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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#491

Post by cameronh90 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #414
cameronh90 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s trading political difficulty for engineering difficulty. There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.

It is another common argument, but again trading a problem for a much harder one. If politicians ban datacenter construction projects, do you think they will take kindly of the process of building them in space? Rockets are really bad from an environment perspective. We tolerate them because we don't do that many launches and the negative effects are small on a global scale.

People oppose data centres mainly for local reasons.

We already have more than 10k Starlink satellites, and there’s almost no outcry about that outside of astronomers, who are justified in their concerns… but politically irrelevant.

Plus, you can technically launch a satellite from almost anywhere if you’re not picky about the orbit, so you just need to find a single country willing to give you a logistically viable launch site. There are no international laws that would prevent, e.g., India launching 1 million satellites.

Re: Starship V3

#492

Post by AntiUSAbah »

kamaal wrote: post #481
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable. You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do…

Everything you wrote is some definition of hard, but all doable. None of this is purely in the territory of 'known' impossible(like FTL travel). Now different people have different points where they quit when things get hard. This is true for even everyday things in life. Quitting triggers exist for people at various points in the ladder. The end of ladder and path both exist, its upto you to decide if you wish to co…

My problem is not the doing thing but the economy of it.

We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.

Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.

Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.

His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.

Re: Starship V3

#493

Post by myrmidon »

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #477

Why was this flagged? Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point: Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion. snicker And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptiv…

For reference: Starlink is Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.

Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).

Re: Starship V3

#494

Post by AntiUSAbah »

m4rtink wrote: post #441
mapt wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hopeful…

5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.

This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.

Re: Starship V3

#495

Post by schainks »

BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #52

I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.

Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence.

Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.

Re: Starship V3

#496

Post by IshKebab »

geertj wrote: post #391
luke5441 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what often gets confused is people saying it isn't viable with "it is not physically possible". It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable. If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.

I don’t think people are confused between the two. What’s happening is that drive by objections have no real way to assess viability. That calculation you ask for has line items in it that greatly depend on engineering optimizations that, unless you work in the field, are hard to estimate accurately.

I don't think you really need those calculations to know that it is always going to be less viable than a traditional data centre. It's like the idea about putting data centres under water.

I'm sure you can do it and you can come up with estimates over how much it will cost... but it's always going to cost more than not putting your data centre underwater.

Re: Starship V3

#497

Post by db48x »

saberience wrote: post #467
randallsquared wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter... Right, but SpaceX has already filed plans with the FCC to launch a million of them, which is to say, 10K of your datacenter units. Tying back to the article, this plan is definitely going to require Starship and airline-like operations.

Ok, how many Starship launches have there been so far? Ok, 11 tests, of which only one has sent a dummy payload. Of the 11 tests, you can say that the latest one was closest to a final (sort of) working version. So we're still very early in the Starship launch program. Let's do the math on "millions of datacenters" worth of launches. In fact, let's try and do it for a single 50k GPU datacenter: 50,000 GPUs at GB200 d…

You’re way overestimating the size of the radiators needed. Then you overestimate their mass, because the ISS has huge heavy radiators that operate at <30°C. A rack of computers can run at much higher temperatures and therefore need much smaller, lighter radiators. The radiators would be smaller and lighter than the solar panels.

Re: Starship V3

#498

Post by IshKebab »

geertj wrote: post #388
elbasti wrote: post #166

Your daily reminder that there is no scenario in which putting data centers in space is easier than putting them in Texas, or Morocco, or literally anywhere else. The only problem that "data centers in space" solves is the problem of trying to scale a rocket company where the potential demand for rocket launches is simply not that big.

The problem putting them in space solves is the approx 5X more solar energy without needing batteries for day and night cycles, along with some smaller wins due to less structural support needed due to microgravity.

100kW of solar and a massive battery is going to be easily cheaper than a 20kW satellite. Especially in somewhere like Texas.

Re: Starship V3

#499

Post by timmmmmmay »

schainks wrote: post #495
BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #52

I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.

Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence. Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.

there is literally zero evidence to support that assertion

Re: Starship V3

#500

Post by rayiner »

eagerpace wrote: post #46
beambot wrote: post #32

Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...

And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.

Raptor is a thing of beauty: https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/Raptor_.... Look how polished it is. It looks like a fucking Apple product.

The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.

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