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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting thing about SpaceX is how it convinced a lot of otherwise sober people that data centers in space was a $50 septillion addressable market. You might laugh and think I’m joking but a lot of people seriously fell for the nonsense in the public filing, which should’ve been a one way ticket to SEC jail.

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Let’s revisit this comment in 5 years. I’m not convinced HN critics know more about this than SpaceX does.

What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.

No one can predict the future, and it's absolutely possible that orbital datacenters will fail (either for technology or business reasons).

But:

1. Without a time machine, we cannot be certain.

2. If forced to choose, I would rather root for their success and be wrong than root for their failure and be right.

What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.

When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.

Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.

Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.

Me, I bought me some SPCX.

A bit strange that you started you comment with the exact same sentence as the previous commenter.

They're just quoting it but typo'ed the >

I was confused at first too.

Yup. I've done that before.

Unless SpaceX knows something about thermodynamics that no one else knows, we can be pretty fucking sure that they have an incompetent mouthpiece or they are committing securities fraud.

I'm not sure I get it. Obviously, computers can work in space--a Starlink satellite is basically a computer with a radio attached. Satellites use radiators for cooling without violating any laws of physics.

I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.

Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.

You could also launch people from LA to NYC via rockets instead of using airplanes without violating any laws of physics. But we don’t, because we have airplanes already. What problem are data centers in space solving? Cooling is probably the hardest issue to deal with for data centers, so why would you give up convective cooling you get for free on Earth?

I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.

That's a different argument.

You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?

I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?

Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.

They won't be economical for many reasons - one of them is cooling. Putting several kilowatts of radiators on a Starlink satellite is a justified cost because the Starlink satellite must be in space. Putting a hundred megawatts of radiators on your AI DC in space is ridiculous because that's too big of a radiator (how do you keep it structurally sound?), air cooling on the ground is a million times better and there's no good reason for it to be in space.

> won’t be

Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.

I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.

For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.

Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.

Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.

Materials other than silicon would be an interesting idea, but I doubt even SpaceX is that crazy.

Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.

There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.

>What problem are data centers in space solving?

A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.

Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.

>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.

You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.

I have a certainty that I don't want to make a bet predicated on SpaceX needing to generate revenue from their AI products that is equivalent to several thousand dollars for every human in a middle income and up country.

I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.

When the first transcontinental railroad was proposed and being built, it was beset with controversy and skepticism.

But when it opened, it exceeded the wildest expectations of its most optimistic boosters. It transformed the country overnight.

A similar thing happened with the first transatlantic cable.

Transcontinental railroads weren't fighting against physics.

There's a reason people are pretty sure it won't work and it's not the difficulty of getting them into space or maintening them space or generally protecting them from space. Of course, those are all considerations as well. No, it's the cooling.

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

> cooling

I've seen many confident assertions about that issue. Do you think Musk doesn't know about it? People thought you couldn't reuse rockets, either. Or land them on their tails. Or pluck them out of the air with chopsticks.

I'm a different guy... But I think he doesn't care and doesn't need to care. His main product is personal branding and hype -- caring about how it works is hardly relevant.

Or launch atop an unprotected flat slab of concrete

The Union Pacific Railroad (the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad) also caused the financial crisis of 1873 (due to construction costs and various corruption and bribery around financing them). It then went bankrupt in 1893.

So, yes, it transformed the country. That didn't necessarily benefit the stockholders and bondholders.

1. It finished the railroad in 1869. 1873 was four years later. 1893 was 24 years later - a generation.

2. Check out "Nothing Like It in the World" by Ambrose.

Right, but four years later was definitely caused by the problem of (and shenanigans around) financing the original construction. Even if you want to say that 1893 was too late to be relevant, 1873 wasn't. It was the problem of financing the original construction that damaged the entire US economy.

Ok, but the problem with this comparison is that SpaceX is trying to avoid building any infrastructure at all. They are obsessed with the launch vehicle and basically have zero plans doing anything on Mars or the Moon once they get there.

If you look at the competitors like say Blue Origin, you see that they have an entire lunar architecture mapped out that wouldn't be feasible without the infrastructure they're planning to build.

You also constantly hear from Musk and SpaceX fans that the moon is a distraction and that the transfer of techniques, etc, from the Moon to Mars is minimal because the ISRU resources and processes are different. From an outsiders perspective, the reality distortion is unbelievable.

Needing to send a different box to the surface of a gravity well doesn't really change anything, fundamentally speaking. You still need power generators, a power grid, communication infrastructure, habitats, life support systems, rovers/excavators to dig out the materials, launch pads, etc. The astronauts get to train on the Moon and come back to their families and perhaps wait until the kids leave the nest, before they commence their deadly one way trip to Mars.

Now after the merger and IPO, SpaceX has become a deeply underwhelming company if you care about space. Starship has been a massive failure and I'm being tired of being told that SpaceX has a proven track record and therefore you should expect them to accomplish something by going complete against the development ethos that their proven track record is based upon. Maybe its not clear, but from my perspective, SpaceX has already become the incumbent it claims to fight against.

For the average SpaceX fan, the Falcon 9 isn't something to be proud of, but rather something to retreat to, once it is exposed that the thing that according to them makes the Falcon 9 obsolete does in fact not make it obsolete. The true SpaceX ethos would have delivered a working Starship by now and only afterwards tried to figure out how to make the Mars/Moon promises work.

Wow so much to unpack here.

If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.

Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.

It's just money laundering. They hide transfers of wealth inside an IPO, buyback etc and tell ludicrous tales so they have a cover story that investors are investing because they believed the tales and not to move money.

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