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He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
Starship V3
251–260 of 667 posts
Re: Starship V3
#252Quick update for the folks passionate about space things (since this thread is full of unrelated comments):
V3 is their first Starship family big upgrade, containing lots of learnings from previous tests, and the big engine upgrades. V3 engines are the first iteration of a production engine, with lots of sensors and auxiliary systems integrated into the engine itself. Besides the improvements in thrust, they've streamlined the production, moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine (the first iterations looked like something out of the steampunk era), and they've simplified lots of fire/heat protection.
The Booster and Ship also got some major redesigns in the way they're handling fuel, the "thrust puck" (the area where the engines get mounted) and so on. It's also a bit taller, helped by the engine upgrades. TWR has also improved, with estimates at 1.6. This should be visibly faster to clear the tower and "jump" the launch.
They are also adding ~44tons of simlinks (starlink simulators, dumb payloads). So they seem to have improved the margins for orbital payload a lot. New this launch will be a few sats that have comms & cameras on them. Hopefully we'll get to see outside shots of Starship from these things, on orbit. They've filed FCC paperwork for this, and they'll likely use it to inspect the health of the heatshield on orbit.
They've also updated the launch tower, with a flame deflector, and a new deluge system.
This flight will be still suborbital, testing payload deployment, booster return to a fixed point somewhere in the coastal waters, and the ship aiming for somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They've also removed some parts of hte heatshield, to test how it handles that. (on a previous flight the ship still nailed its simulated landing with huge gaps in it, from multiple tiles missing intentionally).
If everything works on this flight, the next one is planned to be orbital.
Re: Starship V3
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies. > In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside o…
> In the long term In case anyone is wondering how Tesla’s stock price remain wildly detached from its business reality, keep these four words in mind. If you can convince people that anything about you and your business has to be evaluated on a literally astronomical timescale, you can justify any valuation you desire, because your believers will give you infinite time to realize their investment returns. It has not…
I love how in today’s quarter-based world a decade is now a “literally astronomical timescale”.
Re: Starship V3
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens. Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore. I'm…
> Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
https://terafab.ai/ has a diagram of the proposed satellites
Re: Starship V3
#255I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.
Stefan-Boltzmann law means radiative heat transfer in space is approx. to the 4th power of the hot side of your radiator. Typical space based radiators operate around 350K. If you can increase the hot side of the refrigeration cycle by 4x (1400K) you increase heat transfer by 256x. Create a radiator design that can operate at this temp (multi-stage Brayton loops, heat pumps, possible liquid metal final stage) with a…
I was actually curious about this myself back when everyone was chiming in about how it was physically impossible.
This is first and foremost an engineering problem as you need to design a system that will both tolerate high heat and be able to pump even more heat to the radiators. The high temperature seems to be the primary objective to design for unless launch costs become absurdly low.
Re: Starship V3
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, and I'm not alone, would pay a giant pile of money to go into space for a holiday.
And yet space tourism ventures consistently struggle to be viable. Even SpaceX barely bothers with that market.
People have been pointing to space tourism for decades, but I've never thought it viable. You quickly run out of people with enough money to pay what it costs to run the service.
Beyond that, it's got to be the lousiest way to spend a couple days. Weightlessness is really uncomfortable -- you're most likely going to be motion sick for a day or two. But beyond that your body requires gravity for proper distribution of fluids. The reason astronauts look so puffy in photographs is their faces are swelling from excess fluid.
Re: Starship V3
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost would be insane. And it wouldn’t be near 30min, you’d need lots of teams to reach this, driving the cost further up. Need to rotate them on a regular basis. And soldier without gravity for months at a time are definitely not fit for combat.
> The cost would be insane. Yeah, that's why it'd be a good way for SpaceX to make money.
But it doesn't make sense for the marines. For the same money you could spin up a bunch more QRFs and scatter them over the globe.
Re: Starship V3
#258Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
Tesla has been out competed in Batteries, EV's and Robots so this is his new move. He did something similar with his solar panel company put it inside Tesla and then it has almost disappeared from the news. He puts the AI company inside of Spacex makes up a lot of unrealistic numbers to pump up price and captures most of the stock gains from Spacex IPO by diluting others people shares.
You make it sound like Tesla was a failure and he's only interested in capitalistic success, where if you've been following him for years you'd know this has been his plan all along. He built Tesla when electric cars were mocked and his plan was to push electric cars to be mainstream. To now say "Tesla has been outcompeted and so now he's doing something else [implied- to keep his power]" is to simplify and misinterpret the situation. Tesla has successfully lit a fire under the car manufacturer's world, to the point all of them started making electric cars.
Re: Starship V3
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow. I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in m…
> the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.
The history of international oil companies is instructive here. It takes many billions to build out oil infrastructure, and they're always one election/revolution away from losing it all.
Re: Starship V3
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you cool them? https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80 "Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley tl;dr -> not impossible.
Yeah, that was kind of a surprise. I always thought heat would be the big show stopper, but apparently not.