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There are a class of people who may seem smart until they start talking about a subject you know about. Hank Green is a great example of this. For many on HN,
by jmyeet 9mo ago
There are a class of people who may seem smart until they start talking about a subject you know about. Hank Green is a great example of this.
For many on HN, Elon buying Twitter was a wake up call because he suddenly started talking about software and servers and data centers and reliability and a ton of people with experience with those things were like "oh... this guy's an idiot".
Data centers in space are exactly like this. Your comment (correctly) alludes to this.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all have so many servers that parts are failing constantly. They fail so often on large scales that it's expected things like a hard drive will fail while a single job might be running.
So all of these companies build systems to detect failures, disable running on that node until it's fixed, alerting someone to what the problem is and then bringing the node back online once the problem it's addressed. Everything will fail. Hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, power supplies, fans, NICs, cables, etc.
So all data centers will have a number of technicians who are constantly fixing problems. IIRC Google's ratio tended to be about 10,000 servers per technician. Good technicians could handle higher ratios. When a node goes offline it's not clear why. Techs would take known good parts and basically replacce all of them and then figure out what the problem is later, dispose of any bad parts and put tested good parts into the pool of known good parts for a later incident.
Data centers in space lose all of this ability. So if you have a large number of orbital servers, they're going to be failing constantly with no ability to fix them. You can really only deorbit them and replace them and that gets real expensive.
Electronics and chips on satellites also aren't consumer grade. They're not even enterprise grade. They're orders of magnitude more reliable than that because they have to deal with error correction terrestial components don't due to cosmic rays and the solar wind. That's why they're a fraction of the power of something you can buy from Amazon but they cost 1000x as much. Because they need to last years and not fail, something no home computer or data center server has to deal with.
Put it this way, a hardened satellite or probe CPU is like paying $1 million for a Raspberry Pi.
And anybody who has dealt with data centers knows this.
- everfrustrated 9mo agoMight be why he's also investing in building their own fabs - if he can keep the silicon costs low then that flips a lot of the math here.
- fblp 9mo agoGreat comment on hardware and maintenance costs, and in comparison Elon wrote "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space." It's a pity this reads like the entire acquisition of xAi is based on "Elon's napkin math" (maybe he checked it with Grok)
- titzer 9mo agoCan you provide a link for that quote, because that quote is absolute stupidity.
- spenczar5 9mo agoIt's in the article that you're commenting on, https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex.
- breakyerself 9mo agoHe's bailing out one of his failing ventures with one of his so far successful ones. The BS napkin math isn't the reason he's doing it. It's the excuse for doing it.
- rkagerer 9mo agoThanks for putting words to that; the paragraph which most stuck out to me as outlandish is (emphasis mine): The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, *with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs*. I'm deeply disillusioned to arrive at this conclusion but the Occam's Razor in me feels this whole acquisition is more likely a play to increase the perceptual value of SpaceX before a planned IPO.
- rf15 9mo ago"what if we move all our data center needs into my imagination, things are running so much smoother there"
- WalterBright 9mo ago> but they cost 1000x as much Compute power has increased more than 1000x while the cost came down. I recall paying $3000 for my first IBM PC. > they need to last years and not fail Not if they are cheap enough to build and launch. Quantity has a quality all its own.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoHave you heard of cosmic radiation?
- WalterBright 9mo agoCosmic rays take time to destroy them.
- tecleandor 9mo agoIt's not only about destruction. It's also about reliability. Without proper shielding and error correction you're going to have lots and lots of reliability issues and data corruption. And if we're talking about AI and given the current reliability problems of the Nvidia hardware, plus the radiation, plus the difficulty for refrigerating all that stuff on space... That's a big problem. And we still haven't started to talk about the energy generation. I think there's a very interesting use case on edge computing (edge of space, if you wanna make the joke) that in fact some satellites are already doing, were they preprocess data before sending back to Earth. But datacenter-power-level computing is not even near. I have no idea and numbers to back it up, but I feel it would be even easier to set up a Moon datacenter than an orbital datacenter (when talking about that size of datacenter)
- WalterBright 9mo agoWe'll see! Keep in mind that the current state of space electronics is centered around one-off very expensive launches, where the electronics failure would be a fiscal disaster. (See JWST) Being able to rapidly launch cheap electronics may very well change the whole outlook on this.
- Sparyjerry 9mo ago[flagged]
- jmyeet 9mo agoI went looking through your comments. 75% of them (and probably 90% in the lasst 2 years) were Elon related. Tesla, SpaceX, Grok, Twitter, DOGE, etc. Quite a lot of comments for 101 karma if I'm being real. Why do you feel this kneejerk reaction to defend Elon and his companies? You'll never be him. He doesn't care about you. He'd use you for reactor shielding for an uptick in Tesla share price without a second's hesitation. This is cultish behavior. Do you have any idea who you're defending? I'll give you just one example. A right-wing influencer named Dom Lucre uploaded CSAM to Twitter, a video. But he didn't just upload it. He watermarked it first so had it on his computer and then postporcessed it. It was I believe up for days. This was apparently a video so bad that mere possession should land you in prison. And the fact that the FBI didn't arrest him basically tells you he'd an FBI asset. After taking days to ban him, Elon personally intervened to unban him. Why? Because reasons. And this is the same man who it's becoming clear was deeply linked with Jeffrey Epstein, as was his brother [1]. Bringing this back to the original point: this is why Twitter lost 80% of its value after Elon acquired it. Advertisers fled because it became a shithole for CSAM and Nazis. As for "basically no downtime" that's hilarious. I even found you commenting the classic anecdote "it was fine for me" (paraphrased) on one such incident when Twitter DDOSed itself [2]. Your cultish devotion here is pretty obvious eg [3]. I'm genuinely asking: what do you get out of all this? [1]: https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/02/02/kimbal-musk-jeffrey-epstein-post-conviction-emails https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/02/02/kimbal-musk-j... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36555897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36555897 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836560
- NlightNFotis 9mo agoLol, did you spot one of his alts? But yeah, otherwise agree that his conduct, within a corporate context and otherwise, do not merit the kind of public adulation he's getting. I also remember (vividly at that) his comments on distributed systems when he bought twitter back in the day and was starting to take it over. I remember thinking to myself, if he's just spewing so much bullshit on this, and I can understand this because it's closer to my body of knowledge, what other such stuff is he pronouncing authoritatively on other domains I don't know so much about?
- mosquitobiten 9mo agofor me trying to apply some liquid TIM on a CPU in a space station in a big ass suit would be a total nightmare, maybe robots could make it bearable but the racks would get greassy fast from many failed attempts
- skartik 9mo agoExcellent comment.
- e4325f 9mo agoI'm pretty sure they don't harden compute in space anymore, that's one thing SpaceX pioneered with their cost-cutting approach early on.