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Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

reuters.com

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Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#111

Post by AnthonyMouse »

RIMR wrote: post #71
jacobgold wrote: post #50

I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and I am incredibly skeptical of the "data centers in space" sales pitch. It seems like an actual scam. Data centers submerged in the ocean or placed in the desert seem much more promising. But I have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I…

Let's just put it this way: The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity. An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity. So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites. That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of R…

I don't really get the obsolete argument.

The thing has two main parts. One, a bunch of solar panels, shielding and radiators. This the heavy / expensive to launch part, but should last for what, decades? Two, a bunch of GPUs/servers. These become obsolete, but so what? They're not that heavy, so every few years you send up another rocket and swap them out.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#112

Post by deaton »

jacobgold wrote: post #50

I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and I am incredibly skeptical of the "data centers in space" sales pitch. It seems like an actual scam. Data centers submerged in the ocean or placed in the desert seem much more promising. But I have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I…

To me it feels like a way for Musk to justify directing AI money towards his first true love, which was space.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#113

Post by asadotzler »

RIMR wrote: post #71
jacobgold wrote: post #50

I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and I am incredibly skeptical of the "data centers in space" sales pitch. It seems like an actual scam. Data centers submerged in the ocean or placed in the desert seem much more promising. But I have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I…

Let's just put it this way: The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity. An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity. So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites. That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of R…

Launches are not $74M. That's retail pricing.

SpaceX's launch cost, the internal spend to put one Falcon 9 Starlink payload in orbit, with a return to launch site booster recovery, is about $15M.

If you're going to make such assertions, do the legwork to make sure your numerical claims aren't off by 500%.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#114

Post by eldenring »

metalliqaz wrote: post #106
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ocean is worse than space from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. But that just highlights how bad of an idea space-based data centers are at this time.

> from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns. Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency. The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it…

Cooling is relatively easy, you just need radiators which are passive, and essentially reduce to a launch cost penalty. You are right that they can't be serviced, but that is missing the point of orbital data centers. The whole point is that you can build hundreds of thousands of these in a factory and launch them in a scalable manner. The power, cooling, etc. comes for "free". In the long run, as the cost of the chip, launches, etc. goes down, orbital data centers will scale better terrestrial ones.

As a side note, I don't understand why I keep seeing these wrong arguments on HN repeatedly. Like everything mentioned in this thread can easily be fact checked. Radiative cooling is solved, launch costs are going down, so power costs will pay themselves back very quickly, etc.

You can argue about specifics, like chips will get more sophisticated + power efficient and fabrication will be the true longterm bottleneck, or SMRs/fusion could reduce energy bottlenecks, but talking about cooling as if convective cooling is the only option is just nonsensical.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#116

Post by metalliqaz »

eldenring wrote: post #114
metalliqaz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns. Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency. The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it…

Cooling is relatively easy, you just need radiators which are passive, and essentially reduce to a launch cost penalty. You are right that they can't be serviced, but that is missing the point of orbital data centers. The whole point is that you can build hundreds of thousands of these in a factory and launch them in a scalable manner. The power, cooling, etc. comes for "free". In the long run, as the cost of the chi…

> Radiative cooling is solved.

This is emphatically not true at any scale in which this scheme makes sense. Be careful with including too many Musk boosters in your information diet.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#118

Post by tqi »

nijave wrote: post #102
tqi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the problem also that because of radiation, processors in space either need to have larger feature sizes OR additional shielding / redundancy? Seems like a pretty high price to pay for slightly cheaper energy...

Ars had an article that cited some HPE testing on the international space station that said regular hardware is _probably_ fine up to about 5 years Definitely not definitive but it's plausible current hardware could survive with minimal modification

hm but "fine" as in probably won't die?

my question was more whether the hardware would need extra redundancy or shielding in order to not have unacceptably high error rates

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#119

Post by FuckButtons »

jacobgold wrote: post #50

I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and I am incredibly skeptical of the "data centers in space" sales pitch. It seems like an actual scam. Data centers submerged in the ocean or placed in the desert seem much more promising. But I have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I…

The only barely sane rationale that I’ve heard for wanting datacenters in space is that they would give space-x low latency signal processing capacity it would need to turn Starlink into a real time Passive SAR constellation.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#120

Post by WalterBright »

jackmott42 wrote: post #82
zugi wrote: post #76

SpaceX has accomplished spectacular things in reusable launch vehicles and space-based networking. It will soon restore the heavy launch capability that the US lost when it retired the Saturn V in the 1970s, but in an affordable and sustainable manner. SpaceX is almost single-handedly keeping the US ahead in space. I'm bullish on SpaceX as a company in terms of technical accomplishment. Buying SPCX would make sense a…

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