Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship V3

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 667 posts

Re: Starship V3

#441

Post by m4rtink »

mapt wrote: post #423
svantana wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kessler Syndrome is the biggest dealbreaker. We're already fairly far advanced in that scenario from Starlink, and competitors/scaleouts to Starlink promise to be worse. If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately. Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a ph…

Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.

Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.

Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.

Re: Starship V3

#442

Post by m4rtink »

le-mark wrote: post #430
damnitbuilds wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: Starship V3

#443

Post by kotaKat »

mapt wrote: post #411
arijun wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Re: Starship V3

#444

Post by randallsquared »

philipallstar wrote: post #431
slumberlust wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation. > Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth f…

> glad the American taxpayer is doing it.

For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.

Re: Starship V3

#445

Post by sidewndr46 »

svantana wrote: post #316
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #294

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 th…

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!

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

Re: Starship V3

#446

Post by j_w »

signatoremo wrote: post #438
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #294

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 th…

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-spac…

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

Re: Starship V3

#447

Post by amoss »

saberience wrote: post #404
geertj wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plan is to launch a constellation of smaller AI sats not a monolithic large data center. The calculations I have seen actually have a smaller radiator area than solar panels. Scott Manley’s has a video on this where he goes into some numbers.

Scott Manley's video uses 20kw as a reference number which isn't even half of the power usage of a modern GB200 rack. I.e. not even close to the power usage of an actual datacenter. In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter... Also, how is a constellation of satellites any easier in this case? They all need extremely large radiators, they all need maintenance, they all need high bandwidth communication.…

Later in the video he runs through the changes needed for 100kw per rack.

Re: Starship V3

#448

Post by Yossarrian22 »

signatoremo wrote: post #438
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #294

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 th…

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-spac…

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

Re: Starship V3

#449

Post by general1465 »

adastra22 wrote: post #402
damnitbuilds wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.
Post reply on HN