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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#231

Post by Dylan16807 »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #225
Dylan16807 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mandate anything , then they're going to build the dirty one. So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?

Well, arguably from the get go an orbital datacenter would be better. If launch costs were low enough I would say that as much industry as possible should be moved off planet, and we should make earth into a garden?

We're still doing all the mining and manufacturing on Earth, and there's so much empty land. The final product of self-powered datacenter is among the lowest priority of things to get away from us, and not an effective place to spend environmental mitigation money. And then when they re-enter they pollute pretty badly.

Re: Starship V3

#232

Post by inglor_cz »

gpm wrote: post #184
trothamel wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX's launch capacity is an order of magnitude larger that all four of those put together.

Which is irrelevant because offensive launches can destroy many orders of magnitude more launches worth of payloads. Even with simple kinetic means. Though these days I think I'd expect to see directed energy weapons adding even more zeros to that.

Have you done the math? "Many orders of magnitude" means, IMHO, at least three. A regular Falcon 9 carries 60 Starlinks IIRC, so three orders of magnitude means destroying 60 thousand at once.

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

Re: Starship V3

#233

Post by Paradigma11 »

"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?

Re: Starship V3

#234

Post by throw310822 »

joha4270 wrote: post #186
jatora wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. s…

Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens. Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore. I'm…

> Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production

But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.

Re: Starship V3

#235

Post by pveierland »

dnautics wrote: post #132
pveierland wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

As problems go, radiation and cooling seem to have relatively low dimensionality compared to the other problems. It seems to be mostly a question of optimizing within the dimensions of dissipation / structure / deployment / service / cost / weight. When all is said and done, the cooling solution will end up being a module that can deal with some power dissipation, cost X amount, weight Y amount, have structural interface Z. This seems like something a relatively low number of engineers can iterate on largely isolated from other concerns. SpaceX does have 5000+ of them.

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

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

Re: Starship V3

#236

Post by dingaling »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #196
scared_together wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for travel around Earth, supersonic passenger aircraft are more feasible than rockets. Even if we consider sonic booms, a lot of routes where rockets would be desirable are across uninhabited oceans.

Somewhat agree. Boom has demonstrated something, but Starship looks more ready than them. Plus it's going to be vastly more faster and more impressive. Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.

> Boom has demonstrated something

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

Re: Starship V3

#237

Post by inglor_cz »

kelnos wrote: post #190
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.

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.

I think Prospera and its kerfuffles with Honduras put a definitive end to the "islands" idea.

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

Re: Starship V3

#238

Post by Paradigma11 »

notfried wrote: post #153
AlotOfReading wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware a…

If AGI were to happen, or if AI became a trillions-of-dollars-generating industry, you wouldn't want to have your data-centers which might be the most valuable thing on Earth be located in a foreign country. All this investment in infrastructure is not purely based on where the industry is now, but predicated by where those who are bullish about it think it will be in 5-10 years.

How do you protect your datacenters in space from thrown stones?

Re: Starship V3

#239

Post by dingaling »

ericd wrote: post #114
dullcrisp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth? Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.

In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer. Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in m…

> In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight

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

Re: Starship V3

#240

Post by throw310822 »

grey-area wrote: post #212
ryzvonusef wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's pointless nitpicking, when he bought it it was so early you can easily say he made everything of it.
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