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

501–510 of 667 posts

Re: Starship V3

#501

Post by AntiUSAbah »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #371
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…

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.

The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.

Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:

xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.

I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.

his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.

If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.

He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker

Re: Starship V3

#502

Post by IshKebab »

johnsimer wrote: post #427
7e wrote: post #187

V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cas…

Tesla Semi is in production

Just! Apparently they started two weeks ago.

Re: Starship V3

#503

Post by adastra22 »

kyriakos wrote: post #450
adastra22 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your country?

Cyprus I get "The owner of this website (spacex.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (CY) from accessing this website."

Cyprus is on the proscribed countries list for ITAR.

Re: Starship V3

#504

Post by adastra22 »

Symmetry wrote: post #451
adastra22 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the vicinity of the Earth, they get to about the temperature of the Earth. That’s not a coincidence. Hotter if they are actively generating heat.

Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move some of the solar energy they absorb to a central location which presents problems in moving the waste heat back out so that spot doesn't get too hot. But that doesn't change the overall equilibrium temperature.

Running a data center generates heat.

Re: Starship V3

#505

Post by gpm »

inglor_cz wrote: post #232
gpm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I admittedly hadn't done "math", but doing so the claim checks out.

Retrograde launch, with 20 tons of small objects (say 1mm radar absorbing ceramic ball bearings to cause maximum chaos and minimize even the theoretical ability to avoid the oncoming disruption). Dispersed into a wide variety of LEO orbits by ejecting them as the rocket changes orbit. You wouldn't deny the orbital sphere for very long, because small objects would drop out quickly, but everything in it would be destroyed.

There's 10k starlink satellites alone that could all be destroyed by this. Which is the right number of orders of magnitudes.

Admittedly you can't get far above that currently though, since there are only about 15k satellites in orbit... but a single directed energy weapon could destroy practically every satellite in every orbit instead of only the low earth orbit ones so as a log-of-portion-remaining weapon it gets those extra orders of magnitude.

Space is not a safe place - if you want to keep things safe you keep them on firm ground protected by the atmosphere. If you want to keep them really safe you put them below the ground.

Re: Starship V3

#506

Post by randallsquared »

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…

I have a lot of miscellaneous quibbles with your assumptions and numbers, but even if you grant many of them, 40 launches is not many for Starship's planned cadence. HLS is going to require 10-16 Starship launches just to get it fueled enough for one landing, and they have to be close enough together to minimize boil-off.

Re: Starship V3

#508

Post by whamlastxmas »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #448
signatoremo wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid

Re: Starship V3

#509

Post by whamlastxmas »

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #501
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.

The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so. Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive: xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow,…

That's a lot of alleged failure for one of the richest people in history. Maybe you should go start a car company and launch company and show us how it's done

Re: Starship V3

#510

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

timmmmmmay wrote: post #499
schainks wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is also zero evidence to oppose it. We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).

We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).

Post reply on HN