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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#531

Post by mrandish »

saalweachter wrote: post #472
mrandish wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was initially very skeptical about the viability of space-based data centers but after a couple hours reading papers, studies and summary technical assessments I realized there are a range of credible expert viewpoints from, "pretty unlikely" to "it could actually work". There at least appear to be plausible, though unproven, solutions to the most obvious drive-by objections I had off the top of my non-expert head.…

If you spot Datacenters In Space as making sense, why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it? Why not have SpaceX build datacenter satellites and lease them to XAi et al, or XAi design and manufacture satellite datacenters and pay SpaceX to launch them? Heck, why not start a third company which focuses exclusively on datacenters in space, buying services from one company and selling them to another, so they ca…

> why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it?

I never said it did. My post didn't even mention SpaceX, Elon or XAI. I just shared that my initial drive-by opinion on space-based compute, as a general concept (regardless which company does it, when or how), was reflexively dismissive but after a tiny bit of research, it's now risen to the lofty epistemic level of "not completely ridiculous." And I discovered it's a much more interesting and complex question than I assumed, involving highly uncertain estimates of rapidly evolving technology, physics and economics.

For me the question starts more akin to "could a Dyson sphere ever be viable for human civilization in this solar system" than "should grandma invest her life savings in SpaceX this afternoon." But it seems some can't reason about the potential future viability of space-based compute independent of current politics, personalities, culture war or whether AI is a bubble inflated by circular deals. To be clear, I do think AI valuations are wildly over-inflated and propped up by financial engineering bordering on fraud likely to trigger a huge economic crash. But it can be simultaneously true that there will be hugely profitable AI businesses in 2035 and it's possible space-based compute might be viable for some company in 2040.

As for Elon, ever since I met him a couple times closer to the Paypal days, I've felt he's an eccentric, impulsive nut but that he's also a savvy, technically-minded entrepreneur with a sharp eye for opportunity who's compelled by obsessive, visionary zeal. And everything he's done since has been consistent with that assessment, from the successes of Tesla and SpaceX to his bizarre, self-destructive detours into politics, social media and AI. I don't understand why so many can't deal with the reality that a person can be deeply flawed and wildly irrational in some ways while simultaneously being highly effective and immensely valuable in other ways. Steve Jobs was a brilliant visionary entrepreneur yet also an asshole in his personal life who believed some crazy shit so deeply it contributed to his early death.

Re: Starship V3

#532

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #508
Yossarrian22 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CASC yes Google yes Blue Origin yes But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons. I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date

What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid

Heat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.

Re: Starship V3

#533

Post by Dylan16807 »

bvcp wrote: post #354
Dylan16807 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure.

The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites).

The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter.

They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.

Re: Starship V3

#534

Post by echoangle »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #516
echoangle wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that was permanent and is now scheduled for destruction is still permanent, no? Or can we at least agree that it was permanent at some point of its life? > There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point. Sure, but that's the case for everything, includin…

> Something that was permanent and is now scheduled for destruction is still permanent, no? No, the ISS never was permanent. It had a limited lifespan from the outset. It's actually beyond the original 15-year life. But it is not indefinite. > The ISS was originally intended for a 15-year mission, but the mission has been repeatedly extended due to its success and support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_S…

I think it depends on the context, but for a home, I would still call it permanent housing if it’s supposed to be demolished in 2070, but probably not by 2030.

I’m not sure the bases in Antarctica all have a set lifetime so it doesn’t really matter for the original point.

Re: Starship V3

#536

Post by fragmede »

laughing_man wrote: post #256
verzali wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having a computer in your pocket that's connected to a world wide web of other devices wasn't viable until the technology too support it was there. If it cost the same as a family vacation to another continent, I'm sure there's no shortage of people that want to experience the weightlessness of space. Think of having drinks (alcohol or not) in space. A simple thing as that would be such an experience. It wouldn't be for everybody, just like cruise ships aren't for everybody, yet that industry manages to stay afloat.

Re: Starship V3

#537

Post by kbelder »

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #313
sschueller wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either. In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.

Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD

They tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea.

We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.

Re: Starship V3

#538

Post by mapt »

m4rtink wrote: post #441
mapt wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kessler Syndrome is the biggest dealbreaker. We're already fairly far advanced in that scenario from Starlink, and competitors/scaleouts to Starlink promise to be worse. If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately. Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a ph…

Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome. Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues. Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopeful…

A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.

SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.

When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.

Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.

Re: Starship V3

#539

Post by causal »

db48x wrote: post #482
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable. You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do…

It’s very easy to overestimate the difficulty of cooling things in space, unless you actually run the numbers. So please follow along as Scott Manley runs the numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80 >. Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you’ll find that it m…

What doesn't make sense to me here is that even on Earth, where we have an atmosphere to disperse heat into, we find that closed-loop cooling is too expensive and so use evaporative cooling.

If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.

Re: Starship V3

#540

Post by senordevnyc »

Prediction: SpaceX will launch a handful of GPU-equipped satellites. Maybe they’ll even include some token GPUs on each Starlink satellite so they can throw out some bullshit stats about the vast size of their AI supercluster in space, etc.

They’ll be vague about capacity for a few years, and they’ll be building and acquiring data centers on earth “just while we wait for that will unlock overnight massive scaling of the space data centers”. The timeline will always be “in the next year”, but no real workloads will run on the space GPUs for a decade. Then, finally, maybe, it’ll happen. Or maybe not, just like FSD. Always around the corner, never quite here.

And it’ll work for meme stock purposes, just like his other companies.

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