Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

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Let's just put it this way:

The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity.

An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity.

So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites.

That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of RAM, SSDs, etc., a radiation-proof satellite housing to support all of that hardware, solar arrays, launch costs ($74M per Falcon launch), all for maintenance to be impossible and the hardware to become obsolete in a couple of years.

It's a delusion unless we invent some way to go to space for free.

Launches are not $74M. That's retail pricing.

SpaceX's launch cost, the internal spend to put one Falcon 9 Starlink payload in orbit, with a return to launch site booster recovery, is about $15M.

If you're going to make such assertions, do the legwork to make sure your numerical claims aren't off by 500%.

SpaceX would be launching these on Starship, which has a much lower targeted launch cost.

For reasons already outlined, I have doubts about their math. Targeting $250/kg payload costs is ambitious for a rocket that has not yet successfully reached orbit or proven cost-effective.

Even if we do somehow succeed at affordably dumping tons of GPUs into orbit, what do we do about the Kessler Syndrome?

From first principles, does anyone know what the minimum costs are to put a rocket into space? There must be a minimum cost given that the rocket engines have to thrust until reaching escape velocity to get you to space.

I don't really get the obsolete argument.

The thing has two main parts. One, a bunch of solar panels, shielding and radiators. This the heavy / expensive to launch part, but should last for what, decades? Two, a bunch of GPUs/servers. These become obsolete, but so what? They're not that heavy, so every few years you send up another rocket and swap them out.

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