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He again mentions data center in space. He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet. It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, coul
by AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
He again mentions data center in space.
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
- sschueller 5mo agoNobody 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.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoMicrosoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD
- kbelder 5mo agoThey 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.
- u8080 5mo agoData centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
- philipallstar 5mo agoThis sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.
- jeltz 5mo agoWhy? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.
- u8080 5mo agoBut there are cheap drone swarms on earth which could destroy it.
- svantana 5mo agoI dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!
- lukan 5mo agoYes, you get much more radiation from the sun and other sources. How do you do cooling? Radiators the size of small moons? Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.
- svantana 5mo agoThe joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.
- lukan 5mo agoStarlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.
- svantana 5mo agoI don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.
- lukan 5mo agoWell I was talking about heat. But regarding radiation, there is a long history of transistors in space dealing with radiation. But ... there is also a whole science how to deal with making it reliable: answer, expensive redundancy. And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced. If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.
- jeltz 5mo agoPretty sure this is just a lie to increase the value of Space X before the IPO. Not sure why people still trust Elon after all his hype and lies.
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoElon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know. I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.
- sschueller 5mo agoLike the hyperloop?...
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoThe problem with that was not based on physics, like the thermodynamics of datacenters in space.
- Geof25 5mo agoLike point to point rocket travel?
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoThat works, the physics is proven. It has not been tried commercially yet, so has not failed there, but that is not relevant to my point.
- le-mark 5mo agoJust shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?
- m4rtink 5mo agoRadiators need to be flat and thin - not really good for radiation shielding. But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.
- db48x 5mo agoThe radiators would be a lot smaller than you’d think: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.
- mapt 5mo agoOn the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A and specifically for the economics of AI vs surveillance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4
- signatoremo 5mo agoSo you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]? Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments? I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection. [0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-ambitions-for-tourism-mining-and-more-1KkGhxessTu/share_amp.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-am... [1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-data-centers-orbit-wsj-reports-2026-05-12/ https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-... [2] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/ https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl... [3] https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constellation-jolts-leo-broadband-race/ https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constel...
- j_w 5mo agoI think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.
- Yossarrian22 5mo agoCASC 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
- whamlastxmas 5mo agoWhat's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid
- halfmatthalfcat 5mo agoHeat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.
- 5mo ago
- UltraSane 5mo agoMusk isn't an idiot, he is an utterly shameless conman who will tell any lie however often he needs to to keep share prices high.
- logancbrown 5mo agoSolar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.