191–200 of 1001 posts
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
what makes you believe this? radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
Existing satellites manage to keep their equipment that already can consume several kW cool just fine. You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
The ISS power/heat budget is like 240,000 BTU/hr. That’s equivalent to half of an Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack. So two international space stations per rack. Or about 160,000 international space stations to cool the 10GW “Stargate” datacenter that OpenAI’s building in Abilene. There are 10,000 starlink satellites.
Starship could probably carry 250-300 of the new V2 Mini satellites which are supposed to have a power/heat budget of like 8kW. That's how I got 5,000 Starship launches to match OpenAI’s datacenter.
Weight seems less of an issue than size. 83,000 NVL72’s would weigh 270 million lbs or 20% of the lift capacity of 5000 starship launches. Leaving 80% for the rest of the satellite mass, which seems perhaps reasonable.
Elon's napkin math is definitely off though, by over an order of magnitude. "a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton" The NVL72's use 74kW per ton. But that's just the compute, without including the rest of the fucking satellite (solar panels and radiators). So that estimate is complete garbage.
One note: If you could afford to send up one of your own personal satellites, it would be extremely difficult for the FBI to raid.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
The whole thing makes no sense. What's the advantage of putting AI compute in space? What's even one advantage? There are none. Cooling is harder. Power is harder. Radiation is worse. Maintenance is impossible.
The only reason you'd ever put anything in orbit, aside from rare cases where you need zero-gee, is because you need it to be high up for some reason. Maybe you need it to be above the atmosphere (telescopes), or maybe you need a wide view of the earth (communications satellites), but it's all about the position, and you put up with a lot of downsides for it.
I feel like either I'm taking crazy pills, or all these people talking about AI in space are taking crazy pills. And I don't think it's me.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
[flagged]
He has a habit of saying things that ultimately are just hype building. I do not believe that he really believes in space data-clusters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
what makes you believe this? radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt. Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
Space is pretty ridicolous, but underwater might genuinely be a good fit in certain areas.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
> For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0? Do you not understand how satellites work? They don't send repair people into space. This has been a solved problem for decades before the AI gold rush assumed they have some new otherworldly knowledge to teach the rest of the world.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
[flagged]
The market has had almost a hundred years of being well-regulated, so when a sociopath lies through their teeth, we're inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in the last few years, that regulation has been worn down to nothing, and the result is and was entirely predictable: fraud.