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SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

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Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#121

Post by ben_w »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #114
sifar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. >> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. >> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage.…

You think Grand Forks ND or Tempe Arizona is going to say, “we’re going to shoot down your datacenters?” Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities? Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t…

Destroying a satelite is much easier than launching one, even with existing systems. Worse, given rate of improvements, I think we're going to get ground-to-orbit anti-satelite lasers before 10% of this constellation gets launched.

And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#122

Post by ben_w »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #80
PunchyHamster wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"

Solar capacity factor is 10-20%. So your state of the art chips are utilized 10-20%. That just makes no sense. Adding batteries help, but does not solve it entirely.

Batteries can solve it entirely, but they have a price for doing so which you can then simply compare to launch costs.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#123

Post by ben_w »

timschmidt wrote: post #61
ben_w wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're counting Falcons, you are making my point for me: even with those, on three launch sites, they still can't get close to the minimum for an extremely small, to the point of being unreasonable, target satellite mass. Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for spa…

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon. If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Star…

The competition isn't other launch providers, it's not going to space at all.

According to Google, the price threshold to make space make more sensible than building on the ground is $200/kg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468

Without full reusability, the estimated cost for Starship to LEO is kinda hard to find (necessarily, given the design isn't yet finalised), Wikipedia says $100m/launch in expendable mode, and the SpaceX website* says 250 metric tonnes in expendable mode, which is $100e6/250 metric tonnes = $400/kg.

* at least it does at time of writing: https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#124

Post by ben_w »

GMoromisato wrote: post #88

I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism. Let's assume two premises: 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms). If you don't buy either of these two premises…

> Let's assume two premises:

> 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).

> If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

I'm glad you said the final quoted paragraph; while it has always been difficult to tell which websites are accurate vs. slop, and moreso today with fully automated slop, I see claims the current rate is doubling between 15 and 3 months. Even at the slowest of these, 15 months, this gets 2^(120/15) = 256x growth in 10 years, which would raise it significantly above current total global electrical demand: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...

> A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.

Not so: given that existing power capacity is already a constraining factor for new ground-based data centres, the alternative to be considered is not the CO2 emissions of existing average USA energy sources, but the CO2 emissions of new energy sources. This may be many things, but given that renewables are now the cheapest new energy, if politics stops renewables in the US it just means the data centres (especially at this kind of scale) aren't going to be in the US, but it doesn't say that they'll be in space specifically.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#125

Post by [deleted] »

ericd wrote: post #33
vkou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't GPUs the problem is cooling them. Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.

ISS is not comparable, we don't have to keep GPUs in human-habitable temp ranges, and radiation speed goes way up with increased temps.

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#126

Post by ben_w »

GMoromisato wrote: post #100
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial. And assuming that the current mix of electric generation isn't going to become cleaner over time is an interesting take.

Current mix of electric generation is not going to get 37 times cleaner in 10 years. That's the ratio we're talking about right now. But I do agree that the economic math is not a slam dunk. A lot of things have to go perfectly right for it to make sense economically. But that's the irony: Orbital datacenters are much cleaner than terrestrial ones, and if we don't deploy them, it will only be because corporations car…

> Current mix of electric generation is not going to get 37 times cleaner in 10 years. That's the ratio we're talking about right now.

Doesn't need to: because data centres are already power-constrained, the correct question is marginal new supply in each case.

If you build 25 GW of new data centres (which seems to be roughly the scale being proposed here), the options are (1) build more power plants or (2) have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts.

What are those new power plants going to be? Even though Trump hates renewables, they're now the cheapest new power source, which was already necessary to be even considering putting 25 GW of PV onto satellites in the first place.

This makes it a question of what's cheaper: over-provisioning and storage, or launch costs?

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#127

Post by ben_w »

hackernudes wrote: post #98
bastawhiz wrote: post #90

Who is paying for all this? Starlink revenue? I don't think so. To 100x what they've done over the last ten years and also fund it with money they're not being paid by others is implausible. They've got money, but they don't have THAT much money. They'd need to significantly juice up the whole rest of their business to not just be substantially more profitable, but also launch far more payloads. Does that much demand…

isn't the IPO a way to get tons of money?

I've seen it suggested that the IPO they're targeting (plus the similarly-timed ones from OpenAI and Anthropic) may be so high as to break the financial system. Investors need to have a trillion dollars available to invest if the stuff being added to the market is going to be worth a trillion dollars.

(Phrased that way because while I hear they're targeting 1.5T valuation that doesn't mean they'll be selling 1.5T of shares).

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#128

Post by ben_w »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #65
ben_w wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen (Google paper, IIRC), it only makes sense economically if Musk's stretch goals for price/kg to orbit for Starship become true. Technically it's fine, just take something like Starlink and use most of the power for compute rather than for comms. But financially, it depends on price to orbit being extremely low; not just lower than Falcon, but as low as Musk's best public claims about what may be co…

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"

Almost entirely depends on how much it costs to deal with the ground having night, and if this is more or less than the cost of putting it somewhere that doesn't have night.

Both are already things that can be done in principle, the question is just how expensive the solutions are.

For scale: if these million satellites were 25kW each, that's 25 GW total; Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year between cars and PowerWall units, so provided they didn't need replacing more than every four years this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, so you'd just need to put this all somewhere without much cloud cover.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#129

Post by ben_w »

HDBaseT wrote: post #93
bastawhiz wrote: post #90

Who is paying for all this? Starlink revenue? I don't think so. To 100x what they've done over the last ten years and also fund it with money they're not being paid by others is implausible. They've got money, but they don't have THAT much money. They'd need to significantly juice up the whole rest of their business to not just be substantially more profitable, but also launch far more payloads. Does that much demand…

Satellites for surveillance purposes. Budget is infinite.

> Budget is infinite.

A fantastic way to break your economy. Even the extra half trillion/year Trump wants to spend on the military is increasing investor concern about buying US treasury bills.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#130

Post by MagicMoonlight »

x-complexity wrote: post #106
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial. And assuming that the current mix of electric generation isn't going to become cleaner over time is an interesting take.

> I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial. An orbital DC makes fiscal sense when the cost to launch one to space is lower than the cost to build one on Earth. Key point: The cost of building on Earth will inevitably trend upwards as more restrictions & costs are (~80% rightfully) placed onto Earth-bound datacenters.

And that will never be true, so it’s meaningless.

It would also be cheaper to build one on the moon, if it was free to build them on the moon.

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