Comment by AntiUSAbah
5 hours ago
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...
So you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]?
Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments?
I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection.
[0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-am...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
[3] https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constel...
CASC yes Google yes Blue Origin yes
But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons.
I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date
I think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.
From the links you shared, it seems they are first trying to determine whether it's economically feasible at all.
Musk isn't an idiot, he is an utterly shameless conman who will tell any lie however often he needs to to keep share prices high.
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!
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.
The joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.
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while there may not be atmospheric weather, low earth orbit has its own "weather". Before you even reach LEO you start getting bombarded by all forms of energetic particles. None of these are things you want your computers saturated with
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?
How hot do you think black objects in space get? Something like 10°C. Look up thermal equilibrium of an ideal black body.
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Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.
The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?
And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.
You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.
Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous
The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive
The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.
This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.
A polar low earth orbit can be always-on (no earth shadow). Each satellite will be in thermal equilibrium, around 10°C. Catastrophic destruction from micrometeoroids is rare. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I don't see any dealbreakers in the math/science.
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On the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A and specifically for the economics of AI vs surveillance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4
Pretty sure this is just a lie to increase the value of Space X before the IPO. Not sure why people still trust Elon after all his hype and lies.
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
Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
This sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.
Why? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.
Elon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know.
I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.
Like the hyperloop?...
Just shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?
Radiators need to be flat and thin - not really good for radiation shielding.
But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.
Like point to point rocket travel?