Quick update for the folks passionate about space things (since this thread is full of unrelated comments):
V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've streamlined the production, moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine (the first iterations looked like something out of the steampunk era), and they've simplified lots of fire/heat protection.
The Booster and Ship also got some major redesigns in the way they're handling fuel, the "thrust puck" (the area where the engines get mounted) and so on. It's also a bit taller, helped by the engine upgrades. TWR has also improved, with estimates at 1.6. This should be visibly faster to clear the tower and "jump" the launch.
They are also adding ~44tons of simlinks (starlink simulators, dumb payloads). So they seem to have improved the margins for orbital payload a lot. New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them. Hopefully we'll get to see outside shots of Starship from these things, on orbit. They've filed FCC paperwork for this, and they'll likely use it to inspect the health of the heatshield on orbit.
They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.
This flight will be still suborbital, testing payload deployment, booster return to a fixed point somewhere in the coastal waters, and the ship aiming for somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They've also removed some parts of hte heatshield, to test how it handles that. (on a previous flight the ship still nailed its simulated landing with huge gaps in it, from multiple tiles missing intentionally).
If everything works on this flight, the next one is planned to be orbital.
The level that they managed to fit everything inside of a simple-looking package was so high that the CEO of ULA (the Boeing/Lockheed Martin rocket company) thought they were lying when they first showed pictures [1].
I'm not sure they're all that simpler, the basic plumbing probably hasn't changed much, it's just that modern fabrication tech means you can hide all the complexity inside
And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.
These datacenters in space will become space junk. Doesn't seem to be sustainable. With a million of these it's hard to imagine why this would be a good idea, and it starts looking like insanity.
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
I dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!
Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.
The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?
And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.
You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.
Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous
The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive
Nobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either.
In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.
Close ups of the tail fins and the hull exterior have little hex tiles covering the entire tail fin assembly. There's also different sizes of tile. Exciting to see if that will be enough structural reinforcement.
Yeah, the tile complexity is worrying. I hope they're able to simplify that or fully streamline the manufacturing and attachment. From the outside, the tiles seem like a Shuttle re-run, and refurbishment of those was one of the long poles in reuse.
But for the shuttle each title was kinda unique and had a specific spot. If they managed to find a shape where you don’t have to mark each tile but can just pull them from a box for replacement is a huge win. Maybe even have some spares and allow them to be replaced during an EVA. This was all not really feasible with the Spaceshuttle.
Incredible to get insight into the new things they're trying. Back in the day of the old Space Race this kind of thing was impossible and now an enthusiast can just follow along as incredible feats of engineering are performed. Great stuff!
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has nothing to do with business. They are selling you a vision — which can also come in a pill form, labeled "salvia" and sold at gas stations.
I still see people say the cybertruck is built for mars environments, conveniently ignoring the vast technological and economical barriers stopping us from driving commercially produced vehicles on mars. This space data center thing is the same deal. It doesn't matter how long it will take to solve the technical issues with cooling, radiation, maintenance. It doesn't matter if it will make economical sense or not. It doesn't matter if spacex will be the one to actually do it. You just have to believe, and give them some time — a lot of time, so much time that a monkey can type out Hamlet and type it out again backwards.
See also the buffoonery coming out of Bay Area "effective altruist" and "longtermism" communities.
Chipping in here. There's a lot of speculation on this subject matter, all of which entirely wrong.
Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.
The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.
Compute in space is doable, we already send plenty of computers up there, technologically, it is not even a challenge. It just doesn't make sense economically, even with Starship, it is making things harder for no good reason.
Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.
Just go to Google Maps. Just do it. Type in Arizona, or new mexico, texas whatever. Do you see all this brownish stuff? Yeah thats just empty land with A LOT of solar.
So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?
Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.
Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.
Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.
Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.
Honestly, I don't see (sea?) it. Every advantage of space are found in oceans/seas, especially if we use dead zones where aquatic life is already dead. The cooling is cheaper, tide+wind+solar is cheaper than space solar (I know someone who worked on a lens to observe the sun, the satellite was launched but due to being cheap on the solar panels, the sunlight and radiation chipped away the coating that found itself attracted to the most massive object in the area, the lens). Anti-corrosion is cheaper than light radiation protection, and servicing is way easier and cheaper.
But if solar panel is significantly cheaper and latency doesn't matter you can have servers in any part of the world. Even if they are not up 50% of the time due to limited battery it would still be cheaper.
biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling that is comparable if not more impactful
you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.
you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.
speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?
but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex
'all mass and energy available is outside of earth'
Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.
I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.
All of this may be true but the scale that Musk is talking about would require an immense amount of solar panels -- and if he has the means to produce so many solar panels why not use them to solve our climate and energy crisis on Earth?
Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
>These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations.
They can. But in Elons case, its going to be his style of sending failure after failure up in the space, getting something working part time, lying about it and exaggerating how good it is, and then making fun of others for not using his inferior product.
> Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of land to farming, restaurants and transportation of food it would be so much better if everyone just had a Star-Trek style food replicator in their house.
None of the tech exists but fuck it. Why bother with realities of life?
I am raising 200 Trillion Dollars for AI Space FoodX. Who is in?
Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive.
I assume because the Mars goal is as good as dead with what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one.
This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.
The more straightforward explanation is that it's a story that Elon (probably correctly) thinks will sound good to wall-street and enable him to take a ton of the publics money when SpaceX IPOs and gets added to the S&P for himself.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
This is correct. The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
I don't know why space marines aren't a thing yet. The USA could put a rapid reaction force of Tier 1 Special Forces onto a space station and deploy them through atmospheric re-entry anywhere on Earth within 30 minutes.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
> potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.
Building datacenters in a medium where the main waste product (heat) is incredibly difficult to get rid of, there is zero opportunity for maintainance, and the fuel to get to site costs more than the site does. Makes perfect sense, spot on!
Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around.
you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol
My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators.
Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.
In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere
Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.
US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous.
Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp.
Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.
What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws.
For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
Solar panels in space are 5 time more expensive to build than on earth (not talking into account launching them to space), while being 5 to 10 time more efficient. They also degrade 5 to 10 time faster, not accounting for solar flares. Deorbiting solar panels (and satellites) is also a huge environmental issue, as I dislike heavy metal in my food (and you should too). It isn't a real issue yet because we didn't send enough up there for the quantities to be an issue, but idiots seems persuaded we should increase the quantity of heavy metal sent in orbit without fixing this issue first.
Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware as your chips fail (wasting that part of the resource budget) and the land hardware gets upgraded.
This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
> despite his lack of engineering or technical skills
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit.
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense.
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
Definitely some cool photos of Starship V3 - how much of this is new info vs just a press release style announcement? I havent been following the latest rocket news much
Saw some photo's and the first thing that stands out: the American flag. What's up with that? If you see a product launch in Europe there will be no flag in the photo's (non that I ever saw).
"Europe" does not have a unified stance on this, don't paint our entire continent as The Borg.
If you are Dutch, just take a one-hour flight to Copenhagen to see how a city can be absolutely plastered with national flags.
If Poland or France were introducing a new nationally produced rocket, they would certainly show their national flags around it as well. They definitely do so when displaying new weapons. So does Ukraine etc.
Accidentally, I remember the Dutch colors on every package of Dutch cheese I ever bought.
The flag has been coopted as a symbol of right wing nationalist politics. It's the easiest way to identify the right - their very strange love of the flag.
One of the dumbest things ever was the left giving up on the flag. The only way this makes sense is if much of the left actively disdain most of the nation (ie Stanford vocabulary guide around American flag being a triggering symbol or something ridiculous). I dont see how the left and patriotism are incompatible...
Stefan-Boltzmann law means radiative heat transfer in space is approx. to the 4th power of the hot side of your radiator. Typical space based radiators operate around 350K. If you can increase the hot side of the refrigeration cycle by 4x (1400K) you increase heat transfer by 256x. Create a radiator design that can operate at this temp (multi-stage Brayton loops, heat pumps, possible liquid metal final stage) with a large enough surface area and now a datacenter in space seems possible.
It's a difficult engineering challenge but physically possible, and Elon is no stranger to engineering challenges.
Some numbers: assume an emissivity of 0.85, assume no absorption from the sun, assume heat rejected from both sides of a panel, a 1m^2 panel will reject 1.45kW/m^2 @ 350K.
At 900K its 62 kW/m^2. Not a trivial amount of heat.
I was actually curious about this myself back when everyone was chiming in about how it was physically impossible.
This is first and foremost an engineering problem as you need to design a system that will both tolerate high heat and be able to pump even more heat to the radiators. The high temperature seems to be the primary objective to design for unless launch costs become absurdly low.
Your daily reminder that there is no scenario in which putting data centers in space is easier than putting them in Texas, or Morocco, or literally anywhere else.
The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cases by the end of April.
We have about 600 million years before we'd need to perform serious planetary engineering to remain on Earth and about a billion years before humanity must leave Earth to survive.
Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and prosperity is humanity itself.
Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
I was initially very skeptical about the viability of space-based data centers but after a couple hours reading papers, studies and summary technical assessments I realized there are a range of credible expert viewpoints from, "pretty unlikely" to "it could actually work". There at least appear to be plausible, though unproven, solutions to the most obvious drive-by objections I had off the top of my non-expert head.
Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
I think what often gets confused is people saying it isn't viable with "it is not physically possible".
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
Putting a datacentre in space may be feasible but the scale that he's suggesting is really unbelievable.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
Tesla has been out competed in Batteries, EV's and Robots so this is his new move. He did something similar with his solar panel company put it inside Tesla and then it has almost disappeared from the news. He puts the AI company inside of Spacex makes up a lot of unrealistic numbers to pump up price and captures most of the stock gains from Spacex IPO by diluting others people shares.
You make it sound like Tesla was a failure and he's only interested in capitalistic success, where if you've been following him for years you'd know this has been his plan all along. He built Tesla when electric cars were mocked and his plan was to push electric cars to be mainstream. To now say "Tesla has been outcompeted and so now he's doing something else [implied- to keep his power]" is to simplify and misinterpret the situation. Tesla has successfully lit a fire under the car manufacturer's world, to the point all of them started making electric cars.
Don’t forget solar city. There is precedent for this, it is how Musk operates and it’s far more about protecting his investments and letting him use the company for his own enrichment than what makes sense for the company.
Why is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like.
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.
I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.
This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.
I hoped to get across that I still find this to be a nuanced issue. I like the content, I just dislike the discourse around it, which makes it hard for me to get excited about the content.
I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.
A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.
Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.
--
Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."
Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.
Well, Musk illegally wrecked half the federal government and killed tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Now he spends his days boosting and funding white nationalists and far-right politicians around the world. Why does everything have to be "good" or "bad"? Because some things are just pure evil and need to be called out as such, as well as thoroughly boycotted if the wheels of justice are too slow to turn.
This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.
If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.
The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
This used to be my rationalisation, but my understanding is that Shotwell is the driving force behind the commercial and Falcon sides of the business and that there's a quite strong cultural divide between that and the Starship/Starlink side of the business which is driven by Musk. Apparently there's a lot of culture clash there.
It's funny because I when realized it was signed by Elon I immediately wished it had been signed by Gwynne instead (although I'm sure she reviewed it anyway). I just knew being signed by Elon would push responses to being (even) more about Elon and divided along partisan political lines.
Which, at this point, has already been beaten to death and is just... tiresome. While discussing the broad concept of space-based compute in general (outside of SpaceX, Elon, etc) can still actually be interesting.
I'm with you. Everything government that at least still pretended to serve the public interested and greater good has been openly captured by individuals and movements concerned with some more selfish agenda.
The after effects of DOGE has left the NIH in tatters. Staff has been gutted, grants are months and months behind causing research groups and startups to go under.
Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.
NASA has been propaganda since Operation Paperclip, sadly. It's hard to politicize something that's always been political, even if Musk gives Peenemünde optics a run for it's money.
Of course, which is why I said "increasing". NASA is propaganda, but when the focus is on scientific advancement I can get behind that (as a non-American).
The problem is the recent shift away from science towards a more performative roadmap – getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around, at least that's how it's being messaged. Many pure science endeavours have been canned. And the Artemis missions have a strong vibe of propaganda to them with slick marketing designed to emphasise America.
I guess to sum it up: doing good stuff and being seen to be good because of it, is fine, but making a show of doing good stuff explicitly for show, while behind the scenes doing as little as you can get away with, is not.
Yeah same here. Isn’t it weird, thet i used to be a lot more excited about space travel however, as I grow older I am excited about things more closer to me. Still curious, but focus has shifted from great for humanity to will make my life easier.
Just feels more closer and impactful (to me).
It's a fascinating design but it's been 14 years since the concept was first announced and it's never really completely worked. If it ever was possible, it's not clear the talent for it still works for SpaceX.
Reading reports of people objecting datacenters build in their states I wonder how Florida residents feel about the Spaceport ? It will certainly be more distruptive than datacenters.
Florida residents are extremely proud of space coast and have loved hosting rocket launches for 60+ years. Absolutely no problems at all with it. Will be great to see Starships launch from Cape Canaveral soon.
SpaceX has openly advertised their intent to turn starship into a faster long distance travel alternative to airplanes. Their intent, should all go well, is to have many, many, spaceports.
For their conventional space launch operations they also want multiple... to target different orbits, and to parallelize the high volume operations they anticipate.
There's already two Starship launch sites. The one in use in Texas, and one (LC-39A) in development at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. And there's good reason to believe they've begun planning a third in Louisiana. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64900.0
From what I understand about the Texas facility, SpaceX has also not honored their agreements regarding protected wildlife zones in the area. Damage from explosions is understandable, but they apparently not taken sufficient precautions to protect the surrounding area from their regular operations.
Noise never stopped people from moving to Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Cape Canaveral, etc in Florida. They been blasting rockets from there since the 1950s.
On a more serious note, the Cape Canaveral area / Kennedy Space Center has a large amount of empty land to build space infrastructure. The island has been dedicated to space facilities since the 1960s. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have facilities there.
Quick update for the folks passionate about space things (since this thread is full of unrelated comments):
V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've streamlined the production, moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine (the first iterations looked like something out of the steampunk era), and they've simplified lots of fire/heat protection.
The Booster and Ship also got some major redesigns in the way they're handling fuel, the "thrust puck" (the area where the engines get mounted) and so on. It's also a bit taller, helped by the engine upgrades. TWR has also improved, with estimates at 1.6. This should be visibly faster to clear the tower and "jump" the launch.
They are also adding ~44tons of simlinks (starlink simulators, dumb payloads). So they seem to have improved the margins for orbital payload a lot. New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them. Hopefully we'll get to see outside shots of Starship from these things, on orbit. They've filed FCC paperwork for this, and they'll likely use it to inspect the health of the heatshield on orbit.
They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.
This flight will be still suborbital, testing payload deployment, booster return to a fixed point somewhere in the coastal waters, and the ship aiming for somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They've also removed some parts of hte heatshield, to test how it handles that. (on a previous flight the ship still nailed its simulated landing with huge gaps in it, from multiple tiles missing intentionally).
If everything works on this flight, the next one is planned to be orbital.
"New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them."
Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.
> moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine
The level that they managed to fit everything inside of a simple-looking package was so high that the CEO of ULA (the Boeing/Lockheed Martin rocket company) thought they were lying when they first showed pictures [1].
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/08/40279896/spacex-presiden...
I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.
We don't even have permanent settlements on Antarctica. Don't hold your breath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas
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Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...
I'm not sure they're all that simpler, the basic plumbing probably hasn't changed much, it's just that modern fabrication tech means you can hide all the complexity inside
And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.
The outcome is guaranteed to be entertaining
The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.
Competition does improve products.
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These datacenters in space will become space junk. Doesn't seem to be sustainable. With a million of these it's hard to imagine why this would be a good idea, and it starts looking like insanity.
Nope, they will be in a low earth orbit that will decay and enter the atmosphere without maintenance burns
Not really, if you look at the plans, only a few hundred thousand satellites were planned in LEO, and millions over the Chinese satellites.
There will be a collision at some point, there's no real-time communication between USA and China satellite launches.
And it will impact negatively humanity's health.
https://engineerine.com/starlink-satellites-harming-human/
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Architecture in 68K. ROM. VII Design. Complex machines.
[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona...
He again mentions data center in space.
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
I dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!
Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.
The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?
And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.
You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.
Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous
The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive
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You can only cool by radiation in space. You may get more energy from the sun but how are you going to get rid of all the heat fast enough?
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Yes, you get much more radiation from the sun and other sources. How do you do cooling? Radiators the size of small moons?
Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.
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Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
Nobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either.
In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.
Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD
"My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space"
Soooo, how much did he put on that outcome on polymarket?
Close ups of the tail fins and the hull exterior have little hex tiles covering the entire tail fin assembly. There's also different sizes of tile. Exciting to see if that will be enough structural reinforcement.
Yeah, the tile complexity is worrying. I hope they're able to simplify that or fully streamline the manufacturing and attachment. From the outside, the tiles seem like a Shuttle re-run, and refurbishment of those was one of the long poles in reuse.
But for the shuttle each title was kinda unique and had a specific spot. If they managed to find a shape where you don’t have to mark each tile but can just pull them from a box for replacement is a huge win. Maybe even have some spares and allow them to be replaced during an EVA. This was all not really feasible with the Spaceshuttle.
The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!
The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing.
I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.
It's okay, Mars doesn't have much atmosphere. We can figure out how to bring them home later.
Incredible to get insight into the new things they're trying. Back in the day of the old Space Race this kind of thing was impossible and now an enthusiast can just follow along as incredible feats of engineering are performed. Great stuff!
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
Page banned in my country apparently
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Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
> In the long term
In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has nothing to do with business. They are selling you a vision — which can also come in a pill form, labeled "salvia" and sold at gas stations.
I still see people say the cybertruck is built for mars environments, conveniently ignoring the vast technological and economical barriers stopping us from driving commercially produced vehicles on mars. This space data center thing is the same deal. It doesn't matter how long it will take to solve the technical issues with cooling, radiation, maintenance. It doesn't matter if it will make economical sense or not. It doesn't matter if spacex will be the one to actually do it. You just have to believe, and give them some time — a lot of time, so much time that a monkey can type out Hamlet and type it out again backwards.
See also the buffoonery coming out of Bay Area "effective altruist" and "longtermism" communities.
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Chipping in here. There's a lot of speculation on this subject matter, all of which entirely wrong.
Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.
The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.
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Yes, beyond the three things that are the hard parts it's easy.
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Compute in space is doable, we already send plenty of computers up there, technologically, it is not even a challenge. It just doesn't make sense economically, even with Starship, it is making things harder for no good reason.
Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.
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Just go to Google Maps. Just do it. Type in Arizona, or new mexico, texas whatever. Do you see all this brownish stuff? Yeah thats just empty land with A LOT of solar.
So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?
A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?
Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.
Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.
Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.
Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.
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> What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute?
Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.
> In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error.
Define “long term”. Nuclear energy is practically unlimited, plus fusion (if it ever works).
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It’s like saying within 2-3 years the sun will go out.
Almost correct, yes.
Honestly, I don't see (sea?) it. Every advantage of space are found in oceans/seas, especially if we use dead zones where aquatic life is already dead. The cooling is cheaper, tide+wind+solar is cheaper than space solar (I know someone who worked on a lens to observe the sun, the satellite was launched but due to being cheap on the solar panels, the sunlight and radiation chipped away the coating that found itself attracted to the most massive object in the area, the lens). Anti-corrosion is cheaper than light radiation protection, and servicing is way easier and cheaper.
In the long term, the biggest problem is that space data centers are very hard to defend against missiles.
> all mass and energy available is outside of Earth
Manufacturing capabilities are quite lacking, though, in the short and medium terms, so this doesn't seem all that relevant.
Maybe a self-contained, modular solar panel / radiator / compute unit could be built, but it will be manufactured on Earth. (Where the fabs are.)
And it still seems easier to put solar panels and batteries near the data centers that SpaceX is already building on Earth.
But if solar panel is significantly cheaper and latency doesn't matter you can have servers in any part of the world. Even if they are not up 50% of the time due to limited battery it would still be cheaper.
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biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling that is comparable if not more impactful
you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.
you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.
speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?
but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex
'all mass and energy available is outside of earth' Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.
I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.
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You can put computers underground. Cheaper than launching into space.
Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.
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All of this may be true but the scale that Musk is talking about would require an immense amount of solar panels -- and if he has the means to produce so many solar panels why not use them to solve our climate and energy crisis on Earth?
Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
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>These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations.
They can. But in Elons case, its going to be his style of sending failure after failure up in the space, getting something working part time, lying about it and exaggerating how good it is, and then making fun of others for not using his inferior product.
Pretty much like everything else he has done.
> Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of land to farming, restaurants and transportation of food it would be so much better if everyone just had a Star-Trek style food replicator in their house.
None of the tech exists but fuck it. Why bother with realities of life?
I am raising 200 Trillion Dollars for AI Space FoodX. Who is in?
"aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things"
yawn, people keep making this excuse on behalf of the South African investor with poor technical expertise.
> Yes, Elon is very sane.
tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession.
He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
He didn’t found Tesla, he bought it then called himself founder.
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Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.
You are saying he got lucky? That doesn’t necessarily mean he will continue to be lucky.
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I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
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Maybe coverage is directed outward from Earth ? It could be quite an upgrade to the "UFO" TV series SID (Space Intruder Detector).
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
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I assume because the Mars goal is as good as dead with what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one.
This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.
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The math works out if you project certain macro trends out a sufficient amount of time.
I think if fusion is real, it might not be so advantageous until space mining is a thing.
The more straightforward explanation is that it's a story that Elon (probably correctly) thinks will sound good to wall-street and enable him to take a ton of the publics money when SpaceX IPOs and gets added to the S&P for himself.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
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They'll put up thousands more starlinks and track every mobile device on the planet simultaneously, might as well have a homing beacon in your pocket.
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One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.
My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
Before LEO internet constellations, even the leading nations had just ~20-25 launches per year each, and a good chunk of those were for ISS services.
Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
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This is correct. The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
I don't know why space marines aren't a thing yet. The USA could put a rapid reaction force of Tier 1 Special Forces onto a space station and deploy them through atmospheric re-entry anywhere on Earth within 30 minutes.
I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.
Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.
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> potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.
As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
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Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
-George Bernard Shaw
He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
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It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
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How do you cool them?
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
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You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.
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Building datacenters in a medium where the main waste product (heat) is incredibly difficult to get rid of, there is zero opportunity for maintainance, and the fuel to get to site costs more than the site does. Makes perfect sense, spot on!
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The model 3 was Elons last great idea (if it was even his). Since then, he has been wrong pretty much about everything.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
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Grifter gonna grift
Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce.
Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
He is talking about energy costs.
Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators.
Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.
In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.
I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere
But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.
We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
"We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them."
US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous.
Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp.
Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
elon musk isnt a nazi
I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.
What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws.
For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
Elon musk is not a scam artist.
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Solar panels in space are 5 time more expensive to build than on earth (not talking into account launching them to space), while being 5 to 10 time more efficient. They also degrade 5 to 10 time faster, not accounting for solar flares. Deorbiting solar panels (and satellites) is also a huge environmental issue, as I dislike heavy metal in my food (and you should too). It isn't a real issue yet because we didn't send enough up there for the quantities to be an issue, but idiots seems persuaded we should increase the quantity of heavy metal sent in orbit without fixing this issue first.
Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware as your chips fail (wasting that part of the resource budget) and the land hardware gets upgraded.
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> "We'll need thousands of them!
> Yes, they know.
> Starlink is already planned for a scale of tens of thousands of satellites.
Meanwhile Google installed that many TPUs yesterday afternoon. The idea is still stupid.
So it'll be more like Hertzner[1] in space. Each node just doing its own thing.
Not sure about the cost perspective but, at least that makes more sense than a giant brick floating around.
[1]: https://lafibre.info/hetzner/over-200-000-servers-in-one-pla...
issue is land based will still be cheaper. there are lot of cool things we can do in space, i’m not convinced putting data center is one of them.
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This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?
We had all those things without Elon Musk and the alternatives do it better.
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
> despite his lack of engineering or technical skills
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
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> Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no.
How much did he bring in that timeline?
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit.
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
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Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense.
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
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One more week
> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
isn’t Monday the 18th?
Yes, the linked space.com article has an error. The launch is happening Tuesday the 19th.
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Definitely some cool photos of Starship V3 - how much of this is new info vs just a press release style announcement? I havent been following the latest rocket news much
Saw some photo's and the first thing that stands out: the American flag. What's up with that? If you see a product launch in Europe there will be no flag in the photo's (non that I ever saw).
"Europe" does not have a unified stance on this, don't paint our entire continent as The Borg.
If you are Dutch, just take a one-hour flight to Copenhagen to see how a city can be absolutely plastered with national flags.
If Poland or France were introducing a new nationally produced rocket, they would certainly show their national flags around it as well. They definitely do so when displaying new weapons. So does Ukraine etc.
Accidentally, I remember the Dutch colors on every package of Dutch cheese I ever bought.
The flag has been coopted as a symbol of right wing nationalist politics. It's the easiest way to identify the right - their very strange love of the flag.
What? There are three flags flying in my street alone and I'm in the middle of the liberal bay area.
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One of the dumbest things ever was the left giving up on the flag. The only way this makes sense is if much of the left actively disdain most of the nation (ie Stanford vocabulary guide around American flag being a triggering symbol or something ridiculous). I dont see how the left and patriotism are incompatible...
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Almost any average factory floor in the U.S. has an American flag hanging somewhere. Sorry Europe doesn't have any pride in itself!
I don't think showing a flag is a sign of pride, and as I watch the news it is currently a very misplaced pride in America.
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Aerospace vessel, not terminal prompt.
I was also disappointed to discover this.
I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.
Stefan-Boltzmann law means radiative heat transfer in space is approx. to the 4th power of the hot side of your radiator. Typical space based radiators operate around 350K. If you can increase the hot side of the refrigeration cycle by 4x (1400K) you increase heat transfer by 256x. Create a radiator design that can operate at this temp (multi-stage Brayton loops, heat pumps, possible liquid metal final stage) with a large enough surface area and now a datacenter in space seems possible.
It's a difficult engineering challenge but physically possible, and Elon is no stranger to engineering challenges.
Some numbers: assume an emissivity of 0.85, assume no absorption from the sun, assume heat rejected from both sides of a panel, a 1m^2 panel will reject 1.45kW/m^2 @ 350K.
At 900K its 62 kW/m^2. Not a trivial amount of heat.
I was actually curious about this myself back when everyone was chiming in about how it was physically impossible.
This is first and foremost an engineering problem as you need to design a system that will both tolerate high heat and be able to pump even more heat to the radiators. The high temperature seems to be the primary objective to design for unless launch costs become absurdly low.
Your daily reminder that there is no scenario in which putting data centers in space is easier than putting them in Texas, or Morocco, or literally anywhere else.
The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.
Yay, go Elon!
What SpaceX has accomplished is just phenomenal.
Found an investor in the IPO
I don't like Elon and I'm still going to buy into the SpaceX IPO
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V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cases by the end of April.
Spacex may be the most important company on the planet. What greater goal is there than expanding humanity to the stars!
Is this rhetorical? Feeding the hungry. Healing the sick. Educating the masses. Etc, etc.
I'm a big space fan, don't get me wrong. But your exuberance uh, needs tempering.
I meant unobtained goals.
More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.
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We have about 600 million years before we'd need to perform serious planetary engineering to remain on Earth and about a billion years before humanity must leave Earth to survive.
Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and prosperity is humanity itself.
Figuring out a way to coexist peacefully before expanding any further.
Looking after the humanity we already have?
Ok, but most of Blue Origins plans rely on off planet infrastructure so SpaceX can have earth and Blue Origin the rest of space.
Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
I was initially very skeptical about the viability of space-based data centers but after a couple hours reading papers, studies and summary technical assessments I realized there are a range of credible expert viewpoints from, "pretty unlikely" to "it could actually work". There at least appear to be plausible, though unproven, solutions to the most obvious drive-by objections I had off the top of my non-expert head.
Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
I think what often gets confused is people saying it isn't viable with "it is not physically possible".
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
Putting a datacentre in space may be feasible but the scale that he's suggesting is really unbelievable.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
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Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.
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Tesla has been out competed in Batteries, EV's and Robots so this is his new move. He did something similar with his solar panel company put it inside Tesla and then it has almost disappeared from the news. He puts the AI company inside of Spacex makes up a lot of unrealistic numbers to pump up price and captures most of the stock gains from Spacex IPO by diluting others people shares.
You make it sound like Tesla was a failure and he's only interested in capitalistic success, where if you've been following him for years you'd know this has been his plan all along. He built Tesla when electric cars were mocked and his plan was to push electric cars to be mainstream. To now say "Tesla has been outcompeted and so now he's doing something else [implied- to keep his power]" is to simplify and misinterpret the situation. Tesla has successfully lit a fire under the car manufacturer's world, to the point all of them started making electric cars.
Don’t forget solar city. There is precedent for this, it is how Musk operates and it’s far more about protecting his investments and letting him use the company for his own enrichment than what makes sense for the company.
You forget that Musk has to make all the idiots who gave him capital for Twitter whole, somehow.
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Why is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like.
The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.
I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.
This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.
I hoped to get across that I still find this to be a nuanced issue. I like the content, I just dislike the discourse around it, which makes it hard for me to get excited about the content.
I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.
A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.
Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.
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Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."
Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.
Musk is not just "one of them"; the financial success of SpaceX is extremely unevenly distributed.
Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.
Well, Musk illegally wrecked half the federal government and killed tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Now he spends his days boosting and funding white nationalists and far-right politicians around the world. Why does everything have to be "good" or "bad"? Because some things are just pure evil and need to be called out as such, as well as thoroughly boycotted if the wheels of justice are too slow to turn.
This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.
If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.
The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
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>people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits.
"People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you.
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it...
The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...
Just realize that Gwynne Shotwell is the driver for 99% of the day-day at SpaceX and you can ignore everything else.
This used to be my rationalisation, but my understanding is that Shotwell is the driving force behind the commercial and Falcon sides of the business and that there's a quite strong cultural divide between that and the Starship/Starlink side of the business which is driven by Musk. Apparently there's a lot of culture clash there.
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It's funny because I when realized it was signed by Elon I immediately wished it had been signed by Gwynne instead (although I'm sure she reviewed it anyway). I just knew being signed by Elon would push responses to being (even) more about Elon and divided along partisan political lines.
Which, at this point, has already been beaten to death and is just... tiresome. While discussing the broad concept of space-based compute in general (outside of SpaceX, Elon, etc) can still actually be interesting.
I'm with you. Everything government that at least still pretended to serve the public interested and greater good has been openly captured by individuals and movements concerned with some more selfish agenda.
Weird AI photos on this article, too. Like, it's cool. Take pictures of the cool thing you actually have.
Those aren't AI.
The after effects of DOGE has left the NIH in tatters. Staff has been gutted, grants are months and months behind causing research groups and startups to go under.
Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.
> the increasing use of NASA as US propaganda
NASA has been propaganda since Operation Paperclip, sadly. It's hard to politicize something that's always been political, even if Musk gives Peenemünde optics a run for it's money.
Of course, which is why I said "increasing". NASA is propaganda, but when the focus is on scientific advancement I can get behind that (as a non-American).
The problem is the recent shift away from science towards a more performative roadmap – getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around, at least that's how it's being messaged. Many pure science endeavours have been canned. And the Artemis missions have a strong vibe of propaganda to them with slick marketing designed to emphasise America.
I guess to sum it up: doing good stuff and being seen to be good because of it, is fine, but making a show of doing good stuff explicitly for show, while behind the scenes doing as little as you can get away with, is not.
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umm we all helped? its called taxes... how do you think Starship is being funded ?
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I was disappointed when this was not the command line prompt library
Yeah same here. Isn’t it weird, thet i used to be a lot more excited about space travel however, as I grow older I am excited about things more closer to me. Still curious, but focus has shifted from great for humanity to will make my life easier. Just feels more closer and impactful (to me).
also first thing that crossed my mind!
Same!
It's a fascinating design but it's been 14 years since the concept was first announced and it's never really completely worked. If it ever was possible, it's not clear the talent for it still works for SpaceX.
Reading reports of people objecting datacenters build in their states I wonder how Florida residents feel about the Spaceport ? It will certainly be more distruptive than datacenters.
Florida residents are extremely proud of space coast and have loved hosting rocket launches for 60+ years. Absolutely no problems at all with it. Will be great to see Starships launch from Cape Canaveral soon.
There's only one Spaceport.
SpaceX has openly advertised their intent to turn starship into a faster long distance travel alternative to airplanes. Their intent, should all go well, is to have many, many, spaceports.
For their conventional space launch operations they also want multiple... to target different orbits, and to parallelize the high volume operations they anticipate.
There's already two Starship launch sites. The one in use in Texas, and one (LC-39A) in development at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. And there's good reason to believe they've begun planning a third in Louisiana. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64900.0
Some people close to their facility in Texas aren’t too happy with the noise.
From what I understand about the Texas facility, SpaceX has also not honored their agreements regarding protected wildlife zones in the area. Damage from explosions is understandable, but they apparently not taken sufficient precautions to protect the surrounding area from their regular operations.
Noise never stopped people from moving to Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Cape Canaveral, etc in Florida. They been blasting rockets from there since the 1950s.
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A spaceport will probably use less water /s
On a more serious note, the Cape Canaveral area / Kennedy Space Center has a large amount of empty land to build space infrastructure. The island has been dedicated to space facilities since the 1960s. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have facilities there.