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].

[1] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/08/40279896/spacex-presiden...

Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.

> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship.

This is from the dedicated flight 12 page, not this article. https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

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

> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

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

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

None of those are self sustaining.

According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".

You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.

If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone

(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.

When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.

No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.

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

I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.

Competition does improve products.

I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.

I suspect BO not as far behind as you think.

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...

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

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.

You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.

One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.

The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.

Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.

250.000 * 5 square meter of area.

This alone increases the potential debris in space.

And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.

And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.

If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.

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.

I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.

https://engineerine.com/starlink-satellites-harming-human/

There will be a collision at some point, there's no real-time communication between USA and China satellite launches.

[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona...

The places that are awkward to tile are the spots that need tile the most.

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.

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.

Soooo, how much did he put on that outcome on polymarket?

> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.

> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space

Yes, Elon is very sane.

> 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.

However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.

That's the case on a pure "I could invest my money in something that makes a bigger profit now, and use that money to buy shares in the longer term bet afterwards" basis, but is even more the case when you factor in uncertainty. And "SpaceX's 2026 near monopoly of launch and the 2026 datacentre build rush will still be relevant once we're far enough into the future for inference chips to not need regular replacement and orbital megastructures to be cost competitive with ground ones due to the amount of orbital recycling going on" is pretty uncertain...

The large variance is in the projected market size, but I can see why people might be optimistic. Especially given SpaceX's success in Falcon 9 launches, gradually stealing stats away from the record-holders, who have been mostly Russia/USSR-based[0].

[0] https://spacestatsonline.com/rockets/most-launched-rockets

That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.

[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...

On a serious note, if you think that everyone else loses contact with reality, it's a signal to check and recheck your assumptions.

If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense.

However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).

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.

Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.

With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.

Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more cost-effective cooling solution than pumping local water because "space is cold" are talking nonsense. Potential solutions don't look like trying to get 5000 engineers to invent radiators which defy the laws of physics, they probably look like amortising the costs over multiple decades of operation and ideally assembling the radiator portion of the datacentre from mass that's already in orbit, but that's not a near term profit pitch....

Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".

Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.

I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.

> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.

I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.

Sure, but you're missing the point which people familiar with spacecraft systems engineering are actually making, which isn't "radiators are a problem because they're hard to design" but that "radiators are a problem because it's hard to design everything else to offset their relatively large mass budget, and thus every other aspect of designing and operating an ODC as a profitable alternative to terrestrial ODCs is coupled to the theoretical limits to how low the radiator launch mass can be". The number of engineers required to design radiators themselves is totally irrelevant, but you can't isolate the radiators' required launch mass from the overall concept of operations and operating economics.

The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.

Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.

But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.

Given the current trajectory of battery and solar prices I just don't that space-based systems are cheaper in any way.

Of course there is a long-term aspect should we climb the ladder in the Kardashev scale: Once we used all solar radiation reaching earth we must move to space to grow. But that is decades if not centuries away.

So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?

A Space operation on which you need to send compute hardware constantly upwoards or a fiber connection to some more 'remote/dessert' like area which has a lot of energy available?

Starlink is not a game changer at all. It has 8-10 Million customers, from which plenty of peopple just use it for holidays, or upping there already existing internet line or because its faster to deploy than a cable.

Our planet is already very well connected. Putting lines in the ground is necessary anyway because you still need energy / powerlines.

Of course this can be done, thats NOT the question. The only question is, if its worth it and its not.

Sending some servers up in space is margins more expensive than sending some servers on trucks (you need anyway) to another earth location.

'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems.

> So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?

How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisioning, cooling, automated scaling in space, and off-planet mining are all solved problems, that shitting on our planet will still be the cheapest most maintainable option?

Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly?

But the natural ecosystem thats your issue?

Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG. I would say we have enough space on our planet for a few hundred more years. Especially as we as a society are struggling anyway to expand as we are not even remotely able or capable of educating and handling enough people properly anyway.

'once provisioning' -> Until then lets provision on earth

cooling -> yeah lets just leverage the heat produced by these data centers as an affordable distant heating for housing first? What do you think how much people would enjoy a DC close by if they would get very cheap heating?

automated scaling in space -> how about we start automating earth?

off-planet mining -> you watched to much scifi at this point. Do you even understand how big the machines on earth are for mining? How much we have to transport them away? If you mine anything with a little bit of gravity, the more you mine, the more energy you need to move it around.

Do you even know how to refine minerals in space?

Yeah i think 'shitting' on our planet will be the most maintanbale and cheapest option as long as Musk is alive. Easily.

Even if space was cost competitive (which it really isn't), you basically throw away all the stuff up there (because retrieval is too expensive). Copper prices are already up by 300-800% since the nineties even without dumping the stuff in space.

Starlink is different, it makes sense. Covering the entire Earth, including the oceans with cell towers for global internet connectivity is harder than having a satellite constellation. The opposite situation from datacenters.

There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.

Define “long term”. Nuclear energy is practically unlimited, plus fusion (if it ever works).

Going to mars or staying on the moon will be a Darwin Award-level adventure.

Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.

Almost correct, yes.

you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless.

you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths.

speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures?

but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex

'all mass and energy available is outside of earth' Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too.

I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.

Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.

I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements

I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.

I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.

Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at.

It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.

Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.

Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.

In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.

Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the building codes required to build a data center on Earth. These things all still apply underground, and underground is going to require additional shoring and structural engineering, to ensure that the structure is not crushed, damaged, and so forth.

So in this world vision obviously companies will start shipping iron ore and coal by starship from one coast to the other because it will be cheaper than trains. In fact all trucking worldwide would be replaced by space ships because they would be cheaper than trucks by far. I can't see how it will ever be cheaper to build a literal space ship and launch it than to put stuff on a train. This all reads like some super optimistic early 50's scifi.

You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.

To orbit

Think of how short a distance "to orbit" is.

7.8 km/s delta-v, that's quite a lot.

>You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.

Even if both are reusable a train will last decades and a starship will be lucky to get a few dozen launches, which is still amazing mind you. Maybe it is my lack of imagination but i just can't see how a diesel engine that pulls a metal box at 60mph will cost more per trip than a rocket that has to accelerate to 18000 mph. Even just fueling: a train runs on diesel which is easy to handle and everywhere. Starship requires cryogenic fuel and oxidizer which is inherently more difficult to handle.

Political, not technical.

Going to space replaces a domestic problem of angry locals with an international problem of angry governments.

> No, we don't have the power on Earth.

The power problem isn't meaningfully improved by going to space.

For every GW you put in a sun synchronous orbit to get permanent light, you need around 6 GW in the major world deserts given their cloud cover. But! The ones on the ground last 30-40 years, while the satellites are currently expected to get replaced every 5 years, so the quantity which need to be manufactured each year to maintain fixed useful output is actually about the same.

For scale:

The world installed 445 GW in 2024, and this number has a long term growth trend in the range of 25-35% per year.

If SpaceX's proposed million satellite constellation are each 25 kW modules, the total they need to launch is 25 GW, the ground equivalent is 25*6 GW = 150 GW, so we could deploy something of this scale on the ground three times over in 2024, and probably around 11-18 times in 2030 if trends continue.

And to pre-empt someone what-abouting night, between cars and PowerWall Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year, so provided they didn't need replacing more often than every four years on average this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, long enough to wait for the sun to return and supply enough to be charging rather than draining batteries.

Of course, America only controls one such desert. China has another, makes most of the PV and far more batteries, but America wants to treat this situation as a race against China.

Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.

Unless someone figures out how to break the laws of thermodynamics there's never going to be a cost effective DC in space.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_equilibrium_temperat... A blackbody sphere near Earth's orbit balances out to almost exactly 0C. A sphere has about 4x as much radiating surface as capturing surface. A flat surface facing the sun that would have 2x, front and back.

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?

yawn, people keep making this excuse on behalf of the South African investor with poor technical expertise.

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.

With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.

One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it.

That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps.

Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A

Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.

I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?

What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.

Its will ruin it for everyone, but Russia or China is certainly able to do that.

Even in Russian nationalist circles, the occassional idea of shooting down current Starlink satellites is usually met with derision from the rest of the discussion group (see, for example, topwar.ru comments). That is just step too far, too dangerous.

Meanwhile, on Earth, you have a lot of plausible deniability. "Some terrorist group sneaked in and planted a bomb, totally not our people."

This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.

I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.

What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.

"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"

True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...

If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.

Being the first rocket in history where both parts reached the ground ready to land is a pretty good start.

And if Starship can't land then any space datacenters are just as or even more unlikely, so that explaition makes no sense what so ever.

I think if fusion is real, it might not be so advantageous until space mining is a thing.

In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.

We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.

My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.

Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.

Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.

I can only assume "too easy to track" is part of the logic.

Ditto for kinetic strikes. That was super hyped up.

Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.

Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.

IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes.

As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.

Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.

They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.

Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.

-George Bernard Shaw

I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.

A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.

And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.

Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.

Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.

Looking at things right now? I would say no. We will see, maybe in up my own ass on this, but I see a pretty big set of changes coming down the pike. Adapt or die (as unpalatable as that may seem).

So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?

Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.

Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.

https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...

Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.

And you need to get the heat away from the central point to the extremities of the radiator as much as possible. So you can maximize how much energy can be radiated away.

Seems like the weight of the system would be an issue with whatever gas or liquid you used to fill those radiators, but maybe I'm wrong...

"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley

tl;dr -> not impossible.

So I'll just say the same sentence again. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents.

But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.

Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.

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.

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.

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).

But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy

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.

For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.

Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

The number of political actors that can stop you from building in Morocco (or confiscate/damage your invested capital once you deploy it) are numerous. The number that can do so in space? Maybe a half dozen. We’re already seeing states and municipalities in the US moving to ban data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them. Building in space faces no such procedural roadblocks.

The economics still seem like an open question, but if the demand for compute is high enough, space based data centers might be the only option

> 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.

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...

The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).

Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.

Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.

Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.

Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".

Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.

Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...

If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.

Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.

Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.

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.

At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.

I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.

And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about

I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school.

Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US:

• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).

• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.

• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.

• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.

• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.

• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.

How much did he bring in that timeline?

Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.

Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?

But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.

He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.

Nevertheless...

"underdelivery."

Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.

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.

If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass.

You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.

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.

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.

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.

I.e. it's not worth it.

The cost of launching 100K servers, each of which needs 20m^2 each of radiator (for a single H200 server), or 250 m^2 for a GB200 rack!

Ok but these numbers are for a single server or single rack, now what about a standard cluster size of like... 50k GPUs?

You would need (with optimal idealized efficiencies) roughly 64000 m^2 of space to cool down your space data-center. That's 9 American football fields of double sided radiator panels! For a single data-center, and realistically there would be inefficiencies and wastage so it could end up more like 20 American football fields of cooling needed.

How's that going to work?

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.

That's basically what the logical conclusion of anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism is. If you don't think your culture is worth spreading, possibly through violence, you can't be very fond of it.

You can't say that the US should return the land to the natives and then say that US culture had a positive influence on north america. It's mutually incompatible.

Do you actually believe this data centers in space nonsense?

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.

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.

I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.

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.

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.

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.

"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...

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.

Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.

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.

The first time around it was also about showing off US might. I don't think that something has changed much. Maybe wild Musk's lies are the only thing that was added.

What other company would you rather see funding go to?

I'd rather not give any welfare-queen company another taxpayer dime.

"None" is a full, and adequate answer.

I'm a big space fan, don't get me wrong. But your exuberance uh, needs tempering.

More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.

Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and prosperity is humanity itself.

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."

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.

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?

Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"

Is a good start

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

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.