Starship V3

Post by moralestapia » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

kotaKat wrote: post #443

mapt wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

Post by tekno45 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

choilive wrote: post #148

christkv wrote: post #110

I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.

Stefan-Boltzmann law means radiative heat transfer in space is approx. to the 4th power of the hot side of your radiator. Typical space based radiators operate around 350K. If you can increase the hot side of the refrigeration cycle by 4x (1400K) you increase heat transfer by 256x. Create a radiator design that can operate at this temp (multi-stage Brayton loops, heat pumps, possible liquid metal final stage) with a…

Post by senordevnyc » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

Schiendelman wrote: post #522

saalweachter wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you aren't leaving that heat in place. You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute. If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space. It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can re…

I guess I'm curious: all the comments I see about this act as if the people proposing putting data centers in space are complete idiots. Do you believe they are complete idiots?

Post by saberience » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #506

saberience wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.