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Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
171–180 of 201 posts
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Training, no. Latency is too high. Inference the latency becomes trivial. Other things, I suspect latency is too high again.
They're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency because of intuition drawn from satellites in geosynchronous orbit – but those are about 50x farther away from earth and have correspondingly longer ping times.
They don't go directly to the satellite but through ground stations and then bounce around on lasers between satellites. The latency is going to be worse than fiber
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The maximum heat rejection capacity of the ISS is 126Kw.
Musk’s proposal is to put 1 rack per satellite drawing 150kw using 110 m^2 of radiators (1/4th that of the ISS). The only way to do that is by running the satellite at 71-100C which is a problem for the chips to actually run.
So the open questions are: * can they actually dump the heat and can they have the racks running so hot for so long * is it economical to in one year replace all the capacity you launched 5 years ago (you save up to 0.5B in electricity costs over that time frame but that doesn’t seem like a lot for having to replace that much capacity buildup)? And given they’re running racks way hotter than has been validated on earth, will those chips end up lasting 5 years (including space radiation).
Pretending like it’s a solved problem is neat but I’m not saying sure it’ll be so easy.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#174If you make money shorting a stock, who do you make money from?
Someone who bought and expected to make a profit, but reached a point where they hit their stop loss or just wanted to get out the trade at any cost and couldn’t bear to wait longer. Quite possible a redditor who frequents r/wallstreetbets and YOLOed in.
Whether you buy or sell in the market you’re almost certainly trading with a market maker, not some other individual.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#175I like Elon so much because of one reason: his multi trillion business adds completely new values without taking a single cent away from small retailers and owners, as new big corps do through various legit and not so ways. In contrast, Bezos has closed innumerable stores and every tech giant killed competition in online services. Name it socialism for the poor, but I don't care about his success as long as it doesn't interfere with other's business.
His EV was successful, his social media/AI OK but his space data center will fail and from now on he sells hype, a very fancy, trendy, sexy -name it- and expensive hype. Laws of physics don't allow it to be viable. We have a joke that originally applied to politicians and now to him: you can fool one for a long time, you can fool many for a short time, but you can't fool many for a long time.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX would be launching these on Starship, which has a much lower targeted launch cost.
For reasons already outlined, I have doubts about their math. Targeting $250/kg payload costs is ambitious for a rocket that has not yet successfully reached orbit or proven cost-effective. Even if we do somehow succeed at affordably dumping tons of GPUs into orbit, what do we do about the Kessler Syndrome?
From first principles, does anyone know what the minimum costs are to put a rocket into space? There must be a minimum cost given that the rocket engines have to thrust until reaching escape velocity to get you to space.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#177I 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…
Paul Graham has been positive about the YC startup doing data centers in space https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779
For the idea to make sense I think you have to project forward some years to launches being cheaper and compute demand outrunning the energy grid.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#178I 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…
Paul Graham has been positive about the YC startup doing data centers in space https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779 For the idea to make sense I think you have to project forward some years to launches being cheaper and compute demand outrunning the energy grid.
What makes you think Paul Graham knows what he's talking about re: space, data centers, and the logistics of lifting data centers into space and the ongoing maintenance of them. I don't understand the deification his thoughts receive around here.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The maximum heat rejection capacity of the ISS is 126Kw. Musk’s proposal is to put 1 rack per satellite drawing 150kw using 110 m^2 of radiators (1/4th that of the ISS). The only way to do that is by running the satellite at 71-100C which is a problem for the chips to actually run. So the open questions are: * can they actually dump the heat and can they have the racks running so hot for so long * is it economical to…
Those temperatures aren't necessarily a problem for the chips (there are some minor design changes needed, so it's more a question of having enough volume to justify doing it). The real issue is that this is yet another thing you could do better on earth.
In other words, run fully lights-out datacentres that no humans will access during normal operation - this allows you create more extreme temperature gradients and to replace the atmosphere with CO2 (or even He2), both of which will make your cooling solution much more efficient as well as increasing rack density and perhaps even taking the place of a fire suppression system.
The reason that no-one's actually doing that at scale is that it's currently significantly more expensive than traditional datacentre designs. And yet, that's still much less expensive than boosting racks into space and then letting them burn up in the atmosphere five years later.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The maximum heat rejection capacity of the ISS is 126Kw. Musk’s proposal is to put 1 rack per satellite drawing 150kw using 110 m^2 of radiators (1/4th that of the ISS). The only way to do that is by running the satellite at 71-100C which is a problem for the chips to actually run. So the open questions are: * can they actually dump the heat and can they have the racks running so hot for so long * is it economical to…
It’s as solved as FSD.