Starship V3 | Hacker News Reader

Starship V3

spacex.com

326 pointsfprog641 comments

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.

> 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...

The reason he was so skeptical is that for other engine manufacturers, there are generally different teams working on different parts of the engine, and because Convay's law the final artifact generally ends up looking like the organizational boundaries of the company that made it, with cleanly separated parts for every sub-organization that you can see in the final assembly. One of the things that SpaceX is good at is optimization across these kinds of boundaries, integrating hardware in ways that would be difficult for a more traditional organization.

The way it was explained to me early on was that the newest Raptor engines had simply eliminated many of the different types of test sensors, specifically because sufficient testing had been performed that they weren't getting useful data out of them any more.

I'm not some kind of insider, though.

It honestly makes sense now that I'm looking at a progression down the line - https://i.redd.it/f7prq0x08qgd1.jpeg

Just continual tweaks and refinement to keep slimming down the packaging.

I still don't see TVC there. I think Shotwell was exaggerating.

Here it is, already mounted on Starship - https://i.redd.it/q5dea3tsf60h1.jpeg

> They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.

So much insane engineering just to make this launch pad work. The pad is more complex then the rocket. To make something that survives repeatedly the insane power of Starship is a actually insane.

That they managed to do a full duration static fire and it seems the pad is ok is a huge achievement.

"New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them."

Is that confirmed ? Will be truly amazing to see.

It is confirmed they'll attempt it, hopefully we also get to see it on the broadcast.

> 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

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.

Depends on how you define "permanent" but the closed ecological systems (CES) problem is nowhere near solved.

Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.

Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.

So there is a problem to be solved. Great!

The history of human spaceflight is pretty much: Problem -> Difficult to find solution -> Solution leads to better spaceflight -> Solution leads to better life for humans on Earth. Then repeat that cycle for each new problem.

Think of the new medicine and hospital protocols that are waiting to be developed as biologists explore the solution to this problem.

Couldn't agree more. But I'd recommend solving the problem before shooting ten men and ten women into the Martian regolith forever and telling them to make babies.

Alternatively, it's not the scale of problem you try and solve fifteen timeslipped minutes and (at least) eighteen months away. We're not even sure what the shape of a solution even looks like, apart from "Generic Future Technology Tree Numbers 4 through 90". Mastery of bioengineering would probably fix it, but it would need to be desktop science, like 3d printing. We are not anywhere near that - mostly because we don't have things like "generic bioreactors" that can grow organisms like a universal womb/seedbed/strata/media.

I recognize human advancement comes with sacrifice. But human advancement also comes with prudent decisions like "don't built the village in the lava".

There's a whole book positing that a permanent settlement on Mars is unlikely to work, and I have not seen their arguments debunked.

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

Is it possible that their arguments haven't been noticed to be debunked? These are apparently the authors:

> 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.

Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.

Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.

As someone from within the space industry, their arguments are beyond bad. Indeed they miss the point entirely. If you don’t see much people talking about it, it’s because most people in the industry don’t want to stoop to that level.

But there are a few who have bothered. Here is one of the better ones: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i

If that's one of the better criticisms of the book, that's a pretty good recommendation for the book. The article author clearly just doesn't like their dream being shattered.

Whole article is trying to solve problems of human society through space exploration and colonization. Like trying to mask one's mental illness by not talking about it.

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

Obviously there are research stations on Antarctica. And presumable your argument is that these are "permanent"? My point is that they are not, not in the sense that we will need for Mars. No one lives there full time, people aren't raising families there, they are very dependent on regular deliveries from the outside.

Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...

Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.

Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere.

None of those are self sustaining.

Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence.

Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.

there is literally zero evidence to support that assertion

Yes, we don't experiment on humans in space right now, so there is no evidence, sure. My (limited) understanding leads me to this conclusion for (I think) two _very good_ reasons:

1. The twisting and folding of the heart tube is highly dependent on gravity and micro-pressures of circulating blood in the embryo. I learned that from Dr. Larry Taber at Wash U in St. Louis. In microgravity, there's a very strong chance the heart forms incorrectly or if it does form correctly, it conditions itself for zero-g life, so it will have reduced pumping strength because it never needs to move blood from toe to head against gravity. So, even if you gestate a kid correctly in microgravity, the transition to an environment _with_ gravity could be extremely stressful on the body or possibly fatal.

2. Other phases of gestation _depend_ on gravity. The "baby dropping" around the beginning of third trimester is important to kick start the body to prepare for birth. The baby presses on the cervix to stimulate dilation during the process of birth, etc.

There is also zero evidence to oppose it. We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).

We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).

Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...

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.

Raptor is a thing of beauty: https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/Raptor_.... Look how polished it is. It looks like a fucking Apple product.

The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.

Is that why they never made it to the moon, and did their best to hide fatal failures?

They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.

The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.

Competition does improve products.

New Glenn's engines are quite a bit less efficient than those at SpaceX. Lower chamber pressures, lower thrust:weight ratio, and they're partial flow staged combustion.

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

They’re amazing too. That’s my point. The legacy launch providers were doing zero innovation, limping along shuttle era designs and literally buying the most critical parts from our biggest competitor. The people who hate Elon have no concept how revolutionary the Merlin engine was given this context. It doesn’t matter if SpaceX is successful or not, they revived the entire US space industry. That’s what matters.

I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.

The outcome is guaranteed to be entertaining

Simple is harder than complex.

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

A single metal piece that contains plumbing inside it is simpler than a metal piece with attached pipes for that plumbing.

In this particular case maybe but in general I would say it is the other way round.

Why was this flagged?

Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:

Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.

snicker

And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.

Or lets say they are joining already anyway.

For reference: Starlink is <$20bn yearly revenue (a bit over $1k/customer).

Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.

Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).

> Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share

Several mobile carriers are already using them for backend of remote towers.

For something relevant? Why would they do this? Dark fibers is an easy thing and you need to put power to these remote towers anyway.

And to add to this: They still have packet loss when they switch the satelites every 1-4 minutes.

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.

Starship V2 heat shield was good enough to allow the ship to perform a landing on the ocean in one piece, in a precise spot. But a safe landing is not enough, the ship needs to be in a good enough condition to be flown again, with low refurbishment costs. We still don't know what condition Starship is in after landing (they need to actually land it on land first). I wouldn't say the heat shield is failing, it didn't cause any failure of the ship, it protected it successfully to the sea level.

But the heat shield is just not mentioned in this article. They actually made significant changes to it in the new version. They added added new seals between the tiles, improved attachment points, and redesigned the shielding in specific areas.

A big problem with their work on the heat shield is that they lost the ship before reentry multiple times for various reasons. They were making changes to the heat shield on previous versions, but couldn't test them as they were repeatedly losing the ship before the heat shield was actually used.

Also, from their description of the planned launch of Starship V3:

> For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

So they're still working on the heat shield. Things like space data centers may be economical only if Starship is fully reusable, otherwise the idea is dead on arrival.

From my understanding, they have been intentionally sabotaging the heat shield to test the limits of the ship. They are putting the shield through the ringer to find the extreme boundaries to design around.

If they needed land a payload, they could stuff a dragon capsule in the starship, but the point is building something new.

I think you’re overstating the problem. All of the tests flown so far were deliberately crippled just to see how much they could get away with. They installed fewer tiles than were really needed, leaving gaps in large surfaces and even leaving the hinge areas of the flaps unprotected. The resulting damage was spectacular and terrible for reusability, but the ships still functioned. That actually bodes well for human spaceflight! Losing a tile crippled the Space Shuttle, but the Starship looks to be much more robust.

> Losing a tile crippled the Space Shuttle

Losing a tile on the most damage sensible area of the shuttle.

It's okay, Mars doesn't have much atmosphere. We can figure out how to bring them home later.

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 other aspect is the stainless steel hull that can take more punishment, mechanical mounting of tiles rather than glue (though iirc some places still ended up having to use glue) and more developed automation tech making it realistic to get a machine to do the installation and inspection work.

Also, the ability to fly without crew and the willingness to have highly visible failures means they can actually exercise the heat shield to understand what works.

Indeed! On Starship v1, that's what they started out doing: each tile was the same, and there was awkward placement and notable gaps, especially along the fins. I think they were hoping that this would be good enough, but that dream was dashed. I just hope that it can be completely standardized to provide the benefits you mentioned. I suppose it really helps that they'll be building thousands of these things instead of single digits!

The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!

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.

If a decision is smart due to having access to non-public information, that is more a question of ignorance than intelligence.

I can think of all sorts of successful decisions that would definitely be stupid for a normal person to try, due to lack of connections, access to money, high risk, etc.

And maybe to expose my own lack of intelligence, I've always thought eg Robinhood was incredibly dumb. I never in a million years would have thought of the idea of creating an investing app, since there are already many of them, from far more reliable and trustworthy sources. And yet Robinhood has made its founders billions.

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.

Tesla Semi is in production

Just! Apparently they started two weeks ago.

"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?

If you mean whether he’s putting his money where his mouth is, he is doing that by risking the future of the company that is his biggest asset on it. It may not be exactly 3 years. But is will very likely happen.

The point is that he is not putting his money where his predictions are and we should not put any more stock in them than he does.

I don't see how he's risking the future of his company by saying words that end up being false, he does that all the time and lying/exaggerating is probably an essential part of being an effective fundraiser these days. In my eyes an enforceable large bet would be much stronger evidence indeed than words.

If I'm building a warehouse and I say "this warehouse is going to house the worlds supply of x", am I risking the future of the company if that fails and I pivot to housing y instead?

Why would he do that? A successful IPO is the goal. His shares will go sky high. That is where his money is.

Obviously, but their implicit point is that in your scenario you can win by bluffing as long as you can continue to credibly promise the moon and keep the bet rolling but in their scenario only the final outcome wins. Dude is famous for bluffing so it's a reasonable take.

Prediction: SpaceX will launch a handful of GPU-equipped satellites. Maybe they’ll even include some token GPUs on each Starlink satellite so they can throw out some bullshit stats about the vast size of their AI supercluster in space, etc.

They’ll be vague about capacity for a few years, and they’ll be building and acquiring data centers on earth “just while we wait for <breakthrough> that will unlock overnight massive scaling of the space data centers”. The timeline will always be “in the next year”, but no real workloads will run on the space GPUs for a decade. Then, finally, maybe, it’ll happen. Or maybe not, just like FSD. Always around the corner, never quite here.

And it’ll work for meme stock purposes, just like his other companies.

> just like FSD

Obviously it’s very late, but Tesla now have vehicles in multiple YS cities taxing people with nobody in the front seats.

It’s coming.

Yeah, right. Why do they only have a handful of these cars in each city, when supposedly wait times are super high for them? Why don't they just put more of these in service, if they're just Teslas?

I suspect the answer is because they're being remotely monitored and operated 24/7, and they don't have the staff to tend to them.

But only Tesla knows, and they've spent the last few years absolutely destroying their reputation. They lie constantly, they show flagrant disregard for the lives of their customers, and I trust nothing that they say.

EDIT: lol, looks like I was exactly right. These fucking clowns: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-says-its-robotaxis-are-som...

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.

If they'd just left it in UTC there wouldn't have been an error and the 'rest of World' could easily calculate in their local timezone.

I prefer to call it an unplanned calendar learning opportunity.

Page banned in my country apparently

What is your country?

Cyprus

I get "The owner of this website (spacex.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (CY) from accessing this website."

Cyprus is on the proscribed countries list for ITAR.

Same here! New Firefox VPN feature comes in really handy here - just toggle it on and the access is back, load the page and turn off again.

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...

For china its a future investment. Its R&D, an image topic and its the job of a state anyway to do fundamental R&D.

Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.

Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.

From the links you shared, it seems they are first trying to determine whether it's economically feasible at all.

I think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.

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

What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid

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!

So you are comparing putting up slightly more solar panels and some batteries, both things that are mass produced commodity with re-engineering the whole computing ecosystem and how data-centers have been done for decades, transporting them on the most expensive known transportation system and then operating it in a way where you need specially educated experts.

So my bet would be that just ordering a bunch of sodium batteries and a bunch of solar panels (or you know using a source of energy that is constant) is cheaper then going threw all the effort of putting things into space.

I have been following everything space for decades, and not once have I thought, wow putting super complex engineering things into space so easy and you should do it for things that have an easy alternative on earth.

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.

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.

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.

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

They tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea.

We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.

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.

Solar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.

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?...

The problem with that was not based on physics, like the thermodynamics of datacenters in space.

Like point to point rocket travel?

That works, the physics is proven.

It has not been tried commercially yet, so has not failed there, but that is not relevant to my point.

The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.

Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:

xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.

I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.

his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.

If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.

He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker

That's a lot of alleged failure for one of the richest people in history. Maybe you should go start a car company and launch company and show us how it's done

This is not relevant to the comment is a reply to.

Go start yet another "Elon is an idiot because I hate his politics" thread.

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?

The radiators would be a lot smaller than you’d think: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.

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.

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.

But there are cheap drone swarms on earth which could destroy it.

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 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.

How much energy does it take to pump the heat from a primary loop at a temperature tolerated by the silicon to a secondary loop at 900 K? If we pick 300 K for simplicity, would we not need twice as much energy as we want to get rid of just to raise the temperature? 2 MW to raise 1 MW from 300 K to 900 K?

Yep, the COP goes down as the temperature goes up, and at a certain point it's not worthwhile increasing the temperature.

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.

It's not "impossible" but so hard, complex, and expensive that any "gains" you get from being in space are nothing compared to the costs you pay for being in space.

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?

ELON IS NOT AN ENGINEER.

"Rockets should land themselves" is not a grand theory of physics. He had money and told smarter people to do it.

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.

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

Aerospace vessel, not terminal prompt.

I was also disappointed to discover this.

I was pleased, because for a moment I was worried they'd had an LLM rewrite the prompt thing into some other language.

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.

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.

Ok, but most of Blue Origins plans rely on off planet infrastructure so SpaceX can have earth and Blue Origin the rest of space.

Looking after the humanity we already have?

Figuring out a way to coexist peacefully before expanding any further.

Then we never go.

What if expanding helps us coexist peacefully? Maybe being in a crab bucket with no frontier is part of the issue.

Those goals can be achieved in parallel.

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.

The problem putting them in space solves is the approx 5X more solar energy without needing batteries for day and night cycles, along with some smaller wins due to less structural support needed due to microgravity.

> The problem putting them in space solves is

There are a lot of problems that can be solved by creating 20 other, much bigger, problems.

And then it creates problem with radiation (energy dense particles travelling close to the speed of light ripping holes into 2nm chips) and heat (it turns out that coffee stays hot in a thermos for very long time)

Structural support. A few sheets of steel is what we are trying to safe money on?

So the money we are saving is commodity solar, commodity steel and community battery (or any other form of power).

And instead of those things we add, insane engineering complexity, insane complex heating, insanely complex maintenance or standing backup, insanely expensive transportation and insanely complex operations and insanely complex communications?

100kW of solar and a massive battery is going to be easily cheaper than a 20kW satellite. Especially in somewhere like Texas.

Good luck with heat management.

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.

Yeah, but this is not a national project, but a private one

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.

Your biggest problem is watching the news. It is designed to make you angry. Meanwhile, I've never been prouder to be American.

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.

I presume they meant in Europe.

St. George's Cross has long been a symbol of racism in the UK and they've recently been trying to do the same with the union jack.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c626vxyxgj6o

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...

>The only way this makes sense is if much of the left actively disdain most of the nation

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.

The left (or center) did not "give up" on the flag. It's all over the place in protests.

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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.

Yes, beyond the three things that are the hard parts it's easy.

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.

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.

It’s like saying within 2-3 years the sun will go out.

Almost correct, yes.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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).

In the long term, the biggest problem is that space data centers are very hard to defend against missiles.

> What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute?

Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.

You can put computers underground. Cheaper than launching into space.

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

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.

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.

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.

>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.

"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.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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

It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?

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 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.

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.

Maybe coverage is directed outward from Earth ? It could be quite an upgrade to the "UFO" TV series SID (Space Intruder Detector).

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.

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

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.

"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

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.

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).

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

His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

How do you cool them?

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

Same!

also first thing that crossed my mind!

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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.

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.

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.

As a European my problem is that any additional success by Musks means more support for far right extremists that want to destroy the EU. Being against that is not moralizing or Tribalism.

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.

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.

>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...

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.

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.

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 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.

> getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around

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.

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."

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?

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.

Yeah you would need 10-20 American football fields worth of radiators for a single data-center... so yes, it "can" work, but it's completely inefficient and unrealistic.

There are a lot of things that are possible that make no financial sense.

If you spot Datacenters In Space as making sense, why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it?

Why not have SpaceX build datacenter satellites and lease them to XAi et al, or XAi design and manufacture satellite datacenters and pay SpaceX to launch them? Heck, why not start a third company which focuses exclusively on datacenters in space, buying services from one company and selling them to another, so they can concentrate on this rather specialized skillset without distraction?

How does SpaceX acquiring XAi help anything but Elon Musk's personal portfolio?

Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.

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.

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.

The data centres are for the secret radar constellation masquerading as an ISP company that is Starlink

You are watching the slave grid being erected over your head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A See 1:38:00

Shouldn't we be able to detect radio coming from SAR satellites? If SpaceX were to launch a cover SAR constellation, why can't they just use starlink as an excuse, why do they have to invent a new businessline?

Nope, they will be in a low earth orbit that will decay and enter the atmosphere without maintenance burns

And it will impact negatively humanity's health.

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

They'll all have a sun synchronous polar orbit.. I don't think they'll be very low orbit, unless they are like trains, at every 1km a satellite.

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.

Architecture in 68K. ROM. VII Design. Complex machines.

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

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.

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.

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