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Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space.
by Starman_Jones 9mo ago
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
- palmotea 9mo agoThat's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.
- Mordisquitos 9mo agoIndeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
- emchammer 9mo agoJust ask this scientician.
- AlexandrB 9mo agoUhhhh
- fuzzfactor 9mo ago>data centres in space is most certainly one of them. >Uhhhh Thanks, I wouldn't have noticed how wrong that was otherwise ;) It's most certainly two of them.
- mhh__ 9mo agoYeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
- youarentrightjr 9mo ago> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy. Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company. The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense. The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
- ta988 9mo agoOr you are actively trying to have the meetings when you are sure he cannot be present because he keeps derailing them.
- mhh__ 9mo agoWhy are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
- lokar 9mo agoShedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoThe same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
- mhh__ 9mo agoBill Gates was also pretty good
- Keyframe 9mo agoVery confused by this plan. How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
- general1465 9mo agoWell this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
- reactordev 9mo agoIt’s a vacuum
- floren 9mo agoVacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we use it to keep our coffee hot
- reactordev 9mo agowhich is why the whole idea of data centers in space is ridiculous.
- floren 9mo agoI'm glad to realize we're in violent agreement, I thought you were implying cooling would be easy due to the vacuum!
- reactordev 9mo agoIt can be solved with radiator fins and cold plates but yeah, it’s not an easy task.
- avmich 9mo agoWhat kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
- Spooky23 9mo agoIt’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
- 93po 9mo agoyes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any day now
- Spooky23 9mo agoClearly 200 forward P/E and three consecutive quarters of missed earning is a sign of profitability. It's a stock worth $50-60 with generous valuation. The premium is the Elon bullshit and grift. That isn't gonna last forever.
- light_triad 9mo agoHere's some context: Tesla, BYD, and Xiaomi Are Playing Different Games https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/tesla-byd-and-xiaomi-are-playing https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/tesla-byd-and-xiaomi-are-pl...
- turtlesdown11 9mo ago> with the worst profit margins The 2025 profit margin for Telsa was 4.6%. Toyota's was 9.4%. Telsa is famously on a multi-year sales and revenue decline.
- tokai 9mo agoKeep up.
- oblio 9mo ago> Sales of Tesla's electric Cybertruck fell 48% in 2025, new data shows. > Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in 2025, down from 38,965 the previous year, according to figures from Kelley Blue Book's annual electric vehicle (EV) sales reports. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-musk/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus... > A federal safety report shows that Tesla is recalling 63,619 of its futuristic pickups, and this seems to be the total number of Cybertrucks built since the first one was delivered at the end of 2023. https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_latest_recall_reveals_real_cybertruck_production_numbers-news-5259.php https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_latest_recall_reveals_real_cy... > Musk said that it's time to put the Model S and Model X vehicles to rest. Now it's not that huge of a change, given that 97% of Tesla's sales consist of Model 3 and Model Y cars, but the Model S is still the original car delivered by Tesla. https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_discontinues_the_model_s_and_model_x_shifting_its_focus_to_humanoid_robots-news-5552.php https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_discontinues_the_model_s_and_m... > The financial report paints a grim picture for the company. Tesla's total profit for 2025 was €3.24 billion. That is a lot of money, whichever way you look at it, but it is actually 46 percent less than what the company made in 2024. The profit margin, which is the percentage of money the company keeps after paying expenses, fell to just 4.9 percent. In 2022, that number sat at 23.8 percent. > One of the most interesting parts of the financial report is how Tesla made its money. A large chunk of its profit did not come from selling EVs to people. Instead, it came from selling "regulatory credits" to other car companies that need help meeting pollution rules. These credits brought in €2 billion. > That means 52 percent of Tesla's entire profit for the year came from these credits, not from selling vehicles. If Tesla did not have those credits, the financial results would look much worse. And the problem the company is facing? Those credits are gone; they won't be part of Tesla's business model this year since they were cancelled by the current administration. https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_profits_drop_as_automaker_starts_to_move_away_from_electric_cars-news-5551.php https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_profits_drop_as_automaker_star... Tesla is betting on long shots like humanoid robots and self driving taxis everywhere. There are other desperation moves like merging Tesla (profitable) with SpaceX (I think it's also profitable? but most of its business is governments: risky markets) and xAI (most likely wildly unprofitable, just like Twitter).
- general1465 9mo agoWell the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you: The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio... Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
- ZeroGravitas 9mo agoI saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoSpace is cold because there isn't anything there. There is also no matter to wick the heat away.
- aqme28 9mo agoWell it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
- emkoemko 9mo agobut if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
- iancmceachern 9mo agoThere is no matter. It's cold there because there isn't anything there. So there is nothing to conduct or convect the heat away. It's like a giant vacuum insulated thermos. Is putting data centers in thermos' a good idea?
- jillesvangurp 9mo agoYou are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this challenge. Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem. This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't. The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions. There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites. I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
- zarzavat 9mo agoNobody is saying that building a data center in space is impossible. It's merely expensive. Who is going to pay the money to rent capacity in space when they could rent the same capacity on Earth for a fraction of the cost?
- 9mo ago