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

Post by kibwen » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #92

vlovich123 wrote: post #83

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The Microsoft design of filling an airtight submersible structure with argon and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean floor is the alternative design - you’re not looking to do repairs but amortize the low cost of failures across the value you extract. The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribl…

It’s not an unsolved physics problem. Every satellite in space has to deal with it and even the ISS deals with it by having massive radiator arrays that face perpendicular to the sun. The problem with data centers in space is one of materials science and engineering: how to make radiators large enough and effective enough to cool it while also being economically feasible, both in terms of construction and getting the…

Post by kibwen » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

asadotzler wrote: post #105

jacobgold wrote: post #65

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That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware. I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is pr…

5 years is a Starlink's typical lifetime. Data center satellite lifetimes will probably be shorter. Demise sooner, replace more often. GPUs get more energy efficient every year and leaving the slower, hungrier chips up there much longer than 3 years seems wasteful given the cheap cost of launch. I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design go…

Post by nijave » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #118

nijave wrote: post #102

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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

Post by croes » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

eldenring wrote: post #114

metalliqaz wrote: post #106

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> 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…

Post by croes » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

spongebobstoes wrote: post #127

groby_b wrote: post #125

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"you just need radiators which are passive "Just" is doing a lot of work there. SpaceX is planning to launch 100 GW of compute annually, that comes with ~ 2.5 square kilometers of radiator (assuming an optimistic 800K radiator temp and emissivity of 0.9, double sided) Go for advanced carbon composites, you can do that with just 5,000 metrics tons or so of material. That's 34 starship launches just for the radiators.…

radiators about the same size and weight as solar panels will do the trick there is already a h100 in orbit 1GW of compute is a lot in 2026. comparing 100GW of annual compute to SpaceX 2026 goals does not make sense if Starship launch cost predictions are accurate, data centers in space will happen within 10 years