941–950 of 1001 posts
Not sure if this is stock manipulation trying to push the bubble a little further in a way that doesn't require showing something of substance immediately, or if Elon's having another manic episode after doing too many or not enough drugs, but who didn't see this coming? I'm sure next week he'll have SpaceX be bought by The Boring Company, sell that to Tesla, then rename all the companies as "X". Also, whatever happe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How vital is it really to national security? Starlink will have competition from Amazon Leo in the next few months. And while SpaceX is obviously in the lead in launch capability with Starship, there are multiple launch providers capable of providing roughly the same services the Falcon 9 and Heavy provide today.
The same services as Falcon 9 are 20x the cost and launch 1/20th as much as well. That's like producing hand made good in America versus via a manufacturing line in China.
A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…
The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship, and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.
The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.
The only unsolved technical challenge I see in that article is radiation tolerance. It's unclear how big of a problem that will actually be in practice. But SpaceX probably has more experience with that than anyone other than perhaps NASA so if they think it can be done I don't see much reason to doubt them.
Ultimately I think this is doable from a technical perspective, it's just a question of whether it will be economical. Traditional wisdom would say no even just due to launch costs, but if SpaceX can get Starship working reliably that could alter the equation a lot. We'll see. This could turn out to be a boondoggle, or it could be the next Starlink. The prospect of 24/7 solar power with no need for battery storage or ground infrastructure does seem tempting.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/zzwpue/with_starlin...
> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…
> Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon […] to establish a permanent presence and take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. The trouble with strip mining the moon is that it is a pristine international geological park where one side is permanently visible from Earth*. In terms of park visits it’s been seen by pretty much every hu…
Strip mining moon is the easy part. Manufacturing anything used for satellites is the very hard part. It is very hard as is seen from number of players here on earth. But just imagine doing everything in hostile environment with significantly smaller benefits of scale. Might be possible theoretically. But certain infeasible in any level of practise.
Is it easy though?
The moon surface is full of nasty regolith that can jam up machines pretty quickly. Plus the lack of atmosphere means that any small particle you accelerate fast enough goes into a partial orbit around the moon and hits you on its way back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Twitter debt is not that big in the grand scheme of things. Twitter has been absorbed into his AI company some time ago. SpaceX is a big business. And despite the decline, Tesla is also still a big business. Both generate quite a few billions in revenue. The staggering amount of money Elon Musk raised for doing AI stuff is quite a bit more than what he ever expended on the Twitter value implosion. I think we can…
> The staggering amount of money Elon Musk raised for doing AI stuff is quite a bit more than what he ever expended on the Twitter value implosion. Total investment in xAI are around $30B-40B (including the latest E round). Twitter purchase price at $44B was more than that. Out of that 44B, ~$25B was debt financing. > Star Link is one of those mad plans that actually seems to make sense now [...] AI data centers in s…
The point of Star link was orders of magnitude reduction in cost of launching thousands of satellites. Musk is talking indirectly about another order magnitude of further reduction of that via star ship; sorry if that wasn't clear.
> the physics and economics don't make sense
This is a popular assertion that despite all the experts chiming in is not that black and white. Clearly investors and Elon Musk beg to differ. Similar arguments were used against Star Link when that was still science fiction. And now it isn't. It actually seems like a good idea that at this point is being copied by others. And SpaceX is getting a lot of the launching business, for now.
I think it's mainly the economics that are the challenge here; not the physics. Implicit in the assertion is that launching the amount of mass needed would be prohibitively expensive. There are lots of engineering challenges as well.
> it's just easier and cheaper to build out the same thing on Earth
Maybe; but it seems challenging to scale there. Permitting and scaling energy generation are a problem right now. But I agree, it's more logical to fix that. But one does not exclude the other. We might end up with a lot of in orbit computation regardless. It's not an either or proposition.
> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…
We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen. Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude an…
Why couldn't xAI just, you know, contract with SpaceX to launch its future Datacenters In Space?
Wouldn't a company focused on a single mission, Datacenters In Space, be better at seeing that goal to fruition, instead of a Space Launch Company with a submission of Datacenters In Space, which might decide to drop the project in three years to focus on their core mission of being a Space Launch Company?
Even granting the goal as desirable and possible, why is a merger the best way to pull it off?
> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…