391–400 of 631 posts
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would you choose a flight that's $200 more expensive because it has starlink?
Maybe not $200, but $20-$50 for a cross country flight for sure.
SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced intern…
Hey are absolutely not replacing “legacy” isps and certainly not mobile. Even if they had perfect coverage, sat signals are way too sensitive to obstructions.
I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation. SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. I…
"I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions." When will that be? There are so many unsolved problems with Mars that creating a civilization on Mars will probably be decades or centuries away. Creating an autonomous station on Antarctica or the moon is child's play compared to Mars. And we are far away from that too.
That's because it's unnecessary. It's cheaper to just ship supplies in.
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"I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions." When will that be? There are so many unsolved problems with Mars that creating a civilization on Mars will probably be decades or centuries away. Creating an autonomous station on Antarctica or the moon is child's play compared to Mars. And we are far away from that too.
The ocean floor is more habitable than Mars. The asteroid belt likely contains more easily-obtained rare metals that also don’t have to escape Mars’ terminal velocity. Reading a comment like the grandparent’s while we’re surrounded by many tangible crises on earth is sickening. Especially many of them manufactured by the same man who the grandparent comment seems to deify (DOGE AIDS funding). Anyway, I find myself fe…
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Could you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.
Try this one. You need to parse the hard data from all the speculation. So draw your own conclusions. https://www.aravolta.com/blog/datacenters-in-space As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will co…
Idk, building in the ocean seems a lot harder to me than space. Salt water is ridiculously corrosive, extreme pressure, etc. And one of the main justifications for this is massively increasing the output of solar and making it consistently output its nameplate capacity, which space is great for, and ocean is terrible for. The only benefit for that one I can see is some power savings on cooling, and a whole boatload of drawbacks, whereas we might not be able to keep up with demand with terrestrial power. So I can totally see why they never bothered to complete their subsea datacenter.
They’re definitely not aiming to put niche applications up, they want to run models by the bucketful.
I don’t see how the economics make it impossible? To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s something that’s going to end up happening, I have no idea if it will, but I don’t see how it’s structurally impossible, and I can see some things to commend it if token usage volumes grow like I think they will.
I wonder if this ends up like Tesla - China copies it and makes it cheaper - GG if not protected by huge tariffs/bans. It seems like US these days is just a testing ground for new tech that later scaled further and optimized in China. Are there any hard moats protecting SpaceX from that?
I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation. SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. I…
A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.
250 years ago, you could make this exact argument about the British colonization of Australia, and it would be entirely correct. The early colony was a pure fiscal drain on Britain with almost no return. Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth. Think on a longer time scale.
On a longer timescale would it only be spaceX on Mars?
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It's not meant to replace terrestrial networks, it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover. Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower, and are not economically feasible in less populated areas. There are also many dead-zones in mountainous regions, since cell signals are blocked by mountains. Starlink Mobile supplements this, it's simply chea…
> Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower I'd be interested to find out exactly where this cost exists. I would expect the majority of the cost (especially in rural/mountainous areas) to be more with power and backhaul, rather than the physical radio gear. Because it's rural, you should be able to easily just use coverage bands (ie 850 MHz or 900 MHz) with relatively high transmission power.…
Cell towers aren't very expensive on an ongoing basis, but every few years you're rolling out the next big technology (we went from analog to 1x to 3g to LTE while I was there) and it's a headache.