine anything with a little bit of gravity, the more you mine, the more energy you need to move it around.
Do you even know how to refine minerals in space?
Yeah i think 'shitting' on our planet will be the most maintanbale and cheapest option as long as Musk is alive. Easily.
Even if space was cost competitive (which it really isn't), you basically throw away all the stuff up there (because retrieval is too expensive). Copper prices are already up by 300-800% since the nineties even without dumping the stuff in space.
Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.
The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.
Define “long term”. Nuclear energy is practically unlimited, plus fusion (if it ever works).
Going to mars or staying on the moon will be a Darwin Award-level adventure.
Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.
There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.
If politicians ban datacenter construction projects, do you think they will take kindly of the process of building them in space? Rockets are really bad from an environment perspective. We tolerate them because we don't do that many launches and the negative effects are small on a global scale.
We already have more than 10k Starlink satellites, and there’s almost no outcry about that outside of astronomers, who are justified in their concerns… but politically irrelevant.
Plus, you can technically launch a satellite from almost anywhere if you’re not picky about the orbit, so you just need to find a single country willing to give you a logistically viable launch site. There are no international laws that would prevent, e.g., India launching 1 million satellites.
Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.
tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession.
He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it.
That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps.
Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.
You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).
With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.
He did a great job building that company up, but is now ruining it with a series of really bad decisions and appears to operate more on hype than tangible progress nowadays.
Musk wants to be called founder and he's absolutely right, as he got in when there was still nothing. Not that I care, but if you want to criticise Musk there plenty of real stuff to do it. This one is at the level of "he inherited his money".
It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine.
The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.
Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.
I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?
What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.
Its will ruin it for everyone, but Russia or China is certainly able to do that.
Retrograde launch, with 20 tons of small objects (say 1mm radar absorbing ceramic ball bearings to cause maximum chaos and minimize even the theoretical ability to avoid the oncoming disruption). Dispersed into a wide variety of LEO orbits by ejecting them as the rocket changes orbit. You wouldn't deny the orbital sphere for very long, because small objects would drop out quickly, but everything in it would be destroyed.
There's 10k starlink satellites alone that could all be destroyed by this. Which is the right number of orders of magnitudes.
Admittedly you can't get far above that currently though, since there are only about 15k satellites in orbit... but a single directed energy weapon could destroy practically every satellite in every orbit instead of only the low earth orbit ones so as a log-of-portion-remaining weapon it gets those extra orders of magnitude.
Space is not a safe place - if you want to keep things safe you keep them on firm ground protected by the atmosphere. If you want to keep them really safe you put them below the ground.
Even in Russian nationalist circles, the occassional idea of shooting down current Starlink satellites is usually met with derision from the rest of the discussion group (see, for example, topwar.ru comments). That is just step too far, too dangerous.
Meanwhile, on Earth, you have a lot of plausible deniability. "Some terrorist group sneaked in and planted a bomb, totally not our people."
or a tweet calling it "very weak response" and lying about being warned in advance.
This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.
I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.
What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.
"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"
True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...
If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.
Being the first rocket in history where both parts reached the ground ready to land is a pretty good start.
And if Starship can't land then any space datacenters are just as or even more unlikely, so that explaition makes no sense what so ever.
I think if fusion is real, it might not be so advantageous until space mining is a thing.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.
My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.
Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
> For the same money you could spin up a bunch more QRFs and scatter them over the globe.
The argument Space Force could make is this would allow for higher talent density than dispersed QRFs. The same unit could also attack satellites or space stations.
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/space-force-specia...
Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.
There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.
Problems are:
1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.
2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.
3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
-George Bernard Shaw
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.
In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous.
Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp.
Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce.
Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.
A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.
And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.
Looking at things right now? I would say no. We will see, maybe in up my own ass on this, but I see a pretty big set of changes coming down the pike. Adapt or die (as unpalatable as that may seem).
So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?
You came up with an extremely arbitrary choice. I pointed out that if you were in a position to make that choice, you have much better options somewhere in between.
Then you talked about the more general idea of moving all industry off the planet, and sure that's nice but this is not the industry you want to start with, it should be one of the last ones you worry about.
If someone's offering to build space datacenters for free, probably go ahead and take them up on the offer. But if you have any influence on the decisionmaking, don't push for space datacenters, just push for non-polluting datacenters. You'll get better results for cheaper.
You haven't reasoned through any of this, you're saying that they "should" do something because it will be cheaper/better/whatever. And that's not how it works - it was never how it worked, but it was less obvious in prior times.
There aren't really any better options. Your bottlenecks are power, land costs, technical stuff, and bureaucracy. In space you basically shortcut all of those problems except the technical ones, and (and this is unbelievably important too), it brings the costs of other things you're doing on orbit down. Sure you "could" build data centers in Arizona or whatever, but they're not going to because they'd have to ask permission, it'd be a permitting nightmare, etc.
These guys are also thinking about opportunity cost. So, say you can build AGI++ you just need more compute. What is the opportunity cost of building terrestrially if it takes you 4 years to build this with an extra year for legal requirements?
Launches need permission too.
> And you're using words like "should" - should has no place in this discussion. It's an "is-ought" thing. You're saying "they should behave this way" and I'm saying, "they're going to behave this other way."
My "should" is a summary of the incentives if they acted reasonably. Without a crystal ball, don't be so confident they'll do something different.
And here's a version with no is or ought: Anyone whose goal is avoiding datacenter downsides, that could say "we forbid polluting and power grid draining datacenters here" but chooses to say "we forbid any datacenters here, go to space", is a moron. And anyone that doesn't have the power to say either is irrelevant.
> You haven't reasoned through any of this, you're saying that they "should" do something because it will be cheaper/better/whatever. And that's not how it works - it was never how it worked, but it was less obvious in prior times.
Companies almost always do what's cheaper. Your logic is incomprehensible here.
> There aren't really any better options. Your bottlenecks are power, land costs, technical stuff, and bureaucracy. In space you basically shortcut all of those problems except the technical ones
If the satellites self-powering counts as not buying electricity, then so does self-powering on land. Land in the middle of nowhere is very cheap, and so is the bureaucracy per acre when you're buying large chunks. It's less bureaucracy than rocket launches. And the technical stuff is a lot simpler on land than in space; suggesting you avoid technical stuff by using rockets is crazy.
> Sure you "could" build data centers in Arizona or whatever, but they're not going to because they'd have to ask permission, it'd be a permitting nightmare, etc.
A baseless claim.
When you're happy with the middle of nowhere, building on land only requires a handful of approved sites on the entire planet. That's very achievable, and achievable faster than it takes to set up the production lines.
Do you think the US government that's fawning over StarShield and the Golden dome is going to prohibit it? Of course not. And the permissions required for a launch or series of launches are VASTLY different than the permissions required to get something built. I spent my old life dealing with the FAA a lot. It's painful, but it's not terrible. You basically do their job for them by following their evaluation rules as you write your proposed operations up (they publish those in something that used to be called the 8900.1), then you wait and they stamp it or it goes through a series of revisions, but the time it takes is not immeasurably bad. Other departments and divisions of the government are not like that.
>And here's a version with no is or ought: Anyone whose goal is avoiding datacenter downsides, that could say "we forbid polluting and power grid draining datacenters here" but chooses to say "we forbid any datacenters here, go to space", is a moron. And anyone that doesn't have the power to say either is irrelevant.
I guess time will tell who is right. Still, the permitting costs and the time it takes will be the deciding factor in the long run. We're (that is the collective we as a people) are going to do this. We will have compute in space. Mark my words.
And "is a moron" is a bit of an overstep, unless you want to call the vast majority of people morons, which may be fair, but they're datacenters are the current zeitgeist's nuclear power plants in my experience.
> Companies almost always do what's cheaper. Your logic is incomprehensible here.
Opportunity cost is a big thing, and again, how many companies have you worked for? How many companies have you run? Just a window into my world. I just spent like 3 hours on the phone with the IRS today. It was cheaper for me to do that than to pay someone to do that, so I did. But I'll tell you, if I have to do this again I'm going to have my CPA do it. Time has a value too - it's almost more valuable than money. If you have to wait for the permitting process or just start launching datacenters ASAP, what's the "smart" choice? Well... I'd rather pay more now, and have that big compute without the headache than wait. I reckon it's not all or nothing either, we'll have space based datacenters and orbital datacenters and probably remote / rural datacenters too? But I bet we'll have them all.
We will see who is right here.
> A baseless claim.
Try to go get something big built somewhere, I dare ya. Shit, I live in Alaska which is notoriously permissive when it comes to development, I saw people TODAY on reddit squawking about a plan for a datacenter in the high arctic. I think the high arctic is a stupid place for a datacenter for a lot of reasons (basically most reasons other than cooling and cheap dirty power) and I don't think one would be built there for just logistics reasons alone, but people who will never go to those places (by the way, I've spent much of my adult life working in rural Alaska) will scream bloddy murder and fight tooth and nail to stop that project. I guarantee it.
How what kind of bandwidth are you saying a hypothetical West Texas datacenter would be able to get? How many batteries and how much solar? If you're going to take water from an already parched area, who has the water rights? You ever tried to get something built in the desert? These are all permitting hurdles that have to be stepped through point by point and approved by team after team of bureaucrats.
If the prize is "AGI++" or whatever we're calling super-intelligence in a few years, then the delay is more costly. But again, I just think, and no offense here, but you don't understand the logistical and permitting burden of building in the middle of nowhere. If you already own a rocket company, and you're launching something close to an orbital datacenter node already (starlink), then dealing with the permitting and stress from building outside Tempe, or the uncertainty of Tunisia or whatever is a nightmare. You're just going to go "up." And like I said, you can disbelieve me all you want, but I bet this is how things go. In fact I'm planning on it.
I bought land in the "middle of nowhere" last year to build our cabin on. I bought someplace with literally no-zoning/restrictions on purpose, but even on the land I bought I couldn't just pop up a multi-thousand square foot datacenter without a lengthy permitting process. Hell, even here in Alaska the permitting process for a running water is (rightfully) no joke.
I'm not trying to be an ass, but as someone who owns an (admittedly extremely small) business the opportunity cost of wading through the morass of paperwork and approval is just not worth it if I were trying to do something big. If I already had a space company, orbital datacenters would be the natural choice if I wanted more compute.
But again, we'll see who's right here.
And launching enough rockets to compare to such big datacenters not only needs flight permission, it needs a lot more launch pads. And you need big assembly lines no matter what, so you can't avoid land permitting.
The way I look at it, land for the actual datacenter isn't a delay. Start that permitting at an appropriate time in your process and it'll be done before you're actually ready to build.
But yeah, we'll see.
I'm also assuming designs with no water use for this hypothetical. For bandwidth, you can drag some fiber out there easily, and for big AI tasks you don't need a very high bandwidth to compute ratio. (If you needed tons of bandwidth space would also be a problem.) For batteries and solar, you need massive solar factories either way so this doesn't change things tremendously much.
> And "is a moron" is a bit of an overstep, unless you want to call the vast majority of people morons
I think most people would allow a datacenter that isn't using electricity from the grid, isn't consuming water, and isn't polluting the air or with noise. Am I wrong to think that?
https://wlockett.medium.com/the-spacex-xai-merger-is-a-giant...
But to you're point here, I disagree with this take:
> I think most people would allow a datacenter that isn't using electricity from the grid, isn't consuming water, and isn't polluting the air or with noise. Am I wrong to think that?
This may be uncharitable of me, but I don't think people will. People in the states generally hate AI. Hate it. And, frankly, most people don't know how any of this stuff works. They don't know how the inference gets done and they couldn't care enough to try to learn it. It's kind of like the meme "keep your government hands off my medicaid" that was going around a few years back. People just... totally don't get it and will hate what they hate. Even the people I agree with politically often are absolutely unable to envision anything other than the status quo. People can't even begin to imagine a world where there is no obligation or requirement to work. We could build that world and free ourselves from the tyranny of scarcity, but we're going to need AI to help, and the transition (what we're going through now) is going to be rocky.
Even now you can find people on here who say, "AI gets everything wrong" etc. People will fight musk building something simply because it is Musk. No other reason is needed. People don't actually give a damn about the environment. (this has been hard for me to swallow as an environmentalist at heart, even if I did work for an oil company for a bit). I learned this when I was doing some flying to some mines most directly. Which mines get opposed in the popular press? The mine that happened to be close to a place where a wealthy bank/family had property (a family lodge) that could be wrecked if the rivers got polluted. A hundred or two nautical miles away the same story was playing out with another piece of earth. That mine was unopposed because... well, nobody wealthy gave a damn and the people who inhabited the villages around it were poor. Why do people talk about ANWR like it's some sort of glorious beautiful location of resplendent natural beauty? Because someone said it once, and they're more stochastic parrot-like than the AI lol. I've been up there, lived up there, etc. I'd much rather we protected a few other places (especially some extraordinarily beautiful places that have been absolutely devastated by logging, but I digress), just saying, and ain't nobody going to go up there and spend time up there unless they need to for work.
That is more or less the level of engagement and understanding I expect people to have about this stuff. They read a few Musk tweets, thought, "good lord what a train wreck" (which is largely the right takeaway, to be fair), and will now oppose everything he does, even if it is actually something is probably good for the world. Generally, people don't care about where things come from, how their food gets here, the logistics, etc. I'm being overly broad, obviously some people care, but the amount is far smaller than you'd think, and largely, people will oppose datacenters in America because it is popular to oppose datacenters in America presently. It wouldn't matter if it was a datacenter dedicated to curing cancer and ending world hunger that was entirely sourced from green and conflict-free minerals, you'd have a non-trivial amount of people opposing it.
Now for this: >The way I look at it, land for the actual datacenter isn't a delay. Start that permitting at an appropriate time in your process and it'll be done before you're actually ready to build.
This is right in the "old world" way of thinking about it. Like, if this was the problem 5 years ago, this would be totally right. However, today these guys all view this as a race to AGI and more realistically ASI. If I had effectively infinite money (and Musk basically does), and I wanted to start building a datacenter in here in Alaska, if I built in town it could be 4-8 months to approve the permitting for construction. Double that timeline down south in more desirable parts of the country or with adequate infrastructure. If I'm in a race to build a datacenter as fast as possible, 4-8 months is billions of dollars on the back end when you're being your opposition.
For the delay part, how many months do you think it takes to set up a substantial satellite production line? And go through enough test versions that you're ready for prime time? I think it's a lot more than 16 months. With a bunch of money you can get enough land and permits for a decade of datacenters long before you can get your first gigawatt of satellites launched.
And still, even if you have the land already, and even the permits, space offers something else. You're quite literally "above the law" in some sense.
Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley
tl;dr -> not impossible.
Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.
And you need to get the heat away from the central point to the extremities of the radiator as much as possible. So you can maximize how much energy can be radiated away.
Seems like the weight of the system would be an issue with whatever gas or liquid you used to fill those radiators, but maybe I'm wrong...
But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
So I'll just say the same sentence again. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents.
The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites).
The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter.
They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.
Reaching this scale is a huge problem, but 90% of the problem is shared between the different components.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
How much did he bring in that timeline?
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school.
Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
Nevertheless...
"underdelivery."
Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
"Tee hee he just made a silly oopsie poopsie just like me when I take down prod for a few minutes"