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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#351

Post by myrmidon »

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #329
squidbeak wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just go to Google Maps. Just do it. Type in Arizona, or new mexico, texas whatever. Do you see all this brownish stuff? Yeah thats just empty land with A LOT of solar. 'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems. > So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.? How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisi…

Whats your critisism with 'brownish stuff'? That space is free? Space doesn't disrupt anything? Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly? But the natural ecosystem thats your issue? Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG.…

Agree 100%. Another point that people love to neglect is that for earthbased hardware, you keep all the material, and can recycle/reuse all the copper and trace metals somewhat easily.

Even if space was cost competitive (which it really isn't), you basically throw away all the stuff up there (because retrieval is too expensive). Copper prices are already up by 300-800% since the nineties even without dumping the stuff in space.

Re: Starship V3

#352

Post by m4rtink »

SXX wrote: post #306
inglor_cz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done the math? "Many orders of magnitude" means, IMHO, at least three. A regular Falcon 9 carries 60 Starlinks IIRC, so three orders of magnitude means destroying 60 thousand at once. What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.

No idea about 60,000, but it's not impossible to make whole orbits unusable by launching piles of small junk. Its will ruin it for everyone, but Russia or China is certainly able to do that.

The Starlink orbits are so low that stuff deorbits quite quickly withou active propulsion. So while this might work for a while, you woul need to replenish that junk for it to continue working, in all the many orbifs you would want to deny.

Re: Starship V3

#353

Post by rob74 »

notahacker wrote: post #312
pveierland wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As problems go, radiation and cooling seem to have relatively low dimensionality compared to the other problems. It seems to be mostly a question of optimizing within the dimensions of dissipation / structure / deployment / service / cost / weight. When all is said and done, the cooling solution will end up being a module that can deal with some power dissipation, cost X amount, weight Y amount, have structural inter…

Radiators are raised because it's a known constraint and we know that Stefan Boltzmann implies a lot of radiator mass to be launched even at 100% cooling efficiency and there are also theoretical limits to launch efficiency which Starship is rapidly approaching. Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more…

Space is cold. Space is also an excellent thermal insulator - there's a reason why Thermos bottles use vacuum for insulation...

Re: Starship V3

#354

Post by bvcp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #181
piloto_ciego wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.

You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.

now scale it ti 1 terrawatt

Re: Starship V3

#356

Post by echoangle »

pveierland wrote: post #321
notahacker wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radiators are raised because it's a known constraint and we know that Stefan Boltzmann implies a lot of radiator mass to be launched even at 100% cooling efficiency and there are also theoretical limits to launch efficiency which Starship is rapidly approaching. Nobody is saying orbital datacentres can't be cooled, they're saying people arguing launching the mass of the required radiators into space is a better, more…

I read the comment that I replied to as these challenges being a large prohibitor to this development, and I pointed out that these seem like challenges that can be dealt with mostly in isolation from other challenges and in particular not require a large number of engineers to deal with. Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space…

I don't think anyone is saying that it's impossible to build a datacenter in space. Of course you can do that if you really want to.

But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.

Re: Starship V3

#357

Post by bvcp »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #188
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme. We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.

elon musk isnt a nazi

Re: Starship V3

#358

Post by notahacker »

philipallstar wrote: post #330
notahacker wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All share price fundamentals based on the long term have this pesky thing called discount rate which means your [hypothetical] earnings from something expected to happen in 2050 get weighted a lot lower than your 2028 earnings and your 2100 earnings barely figure in it at all though. That's the case on a pure "I could invest my money in something that makes a bigger profit now, and use that money to buy shares in the…

I doubt anyone is doing earnings analysis 75 years out. It'll be "this is our best guess of the size of the market over time, and here's what percentage of the market SpaceX will get, factoring in the US taxpayer being a large funder of space and preferring a local company." The large variance is in the projected market size, but I can see why people might be optimistic. Especially given SpaceX's success in Falcon 9…

Well yes, nobody doing earnings analysis 75 years out is my point. We're downthread of someone pointing out that most mass and energy is outside earth so in the long run we'll run out if we don't rely on space[1].

That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.

[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...

Re: Starship V3

#359

Post by pveierland »

notahacker wrote: post #338
pveierland wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the comment that I replied to as these challenges being a large prohibitor to this development, and I pointed out that these seem like challenges that can be dealt with mostly in isolation from other challenges and in particular not require a large number of engineers to deal with. Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space…

The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiator tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem. Cutting edge stuff like in-space refuelling and modular in-space r…

> The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiators tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem.

I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.

> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.

I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.

Re: Starship V3

#360

Post by echoangle »

ActorNightly wrote: post #150
AlexErrant wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas

Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere. None of those are self sustaining.

> Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere.

According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".

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