151–160 of 667 posts
Spacex may be the most important company on the planet. What greater goal is there than expanding humanity to the stars!
Is this rhetorical? Feeding the hungry. Healing the sick. Educating the masses. Etc, etc. I'm a big space fan, don't get me wrong. But your exuberance uh, needs tempering.
More or less those things you mentioned have solutions and they are getting better.
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Elon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available. The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it. Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least). Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger so…
Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth? Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.
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Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware a…
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In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer. Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in m…
How big is it? I have some space I’m not using, no pun intended.
Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
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One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand. My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
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I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
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You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding. Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense. I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement . But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken…
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One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand. My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
Before LEO internet constellations, even the leading nations had just ~20-25 launches per year each, and a good chunk of those were for ISS services. Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
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I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?