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Starship V3

spacex.com

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Re: Starship V3

#141

Post by slimebot80 »

pveierland wrote: post #116
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

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 o…

"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.

Re: Starship V3

#142

Post by ulfw »

pveierland wrote: post #116
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

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 o…

> 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?

Re: Starship V3

#143

Post by ericd »

idiotsecant wrote: post #115
piloto_ciego wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Does the fuel cost that much? Just doing some back of the napkin doesn't seem to bear that out. Looks like the fuel load is about $2M, and gets you 100 tons to orbit. I think an inference-optimized NVL72 GB300 rack costs around 3x that, >$6M. That thing eats about 150kw, call it 10 pallets of 30 500W solar panels. Each pallet's about a ton, and costs about $10k. Let's be conservative and say the radiator's about the same weight. In reality, they're not going to be using commercial panels with heavy glass facing designed to resist hail, so should be better than this.

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.

Re: Starship V3

#144

Post by jatora »

pveierland wrote: post #116
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

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 o…

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.

Re: Starship V3

#145

Post by fwipsy »

Fordec wrote: post #123

The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing. I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.

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

Re: Starship V3

#146

Post by avmich »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #125
avmich wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The physics degree is a deception and perhaps fabricated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 (and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less) And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about

I agree, but the idea that he doesn't have skills is still incorrect.

Re: Starship V3

#147

Post by Tostino »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #119
lucisferre wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you cool them? https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...

Admittedly it is not my field, but back of the envelope calculations in a sun synchronous orbit with the radiators pointed towards deep space seem pretty plausible with about 1.3 to 1.7 ratio of solar area to radiator area. 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.

But you need a lot of fluid or gas to move the heat in that radiator system, whereas solar has the benefit of extremely efficiently moving power around at great distances through wiring or integrated bus bars.

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...

Re: Starship V3

#148

Post by choilive »

christkv wrote: post #110

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.

Re: Starship V3

#149

Post by ActorNightly »

pveierland wrote: post #116
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

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 o…

>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.

Re: Starship V3

#150

Post by ActorNightly »

AlexErrant wrote: post #68
elevaet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

None of those are self sustaining.

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