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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#291

Post by ben_w »

b112 wrote: post #278
benj111 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put computers underground. Cheaper than launching into space. Why put them in space? Power? We have that on earth.

There are literally enormous problems powering AI data centers on the Earth right now. No, we don't have the power on Earth. In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train. Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the bu…

> There are literally enormous problems powering AI data centers on the Earth right now.

Political, not technical.

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

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

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

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

For scale:

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

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

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

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

Re: Starship V3

#292

Post by orwin »

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…

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.

Re: Starship V3

#293

Post by kortilla »

danpalmer wrote: post #126
ghshephard wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Culture clash between starlink and falcon has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard. Falcon only exists in its current form because of starlink and starlink only exists because of falcon. Starlink is by far falcon’s biggest customer and starlink enables falcon to iterate and try things nobody that cares about their payload would.

Re: Starship V3

#294

Post by AntiUSAbah »

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...

Re: Starship V3

#295

Post by ActorNightly »

hvb2 wrote: post #203
ActorNightly wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere. None of those are self sustaining.

Why on earth (pun intended), would you want that? You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need. If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you'r…

The point is that we don't have technology (or at least not proven) to make a habitat on earth that can reliably provide isolation from harsh atmosphere.

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

Re: Starship V3

#296

Post by throw310822 »

ben_w wrote: post #280
throw310822 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The other side of the coin of praising him personally for success like that, is blaming him personally for everything that goes wrong, like Cybertruck being simultaneously late and far more expensive than announced and far worse than announced and that even the announcement itself wasn't well done, or the majority of this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... With Tesla, Musk…

Musk's accomplishment was absolutely astonishing in betting on a completely immature market and bringing a tiny startup to the giant that is today. Then stuff like the cybertruck for me mark the moment when he completely lost it.

Re: Starship V3

#297

Post by notahacker »

philipallstar wrote: post #247
pibaker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 not…

All share price fundamentals are based on the long term. Short term trading is why some shares are very briefly high or low.

All share price fundamentals based on the long term have this pesky thing called discount rate which means your [hypothetical] earnings from something expected to happen in 2050 get weighted a lot lower than your 2028 earnings and your 2100 earnings barely figure in it at all though.

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

Re: Starship V3

#298

Post by levanten »

robocat wrote: post #287
pibaker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 not…

> believers If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense. However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).

They also care about networking and connections.

Re: Starship V3

#299

Post by throw310822 »

ben_w wrote: post #272
throw310822 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

The thing is, the infrastructure needed to power and cool each of those satellites makes it economically absurd given that what they collectively do can also be done by a few data centers on earth.

Re: Starship V3

#300

Post by AntiUSAbah »

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…

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.

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