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SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

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Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#81

Post by CamperBob2 »

hkpack wrote: post #73
7e wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Sahara there is plenty of space and plenty of solar. Any heat you can radiate away in space, you can radiate away on Earth. Or, more simply, dig into the ground and pump heat into the cool earth.

I wish you good luck in building a datacenter in the middle of Sahara.

It would be a hell of a lot easier than placing one in space. Much less thousands of them.

Remember that one satellite doesn't represent a data center, it represents maybe 0.1% of a data center.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#82

Post by dzhiurgis »

timschmidt wrote: post #51
toasty228 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They launched a grand total of ~10k starlink satellite, there is a long road between 10k and a million. Musk would be "the most credible" at claiming he'll have 1000 trillion dollar by 2050, it doesn't mean it's credible at all.

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today. 10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

I'd say Starship is already priced in. That's the step to go from 10k (1%) to 10%.

Wonder what will be the next step.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#83

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #64
tristanj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioning Kessler syndrome, especially in the case of Starlink LEO satellites, is the classic midwit signal.

What makes you think they are talking about Starlink satellites? The 1 million satellites in the article are data center satellites.

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#84

Post by fasterik »

wrs wrote: post #36

The people who want to put data centers in orbit must be either much smarter than me, or much dumber than me, because I just don't get how that makes any technical or economic sense. Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")

It probably makes economic sense for a company on the scale of Google/Alphabet to spend something like $100M per year on the technology. There's relatively little downside (that amount is a rounding error compared to annual spending), the research involved might yield discoveries that benefit other projects, and the investment pays off if launch costs go down by 10x and/or the situation for terrestrial datacenters in terms of grid access, water, permitting, local opposition, etc. gets significantly worse.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#85

Post by exabrial »

onlypassingthru wrote: post #38
exabrial wrote: post #32

[flagged]

They've only spent half of the BEAD funds, $21B. 50 out of 56 final plans have been approved so the remaining half will be released. https://www.ntia.gov/press-release/2026/assistant-secretary-...

My bad, the spent $21billion and haven't done a single thing.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#87

Post by flashman »

aruggirello wrote: post #12
Ekaros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And getting them down. Or allowing them to come down on their own... I doubt that is entirely environmental impact free.

LEO satellites come down on their own in a few months/years. 100 tons of metal burning in the atmosphere seems a lot, but it's barely the total mass of meteorites falling in 24-48 hours, actually.

Misleading, because satellites are made of different materials to meteors. Satellites are the dominant injection source of 24 elements into the atmosphere, including Al, Cu, Ti, Nb, Co, Zn, Sn, Pb, Ag, Li, V, Hf, W, Ge, Mo, Zr, B, and Ba. This list includes many transition metals, whose catalytic effects on ozone and cloud nucleation are mostly unknown.

Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#88

Post by GMoromisato »

I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism.

Let's assume two premises:

1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).

If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

But if you buy the two premises above, then what matters is whether orbital or terrestrial datacenters are better for the environment. And it turns out that, given the current energy generation mix, the CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters far outstrip the CO2 from launch.

A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.

So, if you care about the environment, and you believe/fear that AI will demand a lot of compute, then you should hope that orbital datacenter work out. If you really care, you might even help to develop them.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#89

Post by timschmidt »

Zigurd wrote: post #72
timschmidt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today. 10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

> They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit They seem to have constructed a rocket that consistently gets heavier and more complex and more expensive and farthrt behind schedule and hasn't demonstrated specified payload. IOW it ain't better than falcon heavy.

I checked the publicly released stats over Starship's development, and this is what I found: compared with the initial ~5,000 t / ~73.5 MN concept, the latest V3-class Starship/Super Heavy is trending toward roughly 35%+ more loaded propellant mass and about 40% more maximum liftoff thrust if you use the FAA’s ~103 MN figure. Payload capability has also moved upward from the early 100+ t reusable LEO baseline to SpaceX’s current public claim of up to 150 t fully reusable and 250 t expendable.

When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.

You got a different rocket equation?

Re: SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

#90

Post by bastawhiz »

Who is paying for all this? Starlink revenue? I don't think so. To 100x what they've done over the last ten years and also fund it with money they're not being paid by others is implausible. They've got money, but they don't have THAT much money. They'd need to significantly juice up the whole rest of their business to not just be substantially more profitable, but also launch far more payloads. Does that much demand (for SpaceX) to get stuff into space even exist?
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