llm/60ee7d4d-b465-422e-9101-5386aa22c98b/c3975fcf-38cb-4801-a7be-b694da6e8dc7-input.json
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1. > 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 percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
2. 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 and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
3. A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with.
The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
4. That’s not the point of the person you are replying to. They are saying if we somehow come up with the tech that makes harnessing the sun a thing, the best we can still do is put a bunch of GPUs in space? It makes no sense.
5. It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites). However, getting the electricity they generate down to Earth is very complicated, so you end up having to use it in space, and one of few things that would make sense for that is indeed data centers, because getting the data to Earth is easier (and Elon already handily has a solution for that).
However I'm curious how many solar panels you would need to power a typical data center. Are we talking something like a large satellite, or rather a huge satellite with ISS-size solar arrays bolted on? Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control )...
6. > It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites).
It stops making sense the second you ask how you’d dissipate the heat any GPU would create. Sure, you could have vapour chambers. To where? Would this need square kilometers of radiators on top of square kilometers of solar panels? All this just to have Grok in space?
7. You have a dark radiating side on the back of the solar panels. You can spread the GPUs around the solar panels. All the energy in comes from the sun so the temperature should be much the same as any dark panel like object floating in sunlight in space.
8. > It stops making sense the second you ask how you’d dissipate the heat any GPU would create.
The answer, as you surmised, is indeed radiators.
9. But space is very cold, so no problem there /sarcasm
10. The plan seems to be for lots and lots of smaller satellites.
For inferencing it can work well. One satellite could contain a handful of CPUs and do batch inferencing of even very large models, perhaps in the beginning at low speeds. Currently most AI workloads are interactive but I can't see that staying true for long, as things improve and they can be trusted to work independently for longer it makes more sense to just queue stuff up and not worry about exactly how high your TTFT is.
For training I don't see it today. In future maybe. But then, most AI workloads in future should be inferencing not training anyway.
11. A 10MW data center would require square kilometers of solar arrays, even in space.
It’s just as real as the 25k Model 3.
12. 0.2 sq km approx.
13. >Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge
at 70 Celsius - normal for GPU - 1.5m2 radiates something like 1KWt (which requires 4m2 of panels to collect), so doesn't look to a be an issue. (some look to ISS which is a bad example - the ISS needs 20 Celsius, and black body radiation is T^4)
14. So for the ISS at 20c you'd get 481 W/m^2 so you'd only need 2.3m2.
So comparing the ISS at 20c to space datacenters at 70c you get an improvement of 63%. Nice, but doesn't feel game-changing.
The power radiated is T^4, but 70c is only about 17.1% warmer than 20c because you need to compare in kelvin.
15. Sending post-compute radio waves to Earth is much safer than sending back TW of power.
16. That's even more reason that if we manage to increase the amount of solar energy cells by 1000x there are so many more effective ways to use it than immediately flinging them into space. They're not getting constructed as satellites mid-orbit, after all.
17. The problem Elon is trying to address is a societal one, not a technical one. The amount of push back on clean energy generation and manufacturing prevents data centers on earth from being as feasible as they should be. He only got his newly opened xAI data center open using temporary generators on trailers and skirting the permitting process by using laws designed for things like traveling circuses.
18. >the best we can
oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea... .
Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore.
Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.
19. Pick any Gundam series and watch the last 5 or 6 episodes, at least through the Gundam SEED/Destiny era. At least part of the plot will invariably include a space-based superweapon being deployed by one side of the war to end all wars and the the plot for a few episodes will include the other side engaging in a series of challenges to keep that from firing again and destroying it if possible.
20. I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations.
You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
21. > You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory
Then you have to also count the Z3 which predates the Colossus by 2 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
22. The only purely military thing is rockets and everything space related, there's just no way private businesses would've poured so much money into it
Computers and internet being storage, processing and communication systems are clearly useful for civilian purposes
23. Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.
24. OK, so what are they?
Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do.
Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post.
Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;)
What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
25. > doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own
Considering how foundational energy is to our modern economy, energy several orders of magnitude cheaper seems quite likely to have massive implications.
Yes it might be intermittent, but I'm quite confident that somebody will figure out how to effectively convert intermittent energy costing millicents into useful products and services.
If nothing else, incredibly cheap intermittent energy can be cheaply converted to non-intermittent energy inefficiently, or to produce the enablers for that.
26. Scaling up PV production to the point where we could convert the entire Earth's electricity generation to solar is incredibly significant.
Yes there's the problem of intermittency, varying sun availability and so forth - which is why solar will never provide 100% of our power and we'll also need grid-scale storage facilities and domestic batteries and all sorts of stuff - but just imagine being able to make that many panels in the first place! Literally solar on every roof, that's transformative.
But sure, let's send it all to space to power questionable "AI" datacentres so we can make more fake nudes.
27. > Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own
Musk is suggesting manufacture at a scale sufficient to keep the Earth's entire land area
tiled in working PV.
If the maths I've just looked at is correct (first glance said yes but I wouldn't swear to it), that on the ground would warm the earth by 22 C just by being darker than soil; that in the correct orbit would cool it by 33 C by blocking sunlight.
28. Just scratching at the surface, assuming the increase in production capacity is only realistically possible if you can bring prices down (or this "project" would start to consume a proportion of economic output large enough to seem implausible), you can address the intermittency problem in several ways:
Driving down the cost makes massive overprovision a means of reducing the intermittency because you will be able to cover demand at proportionally far lower output, which also means you'll be able to cover demands in far larger areas, even before looking at storage.
But lower solar costs would also make storage more cost effective, since power cost will be a lower proportion of the amortised cost of the total system. Same with increasing transmission investments to allow smoothing load. Ever cost drop for solar will make it able to cover a larger proportion of total power demand, and we're nowhere near maximising viable total capacity even at current costs.
A whole lot of industrial costs are also affected by energy prices. Drive down this down, and you should expect price drops in other areas as well as industrial uses where energy expensive processes are not cost-effective today.
The geopolitical consequences of a dramatic acceleration of the drop in dependency on oil and gas would also take decades to play out.
At the same time, if you can drive down the cost of energy by making solar so much cheaper, you also make earth-bound data centres more cost-competive, and the cost-advantage of space-bound data centres would be accordingly lower.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore (but there's the whole issue of cooling being far harder in space), but I also think the effects would be far broader. By all means, if Musk wants to poor resources into making solar cheap enough for this kind of project to be viable, he should go ahead - maybe it'll consume enough of time to give him less time to plan a teenage edgelor - because I think the societal effects of driving down energy costs would generally be positive, AI or not, it just screams of being a justification for an xAI purchase done mostly for his personal financial engineering.
29. Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes".
I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future.
It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense.
Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive
30. I'm starting to wonder if a person like Elon with his... morals... is who we want to be creating a vision for the future.
31. Starting?
32. Not to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.
33. I think it's much simpler: smart mass surveillance. With LLMs you can finally read and analyze all messages people send to each other
34. The digital internet began with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s.
Many, many network protocols were developed and used.
35. > with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s.
Late 1700 actually, and war was indeed a key motivation for the deployment of the Télégraphe Chappe .
36. See "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/162040592X
Télégraphe Chappe was a semaphore system using flags. It was not an electrical telegraph, nor was it binary.
37. It was optical. The modern internet mostly goes over optical fiber.
38. It wasn't binary nor electrical, but it was already digital. Excluding it would be arbitrarily restrictive.
39. Really? That is so interesting - which ones? Any ancestors of commonly used ones today?
40. Off the top of my head BIX, Prodigy, Compuserve, MCIMail, BBS, Ethernet, Token Ring, $25 Network, AOL, Timeshare, Kermit, Fax
Anyone with 2+ computers immediately thought about connecting them.
41. Well computers are a funny story. The groundwork had been laid and the theoretical and engineering advances that would produce programmable digital computers were well underway in the 1930s. It would have happened very soon even if there was no war, but of course WWII happened right in 1939, so obviously computers made at that time had the purpose of calculating artillery paths or decrypting German messages. But it would be incorrect to say that military applications in WWII are the reason computers were invented.
42. > Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war.
[citation needed]
Because according to Bob Taylor, who initially got the funding for what became ARPANET:
> Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge.
> Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When* Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... § Prologue
> Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing.
> Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. […]
* Wizards § Chapter 1
The first four IMPs were UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. Then BBN, MIT, RAND, System Development Corp., and
Harvard. Next Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford, and by the end of 1970 Carnegie-Mellon University and Case Western Reserve University.
It was only "later in the 1970s" that command and control was considered more (Lukasik):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_go...
But the first two people who get the project going, Taylor and Herzfeld, were about the efficient use of expensive computer resources for research. Look at the firs >dozen sites and they were about linking researchers: the first DoD site wasn't connected until 3-4 years after things go going, and there was nothing classified about it. MILNET didn't occur until 1984:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation
43. Reed Richards is Useless
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUs...
44. > But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things.
Those interesting things won't pump up the perceived value of Musk companies to stratospheric levels - or dare I say - to the moon. He needs the public to believe that to earn the trillion-dollar package from the Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX conglomerate, even if the latter turns out to be the only profitable arm of the conglomerate.
45. "TwitslaX"
46. Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
47. This is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs.
The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix:
We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.
48. > This is a question that analysts don't even ask
On the contrary, data centers continue to pop up deploying thousands of GPUs specifically because the numbers work out.
The H100 launched at $30k GPU and rented for $2.50/hr. It's been 3 years since launch, the rent price is still around $2.50.
During these 3 years, it has brought in $65k in revenue.
49. They worked out because there was an excess of energy and water to handle it.
We will see how the maths works out given there is 19 GW shortage of power. 7 year lead time for Siemens power turbines, 3-5 years for transformers.
Raw commodities are shooting up, not enough education to cover nuclear and SMEs and the RoI is already underwater.
50. My cynical take is that it'll works out just fine for the data centers, but the neighbouring communities won't care for the constant rolling blackouts.
51. Okay but even in that case the hardware suffers significant under utilisation which massively hits RoI. (I think I read they only achieve 30% utilisation in this scenario)
52. Why would that be the case if we assuming the grid prioritizes the data centers?
53. Beyond GPUs themselves, you also have other costs such as data centers, servers and networking, electricity, staff and interest payments.
I think building and operating data center infrastructure is a high risk, low margin business.
54. They can run these things at 100% utilization for 3 years straight? And not burn them out? That's impressive.
55. Not really. GPUs are stateless so your bounded lifetime regardless of how much you use them is the lifetime of the shitties capacitor on there (essentially). Modulo a design defect or manufacturing defect, I’d expect a usable lifetime of at least 10 years, well beyond the manufacturer’s desire to support the drivers for it (ie the sw should “fail” first).
56. The silicon itself does wear out. Dopant migration or something, I'm not an expert. Three years is probably too low but they do die. GPUs dying during training runs was a major engineering problem that had to be tackled to build LLMs.
57. > GPUs dying during training runs was a major engineering problem that had to be tackled to build LLMs.
The scale there is a little bit different. If you're training an LLM with 10,000 tightly-coupled GPUs where one failure could kill the entire job, then your mean time to failure drops by that factor of 10,000. What is a trivial risk in a single-GPU home setup would become a daily occurrence at that scale.
58. I don't see anything impressive here?
59. > the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years
60. Starlink yes, at 480 km LEO. But the article says "put AI satellites into deep space". Also if you think about it, LEO orbits have dark periods so not great.
A better orbit might be Sun Synchronous (SSO) which is around 705 km, still not "deep space" but reachable for maintenance or short life deorbit if that's the plan. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/catalog-of-...
And of course there are the LaGrange points which have no reason to deorbit, just keep using the old ones and adding newer.
61. damn. at this point its not even about a pretense for progress, just a fetish for a very dirty space
62. They re-enter and burn up entirely. Old starlinks don't stay in space.
63. So they pollute the upper atmosphere instead!
64. It's essentially a military network (which is why other power sphere want their own) and a way to feed money into spacex
65. A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship would bring the cost of launch down orders of magnitude, perhaps to a level where it makes sense to send up satellites to repair/refuel other satellites.
66. Same that happens with Starlink satellites that are obsolete or exhausted their fuel - they burn up in the atmosphere.
67. With zero energy cost it will run until it stops working or runs out of fuel, which I'm guessing is between 5-7 years.
68. 5 to 7 months given they want 100kw Per ton and magical mystery sauce shielding is going to do shit all.
69. > Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
The satellite deorbits and you launch the next one.
70. so, instead of recycling as many components as possible (a lot of these GPU have valuable resources inside) you simply burn them up.
I'm guessing the next argument in the chain will be that we can mine materials from asteroids and such?
71. Such a waste of resources
72. not to mention that radiation hardening of chips has a big impact on cost and performance
73. You could immersion cool them and get radiation resistance as a bonus.
74. Yes, because launching then immersed in something that will greatly increase the launch weight will help...
75. So what are the other things? You said he glossed over them and didn't mention a single one.
76. Reliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters
Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)
77. Overview energy has done interesting work in this area.
78. Beaming energy always sucks. Without some very fundamental discoveries in physics nobody will every make this work economically. This isn't just an engineering problem, it's a physics problem.
79. Beaming energy does suck, but it might be something to do before we launch thousands of terawatts of GPUs to space.
80. It's always better to generate electricity on the ground than attempt to beam it to the ground from space. The efficiency loss of beamed power is huge.
81. The efficiency loss of nighttime is approximately 100% if we’re talking about solar energy. At least at a most basic level, it’s not totally absurd to stick some kind of power beaming contraption in space where it is mostly not shadowed by the Earth and beam power to a ground station.
82. Is that more or less absurd than making deals with our neighbours to share their electricity? Build some solar farms around the planet and then distribute it over wire.
I honestly don't know the answer. I know there's some efficiency loss running over long wires too but I don't know what's more realistic.
83. In theory you can do HVDC over long distances. In practice that doesn't help much. Power would normally want to run north to south (not gonna do HVDC across the oceans anytime soon), and so the terminator hits you at the same time everywhere. It's got to be batteries if you want PV at scale.
The practical difficulties aren't really long distance transmission though. They're political and engineering. Spain had a massive blackout recently because a PV farm in the south west developed a timing glitch and they couldn't control the grid frequency - that nearly took out all of Europe and the power wasn't even being transmitted long distance! The level of trust you need to build a giant integrated continent-wide power grid is off the charts and it's not clear it's sustainable over the long run. E.g. the EU threatened to cut Britain's electricity supplies during Brexit as a negotiating tactic and that wasn't even war.
84. HVDC would be a lot less connected than an AC grid.
The real question is, why do you expect Space to have fewer political and engineering issues.
85. The political issues in space are mostly launch related, right? Once you have the birds up nobody cares about anything except space junk and bandwidth. They're getting experience of solving those with Starlink already. And if you can find a way to put the satellites really far out there's plenty of space - inferencing satellites don't need to be close to Earth, low latency chat stuff can stay on the ground and the flying servers can just do batch.
The politics on the ground is much harder. Countries own the land, you need lots of permits, electricity generation is in contest with other uses.
86. There is absolutely nothing realistic about power transmission from space to earth, wired or wireless.
87. I concur it’s not necessarily totally absurd — but when you consider that such contraptions require large — very large! — receiving arrays to be built on the ground, it’s hard to avoid concluding that building gigantic photovoltaic arrays in, say Arizona (for the US) along with batteries for overnight buffering and transmission lines would still be massively more efficient.
88. We have these things called batteries, you charge them during the day, and drain them at night.
A solar+battery setup is already cheaper than a new gas plant. Beaming power from space is absolutely asinine, quite frankly. The losses are absurd, the sun already does it 24/7, and we know how to make wires and batteries to shuffle the sun's power around however we need to. Why on earth would we involve satellites?
89. Why would you transfer the energy to earth? The energy powers ai compute = $
90. Dead on, You can transmit data to and from space and have the compute completed at potentially fractions of the cost.
91. Tell me about your cooling medium in space
92. A large piece of aluminum with ammonia pumped through it?
93. Nothing about this is sounding economically competitive with ground based solutions
94. Right up to the radiation limit and then you'll either have to throttle your precious GPUs or you'll be melting your satellite or at least the guts of it. You're looking at an absolutely massive radiator here, many times larger than the solar panels that collect the energy to begin with.
95. not really, for A_radiator / A_PV = ~3; you can keep the satellite cool to about 27 deg C (300K) check my example calculation (Ctrl-F: pyramid)
96. > > absolutely massive radiator here, many times larger than the solar panels
> A_radiator / A_PV = ~3;
Seems like you're in agreement. There's a couple more issues here--
1. Solar panels are typically big compared to the rest of the satellite bus. How much radiator area do you need per 700W GPU at some reasonable solar panel efficiency?
2. Getting the satellite overall to an average 27C temperature doesn't necessarily keep the GPU cool; the satellite is not isothermal.
97. Where does the heat collected by amminia get evacuated?
98. Through thermal radiation, it's called radiative cooling.
But it's not trivial indeed, especially if you want good power density in your space data center.
99. Datacenter capacity (and thus heat) grows by the cube law, but the ability to radiate heat grows by the square law, so it seems like it would be advantageous to have a bunch of smaller satellites, if you were concerned about cooling them.
100. > it would be advantageous to have a bunch of smaller satellites, if you were concerned about cooling them.
...That's only relevant if you start from the position that your datacenters have to be space.
You could already make smaller datacenters on earth, and still have better cooling, if you were concerned about that. We don't do that because on earth it's more efficient to have one large datacenter than many small ones.
101. Kessler satellites
102. I think you may be thinking of cooling to habitable temperatures (20c). You can run GPUs at 70c , so radiative cooling density goes up exponentially. You should need about 1/3 of the array in radiators.
103. Simply put, yes.
This is not good for SpaceX. It's a less valuable company with X and xAI. But it helps Elon make it look like he runs two successful businesses.
104. I made an example calculation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867402
For a 230 kW cluster: 16 x DGX (8x)B200; we arrived at a 30m x 30m solar PV area, and a 90 meter distance from the center of the solar array to the tip of the pyramid.
1 GW = 4348 x 230 kW
sqrt(4348)= ~66
so launch 4348 of the systems described in the calculation I linked, or if you insist on housing them next to each other :
the base length becomes 30 m x 66 = 1980 m = ~ 2 km. the distance from center of square solar array to the tip of the pyramid became 6 km...
any of these systems would need to be shipped and collected in orbit and then assembled together.
a very megalomaniac endeavor indeed.
105. What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want. If we mine out a substantial fraction of the mass of the earth, we can go harvest asteroids or something.
106. Who got the money? Hahah
107. SpaceX investors want to cash out, which is why they’re going public. Elon Musk wants to dump his X/xAI bags onto the public markets by merging it with SpaceX.
Essentially means that SpaceX investors are bailing out Elon Musk.
108. Water is not needed to move heat. Heat pipes do it just fine. There's one in your laptop and one in your phone too. It does scale up.
109. This is terrible for Space-X. They're doing a great job. Musk has left running it to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Now Space-X has a AI business unit they don't need, a new money drain, and more attention from Musk.
Should have merged xAI into Twitter. A failure there would not be a major setback.
110. After all is said and done, all will be renamed to Brawndo (it's got Electrolytes)
111. That could be true, but the real question is why haven't they built and shipped a Starship yet?
You can play around with words as much as you can, but Musk even with a very high rate of failure seems to be making a lot of things work.
112. Several kW is nothing for a bank of GPUs.
Radiators in space are extremely inefficient because there's no conduction.
Also you have huge heat inputs from the sun. So you need substantial cooling before you get around to actually cooling the GPUs.
113. Even if power cost nothing the limiting factor on data center value creation is distance to where the data is requested. Putting it in space is dumb.
114. I think you may have misread my comment, because no.
115. Falcon Heavy does not cost 100M when launching 60 metric tons.
At 60 metric tons, you're expending all cores and only getting to LEO. These probably shouldn't be in LEO because they don't need to be and you probably don't want to be expending cores for these launches if you care about cost.
The real problem typically isn't weight, it's volume. Can you fit all of that in that fairing? It's onli 13m long by 5m diameter...
116. SolarCity and Tesla made more surface level sense just being in the same general vicinity since they're both fundamentally green energy companies. That made it easy to spin questions about the financials with some CEO-speak about synergy.
However, the way Musk has become less subtle with this tells a story. He got away with these shady financial dealings multiple times so he's now becoming even more brazen and transparent with this behavior. We have gotten to the point in which the spin needed to justify his moves is the physics-defying viability of datacenters in space.
The distortion field will keep growing as long as he keeps getting away with it.
117. >Zip2
I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.
>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.
>PayPal
Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.
>Tesla
Investor, not founder.
>SpaceX
Yup, props here.
>Grok/xAI
Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.
118. And of course, Elon did all of that work personally. 16 hours a day, nonstop hard work. Just take his word for it, it means a lot.
119. no I get it, but I mean fraud is usually kept out of the public. this is fraud in broad daylight?
120. Communication is a well-understood problem, and SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth, but that's not necessarily much of a problem in space. Latency could be a problem, except that AI training isn't the sort of problem where you care about latency.
I'd be curious where exactly they plan to put these datacenters... In low Earth orbit they would eventually reenter, which makes them a pollution source and you'd have no solar power half the time.
Parking them at the Earth-Sun L1 point would be better for solar power, but it would be more expensive to get stuff there.
121. I understand it now, after reading the thread. There's a reason for that.
I have not been following the machinations of X very closely. I don't have the corporate structure of Elon's empire in my head, nor do I have the Meta or Alphabet/Google hierarchies in there. I couldn't have told you about the history of xAI beyond that it exists.
So that's plain ignorance of something you consider common knowledge, but I don't, rather than "aggressively trying to not understand it." And that phrase is particularly grating btw.
122. Why is it cheaper to ship all of the materials to space, then to the moon for assembly (which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive), then back into space vs just…
building them on earth and then shipping them up?
We’re not exactly at a loss for land over here.
123. So... Elon wants to literally build Skynet?
124. We have radiators on the ISS. Even if you kept the terrible performance of those ancient radiator designs (regularly exposed to sunlight, simplistic ammonia coolant, low temperature) you could just make them bigger and radiate the needed energy. Yes it would require a bit of engineering but to call it an "unsolved problem" is just exaggerating.
125. "I meant they would need a clear path to open space not blocked by solar panels, but yes, a hot and cold side makes sense."
This is precisely why my didactic example above uses a convex shape, a pyramid. This guarantees each surface absorbs or radiates energy without having to take into account self-obscuring by satellite shape.
126. The ISS’s solar arrays each weigh a metric ton and generate 35 KW a piece[0], and that’s just for the power collection.
They’d need incredible leaps in efficiency for an orbiting ton collecting and performing 100 KW of compute.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...
127. Sure by building largest charging network and allowing to use their patents they are hindering that transition really badley.
128. Seems like a way to put a lot of junk in space. If thats in earth orbit it will lead to a lot of junk falling from the sky in 10 years. If it all burns up that will be a lot of nasty shit in the atmosphere - millions of tons!
129. "what if we move all our data center needs into my imagination, things are running so much smoother there"
130. The math literally works.
The US mandates by law that we grow a fuck ton of corn to mix 10% ethanol into gasoline.
If you replaced just those cornfields with solar/wind, they would power the entire USA and a 100% electric vehicle fleet. That includes the fact that they are in the corn belt with less than ideal
sun conditions.
We aren’t even talking about any farmland that produces actual food or necessary goods, just ethanol as a farm subsidy program.
The US is already horrendously bad at land use. There’s plenty of land. There’s plenty of ability to build more grid capacity.
131. > It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.
Depends on the deserts in question and knock-on effects: Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants.
* https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...
Helping vegetation in one place to grow may hinder it somewhere else. How important this is still appears to be an open question:
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-00071-w
I'm not sure if humans are wise enough yet to try 'geo-hacking' (we're already messing things up: see carbon dumping).
132. > "The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called 'space' for a reason. [crying laughing emoji]"
This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.
133. Okay, but a human being represents what, 200 W of power? The ISS has a crew of 3, so that's less than a beefy single user AI workstation at full tilt. If the question is whether it's practical to put 1-2 kW worth of computing power in orbit, the answer is obviously yes, but somehow I don't think that's what's meant by "datacenter in space".
134. Data centers in space have never been a thing and never will be.
135. What do you mean? SpaceX didn't invent the reusable rocket, and my understanding is that Falcon 9 is still not significantly more economical than disposable rockets, and that the main reason it's attractive is that it's not Soyuz-2.
136. This place has derangement syndrome unfortunately. Such pessimists, it’s a bit sad
137. The Model 2 vehicle program was killed[1].
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
138. Hello fello Technology Connections watcher?
139. If you solved this problem apply at nasa because they still haven't figured it out.
Either that or your talking out of your ass.
FYI a single modern rack consumes twice the energy of the entire ISS, in a much much much much smaller package and you'll need thousands of them. You'd need 500-1000 sqm of radiator per rack and that alone would weight several tonnes...
You'll also have to actively cool down your gigantic solar panel array
140. It’s also a way to distract from the fact that alleged pedophile and rapist Elon had 3 underaged foreign nationals trafficked to him at the space x headquarters by convinced pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, per the Epstein files.
141. > This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!
One of the dumbest things I've ever read.
142. my partner got shingles a couple years ago, it was a very painful experience!
(to be crystal clear, I am making a joke equating the failed SolarCity/Tesla solar shingles to the (generally considered very painful) Herpes Zoster manifestation also called "shingles")
143. arbitrarily large means like measured in square km. Starcloud is talking about 4km x 4km area of solar panels and radiative cooling. ( https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/ )
Building this is definitely not trivial and not easy to make arbitrarily large.
144. Radiation is an even bigger problem, especially in the polar orbits they are talking about.
145. Periodically send a crew to a comet to bring back a large slab of ice to put in the data center.
146. Just like rockets landing themselves
147. I mean this is clearly directly written by Elon. I suspect the SpaceX comms people are equally eye-rolling.
148. The distinction is that what they are doing for Webb is trying to dissipate small amounts of heat that would warm up sensors past cryogenic temperatures.
Like on the order of tens or hundreds of watts but -100C.
Dissipating heat for an AI datacenter is a different game. A single AI inference or training rack is going to be putting out somewhere around 100kW of waste heat. Temps don't have to be cryogenic but it's the difference between chiselling a marble or jade statue and excavating a quarry.
149. Yep.. "all stock deal" last Spring. https://www.paddle.com/news/industry/elon-musk-xai-acquires-...
150. Huge drag we allow it to be controlled by a drugged out nut job.
151. A million tons a year would be over 18 Starship launches per day.
152. I couldn't believe that was an actual quote from the article. It is.
These people are legit insane.
153. Apple just launched their own silicon chips just a few years ago. They're very ambitious but still calculated.
154. Doesn’t Tesla have a large and profitable storage business now? Probably could have just built that instead of buying SolarCity.
155. Pre-IPO price padding. xAI is going nowhere but at least for now it has some value. Move it under SpaceX, bump up SpaceX’s valuation and therefore it’s opening IPO price. Then kill xAI and write it off.
156. SpaceX is slated to go public some time this year - June IIRC
The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company.
BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war chest" in his battles.
There is also a danger that investors will see xAI as politically dangerous, which will really hurt SpaceX IPO
157. Oh, good. So we only need to multiply that by 200 million times, per space datacenter.
158. What if they use heat pumps to raise the temperature? Heat rejection is proportional to T^4.
159. Just like people should've thought about all the Related Party transactions when deciding how much to pay for Enron.
160. Here is my main question: Musk is on record as being concerned about runaway "evil AI." I used to write that off as sci-fi thinking. For one thing, just unplug it.
So, let's accept that Musk's concern of evil runaway AI is a real problem. In that case, is there anything more concerning than a distributed solar powered orbital platform for AI inference?
Elon Musk appears to be his own nemesis.
161. Great. Now run the numbers to find the energy required to disassemble the planets and accelerating the pieces to their desired locations. For reference, it takes over 10 times of propellant and oxidant mass to put something in LEO.
162. But it won't end the same as MoviePass until Elon dies; he will keep moving things around, propping up failures with VC, IPO, federal/state (taxpayer) and profit making business money.
163. When does the market realize this is all just a shell game and the emperor really has no clothes?
We saw this on a much smalelr scale a decade ago when one of Elon's companies (Tesla) acquired a second one of Elon's companies (SolarCity) because it was broke and owed a ton of money to a third one of Elon's companies (SpaceX).
Elon was forced to go through with his impulsive Twitter acquisition by a Delaware court, an acquisition that was not only secured by a bunch of Tesla stock but also a bunch of Qatari and Saudi royal money. He then mismanaged Twitter so badly Fidelity wrote down its value by at least 80% [1].
So what did Elon do? Raised even more questionable foreign money into xAI, diverted GPUs intended for another of his companies (Tesla) into Twitter and then "merged" Twitter into xAI, effectively using other people's money to bail him out from an inevitable margin call on his Tesla stock.
Interestingly, Twitter was reportedly valued at $33 billion in this deal [2], significantly more than the less than $10 billion Fidelity valued Twitter at. Weird, huh? With a competent government, this would be securities fraud that would have you spend the rest of your life in jail. And even with all that, $11 billion was lost on the deal.
So here we are and it's time for the shell game to be played again. Now it's SpaceX's turn to bail out the xAI investors.
And what is the argument for all this? AI data centers in space. Words cannot describe how little sense this makes. Launch costs (even if the Starship launch costs get to their rosy projections), cooling in space, cosmic rays (and the resulting errors) and maintenance. Servers constantly need parts replaced. You can just deorbit the satellite instead but that seems like an expensive way of dealing with a bad SSD or RAM chip.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-acqui...
164. Can the orbital data centers communicate with my ceramic solar roof tiles?
165. You'd think so, but if you bet on this guy not being able to get investors you'll end up being wrong.
It doesn't make sense (neither does Tesla's valuation, for example), but it is what it is.
Both Spacex and Xai have investors lining up.
166. Probably shouldn't speak to the brilliance of xAI engineers when you've never heard of their work
167. Why not put these AI/PV installations somewhere out in the ocean instead? A tiny fraction of the energy required to ship them there, you can actually physically get there to fix them, can use seawater for cooling, can use existing Starlink for connectivity, etc. Why/how is space more economical than international waters?
168. >I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible.
Maybe you should doubt that. There's literally no reason to think this is plausible besides some hype merchants' say-so.
169. The sock puppet account is angry!
170. SpaceX saves its biggest customer money by being the superior, cheaper launch option. The alternative was ULA, which was an extraordinarily expensive monster.
Please highlight the problems you have with how it pertains to this context, how the biggest customer is harmed.
What do you care if its private owners are willing to absorb the mess that is xAI?
171. That was not a journalist.
172. > arbitrarily large
Space is not empty. Satellites have to be boosted all the time because of drag. Massive panels would only worsen that. Once you boosters are empty the satellite is toast.
173. Won't someone think of the future SpaceX shareholders!
174. I guess you'll have to wait and see what ideas they have to deal with this. If they can't manage the heat they aren't going to spend billions launching these things just for fun.
175. I hope all the Tesla shareholders understand that they’re about to get hosed.
Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.
176. One thing to keep in mind. xAI and SpaceX both have contracts with the DoD. So it makes sense he moved it there rather than Tesla. Not sure I buy the needing AI for doing more in space or if this is to save sinking ship, but if one of his two big companies needed to buy it to keep it afloat it makes sense it was SpaceX and not Tesla.
I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like
177. More likely that it's going to be the same kind of step for Tesla as the Oculus was for Facebook.
178. The dominant factor is "balance of system" aka soft costs, which are well over 50%.[0]
Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.
When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_system
179. There's not even a credible way to transfer meaningful amounts of data to and from a deep-space based data center.
What good is compute if you can't interface with it? This is where we are now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Optical_Communicati...
SpaceX may be leading in short-range (few hundred km) space-to-space data transfer but there is a long way to go for terabit/s deep-space links.
180. 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 happened to his plan to turn twitter into a financial services company?
181. Plenty of politicians are very proud of doing that.
182. I just get tripped up when I see people disbelieve physics, especially laws that have been known for about 150 years!
The economics and energy balance is where I too am very skeptical, at least near term.
Quick back of envelope calculations gave me a payback time of about 10 years, so which is only a single order of magnitude off which can easily accumulate by lack of access to detailed plans.
I can not exclude they see something (or can charge themselves lower launch costs, etc.) that makes it entirely feasible, but also can't confirm its infeasible economically. For example I have no insight of what fraction of terrestrial datacenter establishment cost goes into various "frictions" like paying goverments and lawyers to gloss over all the details, paying permission taxes etc. I can see how space can become attractive in other ways.
Then again if you look at the energetic cost to do a training run, it seems MW facilities would suffice. So why do we read all the noise about restarting nuclear power plants or trying to secure new power plants strictly for AI? It certainly could make sense if governments are willing to throw top dollar at searching algorithmic / mathematical breakthroughs in cryptography. Even if the compute is overpriced, you could have a lot of LLM's reasoning in space to find the breakthroughs before strategic competitors do. Its a math and logic race unfolding before our eyes, and its getting next to no coverage.
183. It's a matter of deploying it for cheaper or with fewer downsides than what can be done on earth. Launching things to space is expensive even with reusable rockets, and a single server blade would need a lot of accompanying tech to power it, cool it, and connect to other satellites and earth.
Right now only upsides an expensive satellite acting as a server node would be physical security and avoiding various local environmental laws and effects
184. His bet then, is that the $1 million cost to get a Starlink V2 mini into orbit can be made cheaper by an order of magnitude or two.
185. It's uhhh... clearly explained in the linked announcement.
186. This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
187. The thing is: at the end of the day, making absolute statements about the inevitability of future success is a fool’s errand.
Musk has a documented history of failing to deliver on promises, timescale or no. So it’s best to engage in some actual critical thinking about the claims he is making.
188. I find HN and the tech circles to be one of the main community pillars holding up X. None of my social friends use it anymore, but links absolutely abound here, and it seems like the standard line is to pretend Elon, Grok, all the one button revenge and child porn etc don’t exist. I truly can’t fathom the amount of not thinking about it it would take to keep using the platform.
189. Perhaps my marketing background is clouding my view, but have exceptional hyping skills seems quite useful when attracting investment.
And fact is Musk is building a lot of stuff of real substance. The hype to substance ratio isn't quite as important as some choose to beleive
190. Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.
Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
191. The ISS is in the middle of rolling out upgrades to their panels so it’s not a great comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_Out_Solar_Array
> ROSA is 20 percent lighter (with a mass of 325 kg (717 lb))[3] and one-fourth the volume of rigid panel arrays with the same performance.
And that’s not the current cutting edge in solar panels either. A company can take more risks with technology choices and iterate faster (get current state-of-the-art solar to be usable in space).
The bet they’re making is on their own engineering progress, like they did with rockets, not on sticking together pieces used on the ISS today.
192. Microdosing might not be the word for it.
193. My point was that they are both quite hostile environments for different reasons. In the same way space has abundant power supply, subsea has an abundant heat sink.
194. The data centers in space is 100% about Golden Dome,
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
195. > This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers.
In the meantime, how about affordable insulin for everybody?
196. Toxic = Not a progressive echo chamber. It takes serious blinders to think Twitter is dying any more than the myriad of tech companies operating at losses. And rather than liberals sucking it up and engaging in open disagreements and fire, or attempting tl correct the far right in any way, they flee to blueski (which is actually not doing well). It really is pathetic.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not conservative, I dont particularly care for Elon or X or this merger. I just despise intellectual dishonesty and selective outrage.
197. I grew up on a rural farm in California with a dial-up connection that significantly hampered my ability to participate in the internet as a teenager. I got Starlink installed at my parents' house about five years ago, and it's resulted in me being able to spend considerably more time at home.
Even with their cheapest home plan, we're getting like 100 Mbps down and maybe 20 to 50 up. So it's just not true at all that you would have connections that are a megabit or two per second.
198. Related: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission [1]. Blue Origin could snatch SpaceX's Starship lander contract. This looks increasingly a good idea.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
199. It will cost less to put it in low earth orbit than it will be to purchase land for it at any reasonable location.
200. Don't forget that a lot of US mil stuff is launched by SpaceX so in a very real way they are the prime defense contractor in space for the country. If the public offering doesn't work, Unc Sam'll bail them out. Wonder if Trump will want a stake in the company this time.
201. I cannot really tell satire apart from genuine opinions anymore.
(But I do hope it was satire, if not, cooling satelites was/is a big issue and they only have very modest heat creation. A data center would be in a quite different ballpark)
202. Yes. People are saying they’re worried that the poor private investors of SpaceX are getting the short end of the stick.
That seems like misplaced concerned for an investor class that really aren’t suffering.
203. Would it blow your mind to say that SpaceX is merged into Twitter? His twitter handle is his greater asset currently.
204. > Datacenters in space for people on earth? That's just stupid.
But if completes the vision of ancestors who thought god living in the sky
So "Lord give me a sign from heavens" may obtain a whole new meaning
205. The ISS consumes roughly 90kW. That’s about *one* modern AI/ML server rack. To do that they need 1000 m^2 of radiator panels (EACTS). So that’s the math: every rack needs another square kilometer of stuff put into orbit. Doesn’t make sense to me.
206. Yes, Rubin reportedly can deal with running significantly hotter.
That makes radiating a much more practical approach to cooling it.
207. Nothing in your argument is proof that the investors aren't idiots.
208. >In an interview with Robert Wright in 2003, Dyson referred to his paper on the search for Dyson spheres as "a little joke" and commented that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious" [...]
To be fair, he later added this:
>in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial".[13] In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one.
Sources are in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
209. ah, good. another heap of "exaggerations" (lies) to investors so that the creditors don't take elon out back just yet. hooray.
210. maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
211. Elon investors should try buying a lottery ticket, it also lets you dream of the future while not providing returns.
212. At least there will be AI and Agentic stuff in mars.
213. Why hide it if you know you won't be punished for it?
214. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.
215. You can't easily use low grade heat.
However there are workarounds. People are talking like the only radiator design is the one on the ISS. There are other ways to build radiators. It's all about surface area. One way is to heat up a liquid and then spray it openly into space on a level trajectory towards a collecting dish. Because the liquid is now lots of tiny droplets the surface area is huge, so they can radiate a lot of heat. You don't need a large amount of material as long as you can scoop up the droplets the other end of the "pipe" and avoid wasting too much. Maybe small amounts of loss are OK if you have an automated space robot that goes around docking with them and topping them up again.
216. It was a spaceplane and also a rocket. It literally had fixed rocket engines and was carried up by separating rocket stages. And yeah, it was expensive to operate, but it was built in the '80s and it truly was the first reusable rocket regularly flown, rather than being merely an experimental craft.
217. Additionally, I feel like a datacenter is going to produce a LOT more heat than the ISS.
218. He just says shit that sounds smart and then rides the vibes to financial success, but it's not working anymore.
10 years ago when Tesla actually revolutionized the retail EV industry everyone took his word for it. Then after a few failed prognostications the nerds started to doubt his credibility, a few more years of this and the tech press started to see through it, and now he's reduced to only the MAGA-faithful falling for his Phony Stark act. The ground is coming up fast.
219. Ok but what if I shoot a car into space and buy my own social media company. Surely thats a better use of billions!
220. For the next four months, at least.
221. Also solar wind, cosmic rays etc. We don't have perfect shielding for that yet. Cooling would be tricky and has to be completely radiative which is very slow in space. Vacuum is a perfect insulator after all, look how thermos work.
222. But that is also just an assumption isn't it? Could this not also be related to the fact that they plan to launch a ton of servers into the sky to run in space and power AI? It would mean that their AI product would become heavily based on the services provided by SpaceX via launching all this.
But regardless, I think quotes like these should have some commentary around them as it helps create a discussion around whatever point they might be trying to make rather than having to make assumptions.
223. Haha, hard pass on the job. I prefer my oxygen at 1 atm.
I'm not a data center technician myself, but I have deep respect for those folks and the complexity they manage. It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day.
224. Depends where you put them. The current vogue option is a sun-synchronous orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
225. > There's plenty of land no one will care if you build anything on
I wonder if this is actually true.
226. Terrible news for SpaceX.
227. which house?
228. SpaceX could fail tomorrow and nothing would change with national security.
229. In a way, its kind of cool to see how robber barons work in real time in our generation. Its also insanely depressing as they will systematically enshittify and extract as much wealth from society as is possible.
230. Politics and finances aside, I wonder how "sending megatons of mass" into space is more ecological than building power plants needed for data centers on earth? Not only all the fuel that you'd need to burn, but also the fact that this material probably can't be recycled since it will burn on reentry.
231. My understanding was that access to very large body of cold water was a core feature for the project. The water was to be used for cooling relatively efficiently or cheaply.
232. didn't tesla just 'invest' 2bills in xai?
233. Send up a spacecraft with back-to-back / equal area solar panels and radiators (have to reject heat backwards, can't reject it to your neighboring sphere elements!). Push your chip temp as much as possible (90C? 100C?). Find a favorable choice of vapor for a heat pump / Organic Rankine Cycle (possibly dual-loop) to boost the temp to 150C for the radiator. Cool the chip with vapor 20C below its running temp. 20-40% of the solar power goes to run the pumps, leaving 60-80% for the workload (a resistor with extra steps).
There are a lot of degrees of freedom to optimize something like this.
Spacecraft radiator system using a heat pump
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883588B1/en
234. Trails of those low orbit satellites wasn't bad enough.
Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.
235. This is either insanely ambitious genius or pure shithousery. I guess we'll find out which one it is in 10 years
236. Who’s saying cooling is not possible? Cooling gets brought up because it’s presented as an advantage of putting stuff in space. But it’s not an advantage, cooling is harder in space than on the ground.
237. Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.
238. Makes about as much sense as Twitch buying Curse about.. a decade ago?
239. It's in the article that you're commenting on, https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex .
240. Won't everyone essentially be a shareholder indirectly? so yeah, someone should think about it.
241. Yeah but he’s an expert his opinion can be dismissed bro this is 2026
242. As soon as a statement contains a timeframe estimate by Musk you know to disregard it entirely.
243. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept
You do - cooling those datacenters in space is an unsolved problem.
244. You kinda can, just don’t make a Twitter account, don’t buy teslas, don’t use grok. Tell your friends
245. Any details regarding valuations etc?
246. You don't have to believe one's bullshit. You just have to believe others will believe the bullshit.
247. you think we don't have enough space on earth for a few buildings? this seems like a purely western cope. China seems perfectly able to build out large infrastructure projects with a land area smaller than that of the continentenal USA
248. polar orbit
249. Elon has spent months and months calling for the Epstein files to be released, even had a big spat with Trump over that and some other things. The idea that he was actually raping girls with Epstein can only be believed by people who will believe anything if it puts their enemies in a bad light. Which are also generally the same people making fake emails and sharing them to defame people they dislike, or editing family photos to pretend they were abuse.
250. would you prefer big tech to piss their waste heat into your rivers, soils and atmosphere?
or would you prefer them to go to the bathroom upstairs?
at some point big tech is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation...
251. No. Imagine if your computer was in space instead of being under your desk. Would that solve anything?
Orbit is a very inconvenient environment. It's difficult to reach so maintenance is a nightmare, it's moving all the time, there's nowhere to sink waste heat into, you have a constrained power budget, you have a constrained weight budget. The only things you want to put in orbit are things that absolutely can't go anywhere else.
252. > I mean, space is called “space” for a reason. [Face with Tears of Joy]
253. Legitimately, did you not immediately conclude it was for financial shenanigans? What did you think? I'm not trying to be shitty, but what else could there be?
254. Yeah you're right. Good distinction.
255. I'm pretty amazed one can play a shell game for so long and so openly with the public.
256. > Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space
A watt is a watt and cooling isn't any different just because some heat came from a GPU. But a GPU cluster will consume order of magnitudes more electricity, and will require a proportionally larger surface area to radiate heat compared to a starlink satellite.
Best estimate I can find is that a single starlink satellite uses ~5KW of power and has a radiator of a few square meters.
Power usage for 1000 B200's would be in the ballpark of 1000kW. That's around 1000 square meters of radiators.
Then the heat needs to be dispersed evenly across the radiators, which means a lot of heat pipes.
Cooling GPU's in space will be anything but easy and almost certainly won't be cost competitive with ground-based data centers.
257. Grrreat! Grok in Space... now AI-generated non-consensual sexual materials can be made completely outside the jurisdiction of any earthly body!
Rah rah. Line goes up!
258. Just like you don’t get much water in space.
259. SpaceX is a private company
260. "In space" is the new blockchain.
261. for a square solar array of side length L, a pyramid height of 3*L would bring the temperature to below 300K, check my calculation above.
people heavily underestimate radiative cooling, probably because precisely our atmosphere hinders its effective utilization!
lesson: its not because radiative cooling is hard to exploit on earth at sea level, that its similarily ineffective in space!
262. Single upset events in a modern GPU are not bitflips. They destroy the surrounding circuitry and usually disable the whole unit.
263. So what? People who buy SpaceX shares should take into account all of its debt when deciding how much to pay for a share.
264. Right, let's not forget that he's selling it to himself in an all stock deal. He could have priced it at eleventy kajillion dollars and it would have had the same meaning.
He's basically trading two cypto coins with himself and sending out a press release.
265. In fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).
266. isn't this just fraud in broad daylight? I don't get it. Why not at least try to hide it?
267. If you're considering only viability, the obvious concern would be cooling, yes; because increasingly large radiative cooling systems dominate launch costs because of all the liquid you need to boost into orbit. And one 100MW installation would be 500 times the largest solar power/radiative cooling system we've ever launched, which is the ISS. So get that down 2 orders of magnitude and you're within the realm of something we _know_ is possible to do instead of something we can _speculate_ is possible.
After that frankly society-destabilizing miracle of inventing competitive photonic processing, your goal of operating data centers in space becomes a tractable economic problem:
Pros:
- You get a continuous 1.37 kW/m^2 instead of an intermittent 1.0 kW/m^2
- Any reasonable spatial volume is essentially zero-cost
Cons:
- Small latency disadvantage
- You have to launch all of your hardware into polar orbit
- On-site servicing becomes another economic problem
So it's totally reasonable to expect the conversation to revolve around cooling, because we know SpaceX can probably direct around $1T into converting methane into delta-V to make the economics work, but the cooling issue is the difference between maybe getting one DC up for that kind of money, or 100 DCs.
268. As a SpaceX fan, I am saddened by this news.
The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.
269. This is the moving force behind all investments of the past decade or so. Crypto? Everyone involved knows it's empty, but they hype it up anyway because they believe some people buy the bullshit, and plenty of people gobble it up and signal boost it because they think they're ahead of the pack. NFTs, same thing. Tesla stocks was probably the one that started it. Pokemon cards.
270. Lol this is why you aren't a VC. Even if every single Musk venture failed other than SpaceX, the investments would have paid off wildly well. You aim for the tails not the median.
271. The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.
There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.
Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.
272. Harder to direct waste heat in space if you dont have gravity for convection.
273. Salt water absolutely murders things, combined with constant movement almost anything will be torn apart in very little time. It's an extremely harsh environment compared to space, which is not anything. If you can get past the solar extremes without earths shield, it's almost perfect for computers. A vacuum, energy source available 24/7 at unlimited capacity, no dust, etc.
274. A Falcon Heavy takes about 63 tons to LEO, at a cost of about $1,500 per kg.
A server with 4x H200s and some RAM and CPU costs about $200k, and weighs about 60kg, with all the cooling gear and thick metal. As is, it would cost $90k to get to LEO, half of the cost of the hardware itself.
I suppose that an orbit-ready server is going to cost more, and weigh less.
The water that serves as the coolant will weigh a lot though, but it can double as a radiation shield, and partly as reaction mass for orbital correction and deorbiting.
275. The projects promised to be life altering for all mankind, they ended up being not even life altering for super rich Americans considering that Teslas are just EVs which without FSD are just regular cars with a different propellent that were made for political purposes and virtue signaling
The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .
As soon as something kinda elegant and hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window
If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco or Amazon or IBM....the world would come to a screeching halt.
Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier
276. I don't understand the claim. SpaceX is literally delivering? And I don't think there is any delusion about that being optional.
277. The real question is not scale, but if it makes financial sense, I don't have sufficient insight into the answer to that question.
Either it does or it doesn't make financial sense, and if it does the scale isn't the issue (well until we run into material shortages building Elon's Dyson sphere, hah).
278. Hot saltwater is the worst substance on earth, excepting, maybe, hydrofluoric acid. You really don't want to cool things with ocean water over an extended period of time. And filtering/purifying it takes vast amounts of power (e.g. reverse osmosis).
279. Why are we still supporting this person? His cars are being outclassed internationally and he's directly meddling in this countries politics. He spectacularly failed (or wasn't it blatantly misled) the CA government with regard to the tunneling, and damaged the public sector while shutting down oversight and regulatory bodies against his companies.
Where is the benefit? These awesome tech demos? It just screams charlatan to me on an epic scale. I see no reason a government shouldn't step in to assume control if its "too big to fail".
280. It's just the thought process that comes with shallow understanding:
"I can buy a server"
"We can put things in space"
"What do you mean I can't get a server in space?!"
281. Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.
282. Accountants will be studying the deals and cyclical valuations of AI companies in the same way we study bank runs and FDIC insurance today.
283. > Musk's margin on Twitter from being called by his investors,
Primary and largest investors in X are: Elon Musk, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey.
I don't know that you need to worry about their financial well-being or that they are getting a raw deal.
284. Radiators might be a reasonably effective way to reject heat if you can run your AI machines at 1000 K or thereabouts.
285. Pre-requisites:
Ketamine
286. Is Grok driving any x.com subscriptions?
287. you can’t tell me the microwave isn’t magic. it’s magic.
288. AI and space based economy
289. Ah yeah. 200 tons is 200,000 kilograms. Definitely way off there. That is an incredulous number.
290. Quite a few do care about the potential for job losses. On the other hand, a lot of people want cheap cars.
This dichotomy has always been in place for a huge range of specifics, both for imports and technology that makes workers less relevant. The "we want cheap stuff" argument is the one that has done best historically, though the track record of handling this badly also led to the invention of actual literal communism.
291. > landing and reusing rockets
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
292. As both are private companies none of this matters if the investors of both companies are happy.
293. People pooh-poohing space datacenters will obviously think this is a bad move. But Elon clearly believes space datacenters will work. Given that, and the fact that SpaceX will IPO this year, this acquisition was inevitable.
SpaceX and xAI would not be able to freely collaborate on space datacenters after the IPO because it would be self-dealing. SpaceX likes to be vertically integrated, so they wouldn't want to just be a contractor for OpenAI's or Anthropic's infrastructure. Merging before the IPO is the only way that SpaceX could remain vertically integrated as they build space datacenters.
294. I'm not big on this subject, but I understand that heat transfer is difficult in space, because there's little to transfer to. If the solution is just making large radiators, then that means you're sending some big payloads full of radiators. Not to mention all the solar panels needed. I wanna live in sci-fi land too, but I don't see how it makes any sense compared to a terrestrial data center.
295. What have the engineers at XAI accomplished? From the ground level, it seems they followed the same research all the other LLM chatbot companies did. They followed along and made a sassy mecha hitler who makes revenge porn.
XAI isn't a serious venture.
296. https://tinyurl.com/xai-joins-spacex
297. Do you honestly believe that nobody involved has ever considered that?
298. beltalowda!
299. Low orbit satellites providing internet across the world also weren't a thing... until they were.
300. Why would they launch data servers into space? What purpose would that serve?
301. Unless it’s obstructing the view of the road, not really
302. Banks released pricing to sell their debt. When the debt gets to valued near market value, it means it is essentially guaranteed to get paid back. The company was making much less money but was more profitable, see the other posters comment on EBITDA.
303. The Robber Barons weren't in the 1920s; that refers to industrial age monopolists (e.g. rail/oil), and culminated in the Sherman Antitrust (i.e. 1800s).
Broadly, your point is still valid, though. Just a mild inaccuracy between the Gilded Age and the roaring 20s.
304. No they didn't. 200Gb/s is 25GB/s, so... They could run 1/36th of a single current-gen SXM5 socket. Not even any of the futuristic next-gen stuff. 25GB/s is less than the bandwidth of one X16 PCIe3 socket. And that's already assuming the best-case scenario, and in reality trying to sync up GPUs like that would likely have loads of other issues. But even just the sheer amount of inter-GPU bandwidth you need is quite extreme. And this isn't some point-to-point routing like Starlink trying to get data from A to B, this is maintaining a network of interconnected systems that need to communicate chaotically and with uneven demand.
305. We have absolutely no way of gauging this until after SpaceX goes public.
306. This. National security is one of the most abused phrases of all time.
Many companies could simply cease to exist tomorrow, including Spacex and Starlink, and the world would go on. Frankly for the better in a lot of cases.
307. It’s only a problem if you get the machines up there! Which I’d argue is economically unviable to boot.
308. 1000m2 is not a square kilometer (1 square kilometer is 1mil m2)
309. This is just what I was thinking.
Twitter (X) owed $1.3B in debt every year in interest since Musk's takeover. This was before re-financing in a higher interest rate environment. The company was losing $200MM+ per year on ~$5B in revenue before the takeover, and there are reports that revenues have decreased by round 50%.
Best case scenario if we accept those numbers is that X makes $3B per year and about half of that goes immediately out the door in debt payments before paying a cent for the entire business to function.
However, if SpaceX acquires X, that ~$1.5B in interest is a fraction of the $8B In profits SpaceX is allegedly generating annually. Further, they can restructure the debt if it's SpaceX's debt, and not owned by X. Investors will be more likely to accept SpaceX shares as collateral than X.
310. I see what you’re saying - higher design temp radiates better despite more energy overall to dissipate.
311. And what is the % over total car sold in the world during FY2024 ?
This is like saying "I am the largest land owner in the country" , big deal considering the enormous number at the denominator.
Also very convenient to just pick one model when brands like Toyota have 30+ and sell 11+ million cars per year every year
312. Likely the intended meaning here is that the practicality of space data centers goes against the physical realities of operating in space. The single most prevalent issue with operating anything in space is heat dissipation in that the only method of doing so is via radiation of heat, which is very slow. Meanwhile, the latest Nvidia reference architectures convert such ungodly amounts of power into heat (and occasionally higher share prices) that they call for water cooling and extensive heat-exchange plant.
Even if one got the the economics of launching/connecting GPU racks into space into negligable territory and made great use of the abundent solar energy, the heat generated (and in space retained) by this equipment would prevent running it at 100% utilization as it does in terrestrial facilities.
In addition to each rack worth of equipment you'd need to achieve enough heat sink surface area to match the heat dissipation capabilities of water-cooled systems via radiation alone.
313. Satellites can adjust attitude so that the panels are always normal to the incident rays for maximum energy capture. And no weather/dust.
You also don't usually use the same exact kind of panels as terrestrial solar farms. Since you are going to space, you spend the extra money to get the highest possible efficiency in terms of W/kg. Terrestrial usually optimizes for W/$ nameplate capacity LCOE, which also includes installation and other costs.
314. We have 15,000 satellites in orbit that are almost literally the exact same premise currently being proposed - a computer with solar panels attached. We've being doing exactly this for decades.
315. You're right.
I meant it specifically for figuring out cooling computers in space.
I am pretty sure this is going to be a solvable problem if this is the bottleneck to achieve data centers in space, given that newer chips are much more tolerant to high temperatures.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/01/07/new-ai-chips-wi...
316. > The intractable problem is heat dissipation.
3 times the area of the heat dissipating surface compared to solar panel surface brings the satellite temp down to 27 deg C (300 K):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862869
> There is to little matter in space to absorb excess heat.
If that were true the Earth would have overheated, molten and turned to plasma long ago. Earth cools by.... radiative cooling. Dark space is 4 K, thats -267.15 deg C or -452.47 deg Fahrenheit. Stefan-Boltzmann law can cool your satellite just fine.
> You'd need thermal fins bigger than the solar cells.
Correct, my pessimistic calculation results in a factor of 3,...
but also Incorrect, there wouldn't be "fins" thats only useful for heat conduction and convection.
317. what makes you believe this?
radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
318. Is it financial engineering or social engineering?
He's all over the Epstein files and his daughter has publicly verified that the timing works out and the emails are probably legitimate.
https://www.threads.com/@vivllainous/post/DUMBh2Vkk8D/im-jus...
319. > Fighting thermodynamics is a losing race
The great thing about your argument is that it can be used in any circumstance!
Cooling car batteries, nope can't possibly work! Thermodynamics!
Refrigerator, are you crazy? You're fighting thermodynamics!
Heat pump! Haah thermodynamics got you.
320. This won’t help him. Because Elon is not important for national security. But our stupid oligarchs will soon learn the same lesson, the russian and chinese oligarchs have already learned.
321. Americans have trouble understanding something like that. We believe anything short of a 3bdrm house with a lawn and backyard is communism.
I'd love to live in a dense city. My office within waking distance. A Cafe in my apartment building, etc.
322. Let me rip my bong real quick..
What if you had a fleet of Optimus robots up there who would actually operate a TSMC in space and they would maintain the data centers in space?
Hold on let me enter a K hole…
What if we just did things?
323. > maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
I think it does, for what it’s worth if we are to extend intelligence (as we know it) and potentially consciousness out there into the galaxy.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
324. What you're describing is one of two mechanisms of shedding heat which is convection, heating up the environment. What the long comment above is describing is a _completely_ different mechanism, radiation, which is __more__ efficient in a vacuum. They are different things that you are mixing up.
325. Like Musk's other great public company failures?
326. Do we need rockets to put satelittes to the space? Cant it be done with baloons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFieAD5Gpms
327. How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?
Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
328. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017792776415682639
For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.
329. Starship has a large number of critical milestones coming: Can it land and quickly reuse the upper stage? If not, it can't make refueling flights without building a dozen or two starships. Can it carry the full specified payload? If not, it can't even try to refuel in orbit. If it can't refuel in orbit, it can't go beyond earth orbit. Etc.
Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
330. Musk always merges his companies when one is suffering:
Twitter/X in xAI
SolarCity into Tesla
xAI into SpaceC
I am just waiting now for Tesla to be acquired by SpaceC as it has run into issues.
331. I’m old enough to remember when this was said about Solar City
332. That wasn't the original question. The head of this thread was quoting Musk's claim, which I repeat here:
> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space
This is 500-1000 times as much as current global production.
Musk is talking about building on the Moon 500-1000 times as much factory capacity as currently exists in aggregate across all of Earth, and launching the products electromagnetically.
Given how long PV modules last, that much per year is enough to keep all of Earth's land area paved with contiguous PV. PV doesn't last as long in space, but likewise the Moon would be totally tiled in PV (and much darker as a consequence) at this production rate.
In fact, given it does tile the moon, I suspect Musk may have started from "tile moon with PV" and estimated the maximum productive output of that power supply being used to make more PV.
I mean, don't get me wrong, in the *long term* I buy that. It's just that by "long term" I mean Musk's likely to have buried (given him, in a cryogenic tube) for decades by the time that happens.
Even being optimistic, given the lack of literally any experience building a factory up there and how our lunar mining experience is little more than a dozen people and a handful of rovers picking up interesting looking rocks, versus given how much experience we need down here to get things right, even Musk's organisation skills and ability to enthuse people and raise capital has limits. But these are timescales where those skills don't last (even if he resolves his political toxicity that currently means the next Democrat administration will hate his guts and do what they can to remove most of his power), because he will have died of old age.
333. They want to go public, but have to sell the hell out of it in the meantime.
I'll bet SpaceX financials aren't as great as some people think. Remember, Elon was the guy who tried to take Tesla private, and talked a lot of smack about how silly it is to be a public company. All of a sudden he wants SpaceX to go public?
334. > If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
Or the current R admin, next time Musk has a spat with Trump.
Would definitely be a popcorn moment; doubly so if Canada has changed its rules on citizenship by then and has also stripped Musk of that, leaving him only with South African.
335. Just use lists, "Your Followers" tab and never touch the "For You" tab and its basically the same as Twitter was 5 years ago.
336. If they AI business is failing why did they just do a successful large raise?
337. As far as I understand they did not make a profit in 2025. They posted positive adjusted EBITDA, which is not the same.
338. Actually all of those things agree with the same laws that dictate why data centers can't work in space.
Your examples prove our case. You just must not understand how they work
339. Are you suggesting there is straight up Enron style legally defined fraud in this deal? What is being hidden?
And yes, agency risk is always a thing. It’s part of life.
340. Why? Let it fail. Bring back NASA.
341. The ISS creates radically less heat than a datacenter
342. You missed the point.
We can make ten or hundred times the number of solar cells we make right now, we just don't have a reason to. The technology is fairly ancient unless you want to compete on efficiency, and the raw materials abundant.
343. The reason for the entire moon mission is national prestige.
Is financial fraud consistent with our national prestige?
There are better companies.
344. This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all.
To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time.
But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.
345. You just have to remember, most of these people live in high density regions and have little comprehension about how much surface area humanity truly occupies... And that isn't even accounting for offshore constructs.
346. In the past 40 years we’ve seen power per unit of compute decrease by over 40 million times. This says we need to put data centers in space because we can’t produce enough power on earth for AI. That won’t be the case as history has shown, but this is a great way to get AI money for your space ships if you’re going to IPO.
347. Perhaps parent was being sarcastic.
348. So they use a valid and valuable company to hide a giant dumpster fire company. To add to that, their best argument is "AI in space", which has some real "solar roadways" energy to it. I honestly don't know how any SpaceX shareholder could approve this.
349. This. There's no scenario where it's cheaper to put them in space.
350. he seems to return to his investors quiet effectively, which is ultimately what a CEO has to do to attract more capital to build stuff.
And I have a Tesla and starlink and I'm quite happy with the level of autonomy the car has, so he has delivered on some level
351. > Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space.
LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality.
- sending raw materials up there
- service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines
- sending stuff back down
Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.
352. Well, no, the worry is that xAI's bondholders, who are also Twitter's bondholders, will be indemnified from any loss on those bonds at public expense because they are now also SpaceX bondholders and SpaceX is a national security interest of the US.
353. The idea here is that the economics of launch are changing with Starship such that the "incredible cost" and "overspeccing" of space will become much less relevant. There's a world where, because the cost per kg is so low, a data center satellite's compute payload is just the same hardware you'd put in a terrestrial rack, and the satellite bus itself is mass-produced to not-particularly-challenging specs. And they don't have to last 30 years, just 4-ish, when the computer is ready for retirement anyway.
Will that come to be? I'm skeptical, especially within the next several years. Starship would have to perform perfectly, and a lot of other assumptions hold, to make this make sense. But that's the idea.
354. hmmmm
355. You know how people sometimes dismiss PV by saying "what happens at night or in cloudy weather?"?
Well, what happens over the course of a year of night and clouds is that 1 TW-peak becomes an average of about 110 to 160 GW.
We're making ~1 TW-peak per year of PV right now.
356. I appreciate you engaging, but I'm not sure power how would be the limiting factor. Assuming an average of 1kW of compute needed per robot (for reference, Tesla's AI4 is ~200W, rumors say 800W for AI5, nvidia B200 is ~1kW), that's nothing compared to the amount of energy we use for locomotion (a car eats like 20kW at 60mph).
357. > Like "robo"taxi, right? A lot of smart people have been working on this at same company for decade+
I'm a bit confused what you're trying to imply here. They have launched RoboTaxi's and recently have been removing the human safety monitors in them. Are you trying to imply this didn't take a lot of work from a lot of intelligent people?
358. I know that per HN's guidelines we're supposed to be "kind and curious", and "reply to the argument instead of calling names". But with some texts, engaging with individual arguments loses sight of the more important bigger picture. So while unkind, the most "thoughtful and substantive" thing I think can be said about this text is:
The man's a moron.
359. This was my immediate thought as well. A great time to ask yourself — why am I literally paying for any of this? At best I literally don't use any of these services, at worst they are actively used against me.
360. The military (and/or government) should keep paying in advance for anything they need from SpaceX and make sure other unsecured creditors are not tooo significant.
When it all goes bankrupt, they can pay off the bonds for x¢ in the dollar and own SpaceX.
Perhaps if the gov could organize a little better, they'd make sure SpaceX owed lots of taxes and put themselves in front of the queue for ownership and screw other creditors (especially foreign).
Edit: looks like the US military doesn't spend that much on SpaceX: https://londoneconomics.co.uk/blog/publication/crouching-riv...
361. I'm pleased that Blue Origin and others are making progress on reusable flight hardware, because I fear that SpaceX will itself suffer a "RUD" for non-engineering reasons.
362. Actually the Trump administration is trying to strip legal status from people and deport them by way of an obscure law that gives the Secretary of State the discretion to do so if they deem those people a threat to the foreign policy goals of the US.
If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
363. It's not like satellites need anything like computer chips, which are finicky things to build that require parts with a sole supplier on the entire planet.
364. What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?
365. If you solve 2, heat dissipation goes away on earth too, so what’s the advantage of space
366. > It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
This is one of those things that's not obvious till you think about it.
367. This is really underselling it tbh. Any land that's growing corn in a developed country is likely top 1% of land on earth. Half of the earth is desert and tundra. Which is still incredibly easier to work with than space because you can ship there with a pickup very cheaply. Maybe when nevada and central australia are wall-to-wall solar panels we can check back on space.
368. The radiators are full of ammonia, they would be the heaviest thing involved. Thousands of gallons of ammonia would have to be launched into space.
369. Hiding losses? From whom? He's the majority shareholder of both businesses. The combined company will go public and report on things like revenue, burn rate, etc. It's not financial engineering. It's a purchase.
Just say "rocket man bad" and save some keystrokes.
370. Technical analysis most definitely can be biased due to political leanings. This is why there is the whole idea that research can often be bought and paid for to get the results you desire. Because they are biased with money. Certain ideas or theories of how things could be done could very easily be overlooked or excluded by someone trying to dig for reasons to say something won't work.
What I am saying is that clearly SpaceX/xAI feel that this is a viable option based on many experts research/facts that are more knowledgeable than a single bloggers opinion. If I am thinking rationally why would I choose to believe a single random person over a group of experts banking A LOT of money that they have a solution that works?
371. This isn't really true, though? The ISS does it with radiators that are ~1/2 the area of its solar panels, and both should scale linearly with power?
372. > Finally, if we limited ourselves to earth-based raw materials, we would eventually reach a point where the remaining mass of the earth would have less gravitational effect on the satellite fleet than the fleet itself, which would have deleterious effects on the satellite fleet.
The Earth's crust has an average thickness of about 15-20 km.
Practically we can only get at maybe the top 1-2 km, as drill bits start to fail the deeper you go.
The Earth's radius is 6,371 km.
So even if we could somehow dug up entire crust we can get to and flung it into orbit, that would barely be noticeable to anything in orbit.
373. Shouldn't the government be aiming to pay the lowest price for the best goods and services rather than using procurement as a way to promote or suppress certain political opinions?
374. It is a real model, real datacenters, and deployed heavily on their social media platform.
That's the full stack? Only other player that vertically setup is facebook, google and microsoft.
375. The entire thing is a play. Musk should be a science fiction writer. He has that uncanny ability to create a statement that compresses 100+ years of industrial evolution into a few sentences.
>Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.
I love how he goes from "the raw material is there" to "we will build high-tech supply chain to process them", just like that, magically.
https://i.imgur.com/wLJ60Vj.jpeg [I think you should be more explicit here in step two]
Also, https://xkcd.com/1724/
Edit: Formatting
376. no the radiator planes are in the shade, so you can increase the height of a pyramidal shaped satellite for a constant solar panel base, and thus enjoy arbitrarily low rest temperatures, check my calculation which I added.
for a target temperature of 300K that would mean the pyramid height would be a bit less than 3 times higher than the square base side length h=3L.
I even handicapped my example by only counting heat radiation from 2 of the 4 panels, assuming the 2 others are simply reflective (to make the calculation of a nearby warm Earth irrelevant).
377. Doesn't the idea of Orbital Datacenters imply that the constraining resource right now is physical space, and not compute, electricity, etc?
Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem?
As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.
378. The goal of JWST is not to consume as much power as possible, and perform useful computations with it. A system not optimized for metric B but for metric A scores bad for metric B... great observation.
379. > Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen
Not sure how you can say that. Nothing lasts forever, especially in the face of Chinese market dumping, but for a while there Tesla really was the undisputed king of EV manufacturing, that flywheel is how he got there, he did release all the patents because he said from day one he didn't anticipate or aim for 100% market share for Tesla and assumed there'd always be lots of EV manufacturers in future. All that sounds like - mission accomplished?
As for Waymo being ahead, maybe today. But Waymo's tech stack is largely pre-DL, they rely heavily on unscalable techniques like LIDAR and continuous mapping. Tesla is betting big on the "scale up neural networks" model we know works well and their FSD can drive everywhere. They're perhaps behind Waymo in some ways, but they're also in different markets - Waymo won't sell anyone a self driving car and Tesla will. I wouldn't count them out. Their trajectory is the right one.
> I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off.
PayPal, SpaceX existing at all, then doing reusable rockets, Tesla, FSD, large scale battery manufacturing, Starlink, X ("he can't fire 80% of employees it'll crash immediately"), robotics, training a SOTA LLM so fast even Jensen Huang was shocked ... the man consistently pulls off impossible seeming things in the face of huge skepticism. How many examples does it take before people start taking the guy seriously? Infinity examples?
380. well, Musk has been overpromising and under delivering for a decade (or more?), so it seems pretty clear this too is shithousery, albeit possibly ambitious.
381. Why do your magic space computers not require maintenance?
382. 1000 square meters really isn't that big in space.
383. I suspended my disbelief and gave it a chance but I couldn’t hold it anymore after the emoji.
384. I'm not the best person to make that case as I can only speculate (land cost, permitting, latency, etc). /Shrug
In all the conversations I've seen play out on hacker news about compute in space, what comes up every time is "it's unviable because cooling is so inefficient".
Which got me thinking, what if cooling needs dropped by orders of magnitude? Then I learned about photonic chips and spintronics.
385. >SpaceX as a government contractor and that means Elon’s pal Trump can now siphon money into xAI via the federal government.
I wonder how much faith Musk has that the US will never again have a president and/or Congress willing to torpedo such an incestuous deal.
386. I think it’s just financial, I don’t see this as being detrimental or disruptive to SpaceX much at all.
387. Haven't you heard? Tesla is pivoting to building humanoid robots instead. They haven't sold a single one, but it toootally warrants retooling their car factories, pinky promise!
388. Excellent comment.
389. That equation have surface area ? What if new material found to be extremely large surface area to weight ratio to dissipate lots of heat ?
390. Why would you short the stock?
391. Where's the government bailout in this transaction that would make this a relevant comparison?
392. > new technology improves vacuum heat radiation efficiency
Isn't this fixed by blackbody radiation equations?
393. Are you a car mechanic living in China?
394. All rocketry was, back then. You wanted ballistic telemetry? If you didn't know someone who worked on the V-2, you had to launch your own sounding rockets.
I think the parent's point stands. There's a lot more pragmatic concern with the damage SpaceX could do in 2026, versus the damage Nazis could do in the 1960s.
395. The burned propellant and oxygen mass (as H2O and CO2) almost all ends up back in the atmosphere when you launch to LEO, so you can keep running electrolysis (powered by solar) to convert it back to fuel.
396. Space is empty, not cold.
397. Cheers to you and your father.
Also, thank you for the reminder that I need to get my ass back to Seattle to be with remaining parent, while I still can. I have been a jackass about that.
398. >This is so obviously false.
One of the biggest but most pointless questions I have about our current moment in history is whether the people in power actually believe the stuff they say or are lying. Ultimately I don't think the answer really matters, their actions are their actions, but there is just so much that is said by people like Musk that strains credulity to the point that it indicates either they're total idiots or they think the rest of us are total idiots and I'm genuinely curious which of those is more true.
399. Perhaps do not use slurs then? Unless you want to claim that term is ever used without pejorative intent?
400. Ah yes, my favourite kind of engineering: financial engineering
401. SpaceX can use the same booster 30 times. NASAs new rocket can use it one time. We don't need to see financial statements to figure this one out.
402. 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.
403. The really skeptical take here is that eventually all of Musk's companies merge, or at least the biggest ones, for juicing that market value to get that $1T payout. Looking at Tesla.
404. I agree that part of the bottleneck is deploying solar physically. China is the best in the world in deploying solar panels. They are only managing linear increases in their solar capacity, year over year.
405. Im not comparing it to Tesla, im comparing it to any normal successful company (apple, google, nvidia, Exxon, whatever).
Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate and it should have been allowed to bankrupt and break off into businesses that worked and actually competed for customers.
406. Have you considered that people smarter than you are scamming you?
407. Is it the required size of the wings for radiative cooling then?
408. On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)
409. The atmosphere is in the way, and they get pretty dirty on earth. Also it doesn't rain or get cloudy in space
410. Don't forget that Musk also founded Open AI (ChatGPT).
411. It seems straightforward to you because you're ignoring everything that makes this not work.
Here's a big one: you can't put radiators in shadow because the coolant would freeze. ISS has system dedicated to making sure the radiators get just enough sunlight at any given time.
412. The Starlink achievement alone is one of the most insane projects ever attempted and works really well.
413. We must be living in parallel universes.
Tesla invested into the first Lotus roadster - and put that cash into the S then the X. Used that cash to build the worlds largest factories and make the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes - so large in fact that the S & X are now tiny single percentages of sales which is why Tesla is stopping manufacturing them now.
Tesla is one of the very few vehicle manufactures which makes a profit manufacturing vehicles. Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning.
Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time. What the Chinese are doing in battery tech is irrelevant to US vehicles as they will never be allowed to sell in the US which is Teslas largest market.
The model 2 has the possibility of being profitable at insanely low purchase price which has the potential to completely disrupt the economics of US sales in such a way that legacy auto could well be bankrupt in 5-10 years. Who will be making Waymo's vehicles then?
414. > I suspect SpaceX will acquire Tesla at some point.
I think that is also likely, unless Tesla can stage a major turnaround, it is going to be beaten by Chinese competitors nearly everywhere that they are allowed (which is everywhere but the USA.)
415. "There's clearly rhetorical hyperbole happening there" in a business paper is called lying
416. > orbital data centers
I'm not a rocket scientist, but how do they plan to dispose of all the waste heat? The ISS carefully maintains its temperature, and it's not running racks-full of servers.
edit to add: this guy, who is a rocket scientist, explains exactly why it's a terrible idea, and yes, heat management is one reason. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
417. Exactly; most of the world's problems are political problems.
Which Musk has no intention to fix, of course, because he's more about money and (buying) status with it. He had an opportunity but decided to aid the regime in extracting people's data instead (probably selling it to adversaries).
418. please check my didactic example here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862869
"Radiators can shadow each other," this is precisely why I chose a convex shape, that was not an accident, I chose a pyramid just because its obvious that the 4 triangular sides can be kept in the shade with respect to the sun, and their area can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the height of the pyramid for a constant base. A convex shape guarantees that no part of the surface can appear in the hemispherical view of any other part of the surface.
The only size limit is technological / economical.
In practice h = 3xL where L was the square base side length, suffices to keep the temperature below 300K.
If heat conduction can't be managed with thermosiphons / heat pipes / cooling loops on the satellite, why would it be possible on earth? Think of a small scale satellite with pyramidal sats roughly h = 3L, but L could be much smaller, do you actually see any issue with heat conduction? scaling up just means placing more of the small pyramidal sats.
419. Banksters struggled to sell off Twitter notes. Did they get out intact finally?
420. That's the price before Starship which would be the prerequisite for this whole project.
421. what? the heat is coming from inside the house
422. > SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security
So was GM. Didn’t stop it from going bankrupt.
423. Sure but like, just use even more solar panels? You can probably buy a lot of them for the cost of a satellite.
424. Is xAI Twitter? I thought they were separate companies, but honestly I don’t know anymore.
425. why must usamericans insist that they be the best at everything? it seems psychopathic...
426. Nameplate capacity needs a derate for availability, so you can drop it down to about 200GW(e) equivalent continuous power assuming we're making and deploying enough batteries to support it. More, obviously, if those panels are going to an equatorial desert, less if they're going to sunny Svalbard in the winter time.
427. Remember MoviePass, and how they were losing gobs of money by letting people see unlimited movies for $20/month?
It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt.
The "datacenters in space" thing is a similar play: it's so obviously dumb that a bunch of smart people have tricked themselves into thinking "wow, SpaceX must have actually figured a way it can work!"; SpaceX has not and it is in fact exactly as stupid as it looks.
428. > X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.
I wonder if Musk would be willing to let a journalist do a deep dive on all internal communications in the same way he did when he took over twitter.
429. I'm not endorsing merely listing, but yes Blue origin.
You are correct about the issues of navigating the DoD but that isn't a reason to accept these assholes the process needs to be open to normal companies and promote standards without any grifter connections.
430. I mean, even if he isn't directly making a lot of the decisions in these companies that are doing well, it doesn't mean he doesn't play a big role in that still. He still had to pick a lot of these leaders, pay them well, keep them satisfied enough to stay there, and also give them the proper freedom to lead these companies. There are many people out there who could also manage to make these companies fail instead of grow.
I feel that a lot of people simply don't like Elon because of political reasons which are often also based on misinformed opinions. It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.
Now I think ultimately any ultra wealthy person is going to have some flaws that people can find and latch onto in order to hate someone.
431. Photovoltaic production has been doubling every year. That's not a huge amount of doubling!
432. He spent other people's money (or maybe even imaginary money) he couldn't have used for himself (since selling off major stakes in your company is a big nono)
433. Starlink already solved those problems, they do 200 GBit/s via laser between satellites.
And for data centers, the satellite wouldn't be as far apart as starlight satellites, they would be quite close instead.
434. But everyone is crazy about GPU’s right now. Why not ride that wave for extra investment? All the benefits transfer to all the other things we can do with it.
435. to replace the Shuttle, certainly not
436. 5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches.
The ISS power/heat budget is like 240,000 BTU/hr. That’s equivalent to half of an Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack. So two international space stations per rack. Or about 160,000 international space stations to cool the 10GW “Stargate” datacenter that OpenAI’s building in Abilene. There are 10,000 starlink satellites.
Starship could probably carry 250-300 of the new V2 Mini satellites which are supposed to have a power/heat budget of like 8kW. That's how I got 5,000 Starship launches to match OpenAI’s datacenter.
Weight seems less of an issue than size. 83,000 NVL72’s would weigh 270 million lbs or 20% of the lift capacity of 5000 starship launches. Leaving 80% for the rest of the satellite mass, which seems perhaps reasonable.
Elon's napkin math is definitely off though, by over an order of magnitude. "a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton" The NVL72's use 74kW per ton. But that's just the compute, without including the rest of the fucking satellite (solar panels and radiators). So that estimate is complete garbage.
One note: If you could afford to send up one of your own personal satellites, it would be extremely difficult for the FBI to raid.
437. > It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day.
More disturbing than surprising.
438. Has anyone done the math on how much liquid methane and oxygen this would take to launch on Starship? Seems like an impossibility alone without digging into the numbers.
439. Random bit flips might even improve output.
440. You have presented a good case from the physics textbook for calculating the radiator size.
However, what do you reckon the energy balance is for launching the 1 GW datacenter components into space and assembling it?
441. Sure, and copper, and aluminium
442. BYD are just affordable and maybe reliable, regarding maintenance their spares are hard to come by and are almost as hard to work with as Tesla and other brands.
443. [Absolutely]( https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab... ), [no way]( https://payloadspace.com/estimating-spacexs-2024-revenue/ ), indeed.
444. All as a side effect...
445. A "bailout" is when a company rescued from bankruptcy. Common equity holders take large losses or are wiped out. This did not happen here.
We also know the Twitter buyout debt was sold at near par before the merger with xAI which is inconsistent with being near bankruptcy.
446. tbh you could just combine them with starlink sats. didn't they just apply for (and get?) a license for 1 million sats? Stick a single racks worth of gpu power on those and hey presto you've just got yourself the largest ai cluster in the world by far.
447. Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that.
One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.
AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.
I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.
448. It's always 2-3 years with this guy
449. tone: I don't really understand orbital mechanics, but I do understand geopolitics a bit.
1. China is very concerned about Starlink-like constellations. They want their own, but mostly they want to be able to destroy competitors. That is really hard.
2. Many countries have single ASAT capabilities. Where one projectile can hit one satellite. However, this is basically shoot a bullet, with a bullet, on different trajectories.
3. > Sure, it'd take orbital launch capabilities to lift ... how many bags of metal scrap and explosives?
If I understand orbital mechanics... those clouds of chaff would need to oppose the same orbit, otherwise it is a gentle approach. In the non-aligned orbit, it's another bullet hitting a bullet scenarios as in 2, but with a birdshot shotgun.
My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD, as far as mass to orbit, all at once! If you blow up some group of Starlink, that chaff cloud will just keep in orbit on the same axis. It will not keep blowing up other Starlinks.
The gentle grenade approach was possibly tested by the CCP here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820992
450. From [2] (abridged):
NASA contracts alone have exceeded $13 billion since 2015, with $1.1 billion expected for 2025.
The U.S. Space Force awarded $845 million for 2025 and $733 million for 2024.
Commercial satellite operators are estimated to contribute between $2.5 billion and $3 billion in 2025.
451. LLMs specifically are fine with random bits flipped for the results to be 'creative'.
452. Okay so that works out to 124 kW/ton for the opal config.
453. People can build a factory that makes satellites. And then a factory that makes factories to make satellites.
There is plenty of material in the solar system (see my other response), and plenty of orbits, and launch capability can scale with energy harvested so the launch rate can grow exponentially.
Lots of people will probably decide they don't want any more satellites. But it only takes a few highly determined people to get it done anyway.
454. the X super-conglomerate
455. > the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes
Tesla isn't even in the top 15 auto manufacturers by volume? The largest manufacturer Toyota produces 9x the cars Tesla does. Tesla is also on a multiyear sales drop with no sign of sales improvement.
The top 15 car makers produced 70 million cars, to Tesla's 1.7m. They have no enormous volume, at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...
If Tesla's stock traded in line with its competitors, its a $30-40B company. The hype around future growth (now completely off the charts) is the only reason the stock price is out of line with reality. There is no reason to expect Tesla's sales figures to improve going forward, in fact, they will continue to decrease.
> Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning
Tesla had a profit of $3.8b in 2025 (this is a 46% drop from 2024 and a second year over year drop). It's revenue was $94b (also less than 2024), which places it 12th among auto manufacturers. It's profit is 6th, which is a decent margin compared to legacy makers, but as mentioned above, the profit is plummeting as Tesla struggles to sell cars. It's revenue among all global companies is not even in the top 100.
It does not "throw off cash", the business is in a tailspin.
>They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time
Musk has been promising full self driving mode is within six months to a year away. He first made those claims in the mid 2010s? Do Tesla's have full self driving mode in 2026?
There is a decade long trail of failed claims from Musk and Tesla.
In 2019, Musk predicted 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020. How many Tesla robotaxis are on the road in 2026? Fifty? One hundred? It's a rounding error compared to the claim that they'd have a million in 2020...
Musk said in 2019 that he believed Tesla vehicles were not traditional depreciating assets and instead could appreciate because they contained future-value technologies, especially Full Self-Driving (FSD): “I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset — not a depreciating asset.”
In fact, Tesla's are among the worst depreciating vehicles on the market today, their depreciation compares to the low end car market of Nissan, Hyundai and other low quality manfacturers.
Elon projected 250-500k Cybertruck sales per year. In reality, they sold 38k in 2024, and just 16k in 2025.
>They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time
456. It's a con, his AI business is failing, so he's rolling it up into the profitable business. Did a similar thing with Twitter.
This is so obvious, but it's so stupid and at this scale that people find it hard to believe.
457. I think we're around stage 4 of:
1. Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
2. How dare you! You're just jealous!
3. Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
4. Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
5. Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.
458. Asking for a friend (who sucks at thermodynamics:) could you use a heat pump to cool down the cold end more and heat up the hot end much higher? Heat radiation works better the higher the temperature?
459. All kinds of industries have been conserving more each decade since the energy crisis of the 1970's.
With recent developments, projected use is now skyrocketing like never seen since.
Before that I thought it was calculated that if alternative energy could be sufficiently ramped up, there would be electricity too cheap to meter.
I would like to see that first.
Whoever has the attitude to successfully do "whatever it takes" to get it done would be the one I trust do it in space after that.
460. > put a slightly larger solar array on the same equipment on earth?
Land and permitting. I’m not saying the math works. Just that there are envelopes for it to.
461. And how much of that power would be spent on high speed communications with Earth that aren't, you know, a megabit or two per second
462. It's such bullshit that we've decided this moron and others in his cohort can unilaterally reallocate such vast portions of humanity's labor at their whims.
This is an extremely stupid idea, but because of our shared delusion of capitalism and the idea that wealth accumulation at the top should be effectively limitless, this guy gets to screw around and divert actual human labor towards insane and useless projects like this rather than solving real world problems.
463. Google is currently working on AI data centers in space.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/go...
464. True. It would a tradeoff with the fuel consumed vs doubling power output.
465. The Technology Connections Youtube channel recently did a great video arguing pretty convincingly that the land used to grow corn for cars would be vastly more efficiently used from an energy perspective if we covered it with solar panels.
466. Yeas, and this will happen within weeks of launch with the orbits under consideration.
467. Musk is, indeed, allowed under the 1st to promote whatever he wants to promote. Him being a hypocrite about "free speech absolutism" is not a crime.
However, the current US administration appears to be actively violating the 1st and 5th in a bunch of ways, the 14th that one time, and making threats to wilfully violate the 2nd for people they don't like and the 22nd to get a third term. It is reasonable, not hyperbolic, to be concerned about Musk's support of this.
468. I think he will spin Tesla off since electrification and autonomy are no longer cool (he can’t build good quality cars or reliable FSD)
469. The Goalpost shift continues,
If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.
Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
470. When a physicist says arbitrarily large it could even be in a dimensionless sense. It doesn't matter how small or large the solar panel is:
for a 4 m x 4 m solar panel, the height of the pyramid would have to be 12 m to attain ~ 300 K on the radiator panels. Thats also the cold side for your compute.
for a 4 km x 4 km solar panel the height of the pyramid would be 12 km.
471. My point is not to make fun of him, but to help avoid the destruction of humanity via an HN comment. No joke.
This is starting to get really serious.
472. Elon prepping SpaceX for a meme-stock IPO?
Is there any other valid reason?
Datacenters in space is just stupid, getting rid of heat is much much easier on earth than in space.
473. We're talking past each other I think. In theory we can cool down anything we want, that's not the problem. 8 DGX B200 isn't a datacenter, and certainly not anywhere close to the figures discussed (500-1000tw of ai satellites per year)
Nobody said sending a single rack and cooling it is technically impossible. We're saying sending datacenters worth of rack is insanely complex and most likely not financially viable nor currently possible.
Microsoft just built a datacenter with 4600 racks of GB300, that's 4600 * 1.5t, that alone weights more than everything we sent into orbit in 2025, and that's without power nor cooling. And we're still far from a single terawatt.
474. Presumably "hard to come by" would be somewhat irrelevant in any jurisdiction other than the US?
475. if the thermal radiation panels have ~3 x the area of the solar panels, the temperature of the satellite can be contained to about 300 K (27 deg C). Ctrl+F:pyramid to find my calculations.
476. What are you talking about?
477. It’s hard to estimate what Starship’s actual costs will be when it isn’t fully operational. I am finding estimates of $100 to $200 per kilogram and even as low as $10 per kilogram.
Let’s say the costs in 5 years do get as low as $15 per kilogram or about 2 orders of magnitude improvement in launch prices. That means a 200-ton payload Starship would cost $3,000 to launch.
Do you honestly believe that? The world’s largest rocket cost a total of $3,000 to launch?
478. Because Elon Musk owns a space company not a shipping company. If Elon Musk happened to own a tonne of boats sure as hell sea-steading data centres would be the future. But he doens't, so it's AAAAIIIII IIIIIN SPPPPPAAAAAAAACE.
479. It doesn't have to; the government's rescue of GM in 2008 killed a bunch of brands that they owned.
But given the current administration, I don't have a lot of faith in the government looking out for anyone else's interests here.
480. And now Tesla is hindering that transition.
481. The quoted "1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally" is the peak output, not the average output. They're only about 20% higher peak output in space… well, if you can keep them cool at least.
482. Whats your definition for reasonable temp? my envelope math tells me at 82 celsius (right before h100s start to throttle) you'd need about 1.5x the surface area for radiators. Not exactly back to back, but even 3x surface area is reasonable.
Also this assumes a flat surface on both sides. Another commenter in this thread brought up a pyramid shape which could work.
Finally, these gpus are design for earth data centers where power is limited and heat sinks are abundant. In the case of space data centers you can imagine we get better radiators or silicon that runs hotter. Crypto miners often run asics very hot.
I just don't understand why every time this topic is brought up, everyone on HN wants to die on the hill that cooling is not possible. It is?? the primary issue if you do the math is clearly the cost of launch.
483. The opposite of down is up, so it wouldn't be completely illogical.
484. Maybe we are talking about different things here?
I don't doubt spacex can fail at this.
I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible.
> plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers
Famously, plenty of people who have spent careers building rockets would swear that reusable rockets would absolutely never work.
485. Have you heard of cosmic radiation?
486. The US has district heating systems. The country is very big and varied, as much as people like to paint it as homogenous.
487. We also don't have fully reusable launch vehicles, yet. But we will shortly. That will decrease the cost of launch by at least an order of magnitude.
Still there will be a lot of engineering problems to solve.
2-3 years seems very short, but 10 years seems long to me.
488. Of course, we are stripping the earth bare to build word-guessers GPUs in orbit, but aliens are definitely the problem.
489. > he made the best selling car in the world 3 years running
Not only did Elon not found Tesla[0], but many employees have described the "babysitters" or "handlers" who are responsible for making him feel like his ideas have been implemented, so that his caprice and bluster don't interfere with the actual operation of the company.
To give him his due, he's a phenomenal manipulator of public opinion and image, and he certainly has invested a lot of his emerald-generated wealth into numerous successful ventures - but he himself is not a positive contributor to their success.
[0] https://autoworldjournal.com/is-elon-musk-the-founder-of-tes...
490. The next step will be merging SpaceX and Tesla.
Tesla has probably the most valuable shareholders on Earth. Over years of empty promises and meme status, the stock has pretty much purged all the level heads. So it's mostly deluded Elon sycophants giving placing their tithe on the alter of his sci-fi fantasy smoke and mirrors game.
In reality he will be dumping the debt of twitter and xAI (and maybe spacex?) on Tesla shareholders, and buoying that with the added layer of hyper that spaceX brings.
491. > We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally.
Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but as of right now humanity seems to have an insatiable demand for power.
492. > Yep, definitely being scammed by not dismissing things outside my area of expertise out of hand.
I wish I had your confidence about everything!
Instead you put your confidence in Elon, who has zero expertise in this area?
493. Please understand that his companies succeeding in some things doesn’t make the things that are exaggerated, overpromised, or just plain naked hype with no backing somehow practical. It’s an interesting effect of our age that for some figures to some people if any criticism is considered unwarranted then all criticism must be disregarded.
It reminds me of growing up in the evangelical church and all the pastors who’d still keep their followers even after they show up in new cars or fly first class, taking the tithes from old ladies on their pension.
494. Why would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment.
Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
495. What do you do with the steam afterwards? If you eject it, you have to bring lots of it with your spacecraft, and that costs serious money. If you let it condensate to get water again, all you did is moving some heat inside the spacecraft, almost certainly creating even more heat when doing that.
496. Yeah that’s where I’m confused about this “conspiracy theory” stuff. It’s common knowledge that Musk wanted hyperloop to undermine the high speed rail project and also it later failed. Aside from a single HN comment I have never seen anyone attribute him with that much influence on the thing, so it is bizarre to see someone talking like there’s some sort of common conspiracy theory that Elon Musk controls trains or whatever. As far as I know pretty much nobody believes that.
497. That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.
498. Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt.
Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
499. Yes, satellites and the ISS successfully radiate heat today.
500. Financial theatre
501. Ahahaha, who got the money?
502. All of these Musk lead 'X' companies, buy each other, invest in each other, then sell each other to each other, and re-buy.
Are we sure this isn't some Ponzi skeem?
Is Musk just using purchasing of his own companies as way to inflate them?
503. FSD is incredibly reliable. Build quality of US built cars is middle of the pack, Europe/China built Teslas are top of the pack.
504. Tesla was a decent car with a very good computer in it.
They never bothered to improve on the car part, causing Teslas across the western world to fail inspections at staggering rates when the very basic car bits couldn't handle the torque of an EV.
Now old manufacturers have caught up on the computer front and China is blowing past at crazy rates and Tesla is legitimately in trouble.
The very high profile CEO cosplaying as an efficiency edgelord with the american president didn't help the company's image at all either.
505. Heat exchanger melts salts, salts boil off? Some kind of potential in there to use evaporants for attitude/altitude correction. Spitballing. Once your use case also has a business case, scope to innovate grows.
506. Because Twitter/X is distorting our politics (with ann unbalanced scheme of censorship / amplification / suppression) and destroying the country by mainstreaming far right supremacist politics. Twitter/X does not deserve a single dollar of taxpayer money. If SpaceX is now part of that machine, it doesn’t deserve a single dollar either. I would rather pay more for alternatives and encourage their growth. I also look at any money given to this company as the equivalent of GOP campaign funding, so I feel it should be treated as illegal under the law.
507. This is financial engineering for an IPO, whatever spurious justifications are provided.
508. that's an amazing read, lots of concrete and convincing challenges; but otoh, technology is evolving at such a fast pace, maybe it is possible for breakthroughs that we couldn't imagine now to become reality sooner than we would have anticipated?
509. Sean Duffy is no longer acting administrator of NASA. This proposal was apparently part of a bid to get the support of a coalition of old-space companies and new-space non-SpaceX companies. As part of that strategy he apparently leaked Isaacman's Project Athena document and was backgrounding that he was a SpaceX plant.
But, Isaacman is administrator now, and whatever you think about Isaacman and his relationship to SpaceX, I don't think there's much merit in thinking one of Duffy's half thought out plans is likely to be carried out.
510. Exactly. He can croon about DOGE all day, but the reality is his entire fortune was built on feeding at the trough of government largess. That's why he talks about Mars all the time. He's not stupid enough to think we could actually live there, but damn if he couldn't make a couple trillion skimming off the top of the world's most expensive space program.
511. How isn't China playing by the same rules? Every country subsidises and supports industry it thinks is important, surely nothing would stop Germany from investing into Volkswagen and BMW or the US from investing into Ford the same way China invests into BYD?
512. It's just "Elon zomg lulz" trolling for updoots. This place pretends to know better.
513. good read: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
514. It seems like you’re ascribing to Elon some kind of magic, where you feel he’s breaking the rules of what should be allowed in order to achieve success. Is it impossible you simply don’t understand how what he does works?
515. I feel like without adding some commentary with these quotes this comment lacks enough info to see how it relates to the linked article.
516. Why does he?
that's an arbitrary standard set by you.
His investors are quite happy with his success rate. He is constantly building new stuff. And as a consumer who has had great experience with every product I've bought, so am I
517. With that attitude mankind would still be living in caves. Why build a farm and stay in one place - we should follow the animals around.
518. I think this is all ridiculous, to be clear, but re: this problem couldn't the radiators in theory be oriented so that they vent in opposite directions and cancel out any thrust that would be generated?
519. Probably for the same reasons they aren't doing mixed use prison and restaurant buildings.
520. There is no conspiracy theory, that aside the link does not indicate that there is one? “Vaguely accurate” does not mean “untrue”, and Vance is clear that he is talking about his personal interpretation of what Elon Musk is documented to have said, which he does not refute.
I like the idea that “he didn’t say that” and “he did say that but a different guy feels like he probably meant something else” are so obviously equivalent that skepticism of that notion constitutes a ‘conspiracy theory’.
That aside I like that the guy whose opinion should be treated as indisputable fact said that he thinks that there hasn’t been any high speed rail built globally in the past decade, which is not even remotely true. Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so, since his next sentence was praise of Musk’s world-wide achievements.
I suppose it’s possible that Vance either doesn’t know anything about high speed rail or was in such a rush to extoll the virtues of the CEO of Tesla that he just sort of blurted something out to make Musk look good?
521. >You do not radiate all the heat away from a GPU, a modern GPU can run pretty hot.
LOL. If you don't radiate the heat the spacecraft just gets indefinitely hotter (until it glows and the heat is forcibly irradiated). It's space, there's no fluid to provide convection.
522. So he doesn't want to go to mars he wants to make a big space chatbot?
523. All this is happening before then, no? So people can take that into account when pricing IPO shares, or deciding if the IPO ask is too high.
524. Does that include all the required radiators to vent heat?
525. However, you can drive the computer and 100x the solar panels to the middle of nowhere for 1/1,000,000th of the cost.
526. > you'd have no solar power half the time
Polar orbit.
527. That is what they want you to think it isn't too big to fail there are plenty of competitors with much stronger engineers and principles than this grifter.
528. I see what you're saying, but I also know that companies do these kinds of things all the time. It's very normal for companies to move around like this if it results in better financials. I don't see how that really makes this "financial gymnastics". Pretty much every company out there does some funny things with the numbers in order to reduce their tax burden. I wouldn't doubt this is the same kind of thing. If xAI plans to launch a ton of servers into the sky, it kind of makes sense for them to be apart of a company they also own that just so happens to launch satellites.
Starlink is also a company under SpaceX. Would you argue that is also financial gymnastics? Is it much different from what Starlink does? Instead of launching satellites to be a world wide ISP, they are launching them to be an AI provider.
I just don't see how this compares to the quote, otherwise it would apply to so many companies, including other ones already under SpaceX.
To me this just doesn't seem related and seems like a pretty big stretch likely biased by people who dislike AI and Elon.
529. The land area and heating is completely insignificant on a terrestrial scale.
530. Well there lies the rub, solar panels already need their own thermal radiators when used in space ...
531. You are missing one important thing here.
You do not radiate all the heat away from a GPU, a modern GPU can run pretty hot. Also look up how this is getting better for the next generation of GPUs.
Maybe repeat your calculation with updated assumptions?
But even if you were completely right, your argument is that we can't do this tomorrow, yes I agree. Typical technology development cycles are about 5-10 years.
532. I'm not talking specifically about SpaceX, although historically the cost of their rockets have been much lower than NASA. I'm being much more general. The public sector doesn't have the same incentives that private companies have, whether it's rockets or any other technology. It's sad, but it's the truth.
533. > Right now only upsides ...
You are missing some pretty important upsides.
Lower latency is a major one. And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it. Both are fairly limited as far as resources go, and gets exponentially expensive with competition.
The major downside is, of course, cost. In my opinion, this has never really stopped humans from building and scaling up things until the economies of scale work out.
> connect to other satellites and earth
If only there was a large number of satellites in low earth orbit and a company with expertise building these ;)
534. What are you talking about? They are both private companies. They don't have public financial reporting.
535. Apparently, OpenAI plan to build 250 GW of computing capacity by 2033.
To put that in space, based on your numbers, that's 1,250 square kilometers of cooling - an area roughly equivalent in size to Los Angeles
536. When I search for this, I find about equal numbers of stories with two opposing narratives.
One matching what you say; the other saying they're up significantly, e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/byd-overtakes-tesla-world-lar...
I do not know what to make of this.
However, it is unimportant, as the main concern for your argument should be all Chinese brands combined rather than any specific brand. Unfortunately, given I'm seeing two narratives that seem to be mutually exclusive for BYD, I don't think I can trust web searches to tell me about all brands combined either.
However, even that is unimportant, as my point was more focused on the price and value for money, how Chinese models compete on AI for less cost; even to do badly in this regard (which they might or might not be given the mutually incompatible news stories I've seen) is less a narrative about Chinese market failure and more of a demonstration that hardly anyone really cares about the AI in the first place.
537. > That's what asteroid mining is for.
It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down. Metric tonnes of stuff. It’s not physically impossible, but it is wildly expensive (in pure energy terms, not even talking about money) and completely impractical with current technology. We just don’t have engines capable of doing this outside the atmosphere.
538. So the Cybertruk is one vehicle out of an entire line up, I get not liking one model but what's that go to do with the entire line up?
539. Can someone convince me that this is not a) pure horseshit b) a plan for Elon to sneak enough mass into orbit to hold the Earth hostage?
If you can bring millions of tons of anything into orbit around Earth you can destroy civilization, or just France.
540. What about security?
541. both can be true, he can excel at 'narrative' and also deliver me my Tesla and my starlink, it's not either or
542. To me, failed, implies some sort of real failure, not just, "eh, won't make us enough money" a la Google/business since forever/the exec who's pet project it was moved on/had babies/was fired for unrelated reasons/some other human thing unrelated to the technical proposition.
If, like, sea-water entered and corroded the system and it blew up and ate babies, and caused Godzilla, that would be a failure. It just being not quite interesting enough to go after seems... I mean I guess it is, but on a "meh" level.
543. care to expand on your comment? or are is this just remarking that some light was reflected?
544. > in what fantasy world
It is already more expensive to performance maintenance on SOCs than it is to replace them. Remember, these machines are not for serving a database, there are practically no storage needs (and storage is the component that fails most often.)
Given that, the main challenge is cooling, I assume that will be figured out before yeeting 100 billion $ of computers into space. Plenty of smart people work at these companies.
545. Anyone remember the quote by Russ Hanneman on SV [0] - "No Revenue, means you're potential pure play"
We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ?
yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the land is needed. Hell it's even in the Tesla Master Plan v3 docs [1] - current limitation being storage & distribution
so all you - are now witnessing to the greatest scam ever pulled on earth.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
546. it absolutely doesn't unless there's a magical unobtainium cooling tech Musk got his hands on
547. This could just be a gamble they hope pays off. Or maybe there is some kind of other bigger picture strategy at play here that goes beyond just the AI from space idea. I try to stay optimistic about innovations in tech and I like to see companies willing to try new things instead of just staying stagnant.
For example, I think the car market had become pretty stagnant with traditional car makers, and most electric cars they attempted to make sucked. Tesla making good desirable electric cars really pushed EV's into becoming more popular and having a better charging network. I think it would have taken much longer for EV's to start growing in popularity if someone wasn't willing to take a risk.
Are they going to be too early to the market for this kind of tech? Maybe. Is it going to end up being a waste of money? Yeah it totally could be. But at the end of the day I do like to see some risks being taken like this and it sucks seeing constant negativity whenever companies try something new.
548. Who? Finding great engineers is comparatively easy versus knowing how to navigate the DoD procurement process and having the balance sheet strength to run huge losses for ages. Blue origin might have the capital and talent, whilst Boeing has the DoD procurement locked down, but neither have both.
549. See Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
550. I think its an effort to position SpaceX as an AI company in order to justify some ridiculous valuation at IPO.
551. > I'd love to live in a dense city. My office within waking distance. A Cafe in my apartment building, etc.
Then move to one?
552. This is all based on bad math. The people proposing these things don't even have proper scientific and mathematical training to determine what is achievable.
553. What a clever trick to throw more money (governmental subsidies) into a sinking ship (xAI and "AI" in general). Perplexingly this maneuver will probably boost stock prices thus creating more monopoly money to burn resources with.
554. Why would you put data centres in space?
555. My up thread commentary was not meant as real snark at all. I was attempting to be genuine.
However, I think it did accomplish my goal. I bet that we could now have a beer/tea, and laugh together.
If you are ever near Wroclaw, Prague, Leipzig/Dresden, or Seattle, please email my username at the the big G. I would happily meet you at the nearest lovely hotel bar. HN mini meetup. I can only imagine the stories that we might exchange.
556. > How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?
I provided the calculation for the pyramidal shape: if the base of a pyramid were a square solar panel with side length L, then for a target temperature of 300K (a typical back of envelope substitute for "room temperature") the height of the pyramid would have to be about 3 times the side length of the square base. Quite reasonable.
> Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that whatever prevents us from putting GPU clusters in space, it's not the difficulty in shedding heat by thermal radiation that is supposedly stopping us.
557. Well you see, what you do is send a bunch of humanoid robots up there to do all the work.
(please don't ask what we do when those break down)
558. I imagine those are surmountable challenges. Boeing somehow manages.
But more likely that merger would consist of SpaceX acquiring Tesla and taking it private
559. Haha. It's less than 1,000 words that would take less than 5 minutes to read.
I bet much less than half of the hundreds of HN commenters here bother to read it. Many are clearly unfamiliar with its content.
560. > tone: I don't really understand orbital mechanics, but I do understand geopolitics a bit.
Thanks for the clarification, I guess that explains this (from you):
> Think about how hard it would be to practically take out Starlink.
and this:
> My entire point is that constellations in GEO
which you've now corrected.
Moving on:
> My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD
So let's not do that .. how hard is it to render the entire LEO zone a shit show with contra wise clouds of frag that cause cascading failures?
Forget the geopolitics of China et al. .. LEO launch capabilities are spreading about the globe, it's not just major world powers that pose a threat here.
561. Also it's gravitationally unstable, like Dyson Rings, where as soon as you have any perturbance from the center means that the closer side is more attracted to the sun so it enters a feedback loop.
562. Yeah but who can be hurt by this, these are both private companies? So whose interest is his "conflicting" with? I'm sure the shareholders will raise it with him and/or bring a lawsuit if they aren't happy (they probably are happy).
563. Check the authors history. They are both anti AI and anti Elon. I think I feel a lot more confident staying optimistic and assuming that the SpaceX and xAI team have done their research about this. I know a lot of people are heavily biased in this matter due to politically not liking Elon or not liking AI, but I also think it's fair to say these companies have many very smart individuals working for them. If they have come to the conclusion that this is viable, then I have much more faith in what they are saying over one guys opinion who is biased against them and saying it's a bad idea.
You're also passing these judgements without knowing their full plan. Maybe we only know one part of the plan and maybe other details have not been announced. They may have a much bigger plan for this than just the specific information we have.
564. This is definitely better than merging with Tesla.
They can sell xAI/Grok to all automobile companies along with Tesla and other businesses(X.com included) just like the SpaceX services.
It would good to see how it was valued.
565. Pretty terrible for SpaceX. Of course they paid a crazy inflated price for xAI in an attempt to cash in on the IPO. This just devalues SpaceX and exposes the investors to all the AI bubble risk.
566. I thought they were part of twitter
567. SpaceX has jumped the shark.
568. It'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)
569. SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security.
I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
570. > Assuming an average of 1kW of compute needed per robot
1kW would be hell on the battery, and at the same time make the robot a space heater even while standing still which in turn creates new problems if you want to replace all labour with them.
Further, to my point about moving the compute out of the machine and mains-powering them, the current global electricity supply and demand is about 350W/person. We're currently already using all of that, including for industrial purposes.
To see the effect of demand exceeding supply, observe that the data centres were starting to cause local problems with only 4-5% of the USA's national power use.
Even if the current literally-exponential growth of each of PV and wind continues, it doesn't change my timelines: even with 31% per year compounding growth for PV, and given what we're doing with it already even without androids, it takes a sufficiently long time to build out sufficient electricity for androids that we're not likely to have enough spare electricity to run an economically relevant number of them (say, equivalent to 10% of the current labour force) before we improve both the compute hardware and the algorithmic efficiency of the software running on it.
571. Just put a fan in a window.
572. Merging SpaceX with a public company like Tesla would create a lot of issues for the classified projects SpaceX does.
573. Do they need to be maintained? If one compute node breaks, you just turn it off and don't worry about it. You just assume you'll have some amount of unrecoverable errors and build that into the cost/benefit analysis. As long as failures are in line with projections, it's baked in as a cost of doing business.
The idea itself may be sound, though that's unrelated to the question of whether Elon Musk can be relied on to be honest with investors about what their real failure projections and cost estimates are and whether it actually makes financial sense to do this now or in the near future.
574. The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit
575. Context missing. This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers.
Full paragraph quote comes from:
> While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, 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.
>
576. Data centers don't do anything other than sit there and turn electricity into heat. They only emit nothing but heat (which could be useful to others in the building).
577. From the linked article:
> By directly harnessing near-constant solar power
Implies they would not spend half of their time in the dark.
578. I've yet to attain full-stack mastery in my job, but Musk has already attained capital stack mastery.
579. eldenring is slightly wrong: for reasonable temperatures the area of the radiating panels would have to be a bit more than 3 times the area of the solar panel, otherwise theres nothing wrong.
No need to apply at NASA, to the contrary, if you don't believe in Stefan Boltzmann law, feel free to apply for a Nobel prize with your favorite crank theory in physics.
580. > > Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate
The public is very afraid of innovation in anything aviation related, same goes for nuclear reactors.
If you are in those businesses you have your hands tied behind your back.
Still you'd buy the stock if the only way to get miles aboard Boeing planes were to own the stock and get paid dividends and capital gains in the form of miles.
This underscore how essential and vital Boeing is to the world whereas if you disappeared Tesla nothing would really happen
581. Zero.
582. You do realize that “space-grade” involves process changes that intrinsically incur orders of magnitude efficiency losses? Larger process sizes, worse performing materials. It’s not just a design thing you can throw money at.
583. "it'll never work" is quite black and white while "failure" is a lot more of a grey area. Will it actually launch? Sure, we've seen it. Will it actually hit the reliability as sold? Will it have as fast of turnaround time to reach launch timing goals? Can it actually launch as much payload as promised? Will the economics actually shake out as intended?
Did the Cybertruck "never work"? Obviously not, they're on the streets. Was it a <$40k truck with >250mi range? No.
Did FSD "never work"? Obviously not, tons of people drive many, many miles without touching the wheel. Does Tesla feel confident in it enough to not require safety operators to follow it on robotaxi trips? No. Does Tesla trust it enough to operate in the Las Vegas Loop? No. Has Tesla managed to get any state to allow it to operate truly autonomously? No.
Look, I hope Starship does work as advertised. Its cool stuff. But I don't see it as a given that it will. And given by the track record of the guy who promised it, it gives even less confidence. I'm sad there's less competition in this space. We have so many billionaires out there and yet so few out there actually willing push envelopes.
584. Sure, but cooling a starlink in space is a lot more difficult than cooling a starlink on earth would be. And unlike starlink which absolutely must be in space in order to function, data centers work just fine on the ground.
585. > I'm gonna be honest, I really don't see how these opinion pieces are relevant. There are a lot of smart people working at these companies and I'm sure they have done a lot of research and work into determining that this is a viable thing to try.
Like "robo"taxi, right? A lot of smart people have been working on this at same company for decade+
> I am going to put more faith into that than somebodies opinion online.
There are opinions and then there are things you can review that are factual and based on laws.
586. Financial engineering. Twitter under Elon became a dumpster fire of porn and hate and big banks were holding 13B in bonds that wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on for the company alone so he just links it with his only company that actually is doing something worthwhile…
Not sure how X which “merged” wit X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX really matter or synergize but here we are. It’s all about the money being protected. And this Ketamine using wierdo is gonna be the worlds first trillionaire. Yay all of us.
587. > In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.
Not just that, the cost of each rocket launch is drastically cheaper than all of its competitors costs.
588. What this tells me - xAI is essentially a failure, though at what level I'm not sure.
589. that page has not a single calculation of radiative heat dissipation, seems like he pessimistically designed the satellite avoiding use of radiative cooling which forces him to employ a low operational duty cycle. Kind of a shame to be honest, given the high costs of launching satellites, his sat could have been on for a larger fraction of time...
590. > Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.
Boring Company bought an existing tunnel boring machine (TBM), and used it to dig a car tunnel. Their only “innovation” in terms of any cost savings is to dig smaller tunnels - which we already knew could be done (tunnel cost grows with diameter), and which we don’t do for good reasons (capacity, emergency egress).
The branding and marketing exercise was excellent though.
591. Lol, 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?
592. I remember reading somewhere that satellites are extra expensive for 2 reasons:
- launch costs are so high that doing exotic bespoke engineering might be worth it if it can shave off a few pounds
- once again because launches are expensive and rare, you cannot afford to make mistakes, so everything has to work perfectly
If you are willing to launch to lower orbits, and your launch vehicle is cheap, you are building in bulk, then you can compromise on engineering and accept a few broken sats
Undergrads afaik even high schoolers have built cubesats out of aluminum extrusions, hobbyist solar panels, and a tape measure as an antenna. These things probably dont do that much, but they are up there and they do work.
593. Assuming you can stay out of the way of other satellites I'd guess you think about density in a different way to building on Earth. From a brief look at the ISS thermal system it would seem the biggest challenge would be getting enough coolant and pumping equipment in orbit for a significant wattage of compute.
594. And that's why the best way to use Superman's powers is in making him turn a giant crank
(yes I fully agree with you!)
595. Also 1.2 seconds is like ridiculously long, unacceptable latency.
596. It's "ironic?" considering Tesla launching in China is what created the necessary supply chain to turn BYD into the powerhouse it is today. Tesla's greed will become their own demise.
597. > xAI had an oversubcribed fund raise in January
My understanding is that it was not oversubscribed and would not have closed without Tesla’s investment.
598. note the post you're replying to said "track record" not "founded"
599. It's a scam. I don't understand how EVERYONE falls for Elon Musk's obvious scams, when every year his claims are more fantastical and exaggerated than the last.
This is obviously about propping up a shaky business (SpaceX) by making people believe that data centers in space are a solution. It's just riding the AI hype wave.
It's impossible to cool servers effectively in space, and, even though I'm skeptical, I'm more inclined to believe in a project to put them in the ocean than in space, simply because water conducts heat, unlike a vacuum.
Sure, there's a lot of room in space, but: - it will always take more energy to get into orbit than to install servers on Earth - the distance between the data center and us adds latency, which is not desirable for an LLM - the distance between the satellites themselves adds a huge amount of latency, making the data center less efficient
In a nutshell, there are physical problems that can never, ever be solved by science or technology, and even science fiction doesn't dare to invent scenarios this implausible. But then, coming from a pedophile who lied about his ties to Epstein, is it really surprising that he's lying and trying to divert attention right now.
600. Being too big to fail is not really a desirable outcome, it’s just better than failure.
Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder
601. It's a solved problem. The physics is simply such that it's really inefficient.
> ... we'd need a system 12.5 times bigger, i.e., roughly 531 square metres, or about 2.6 times the size of the relevant solar array. This is now going to be a very large satellite, dwarfing the ISS in area, all for the equivalent of three standard server racks on Earth.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
The gist of it is that about 99% of cooling on earth works by cold air molecules (or water) bumping into hot ones, and transferring heat. There's no air in space, so you need a radiator 99x larger than you would down here. That adds up real fast.
602. If you had told me 4 years ago that Twitter would be merged into SpaceX I would have called you crazy. Yet here we are..
603. Some people on here are such NPCs, you can give them all calculations, numbers and diagrams as to how this is not an impossible concept, and all they will say is "Thermal radiation is not efficient".
You can prove that the lower efficiency can be managed, and they will still say the only thing they know: "Thermal radiation is not efficient".
604. The wild claim is that they will deliver data centres in space
605. According to google Tesla has shipped 8 million cars total since inception.
It is valued at 1.32 Trillion as of today. Which is roughly $165,000 per shipped vehicle.
606. What's to stop president AOC from pulling the clearances of everyone working for SpaceX?
607. > and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.
No? ISS isn't exempt from legal systems.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
608. Seemingly to prop up the value of your companies
609. > but have exceptional hyping skills seems quite useful when attracting investment.
Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and a lot of ex-crypto-bros (fraudsters) would agree.
"Exceptional hyping skills" is (today) possibly a more derogatory term than you're expecting.
> And fact is Musk is building a lot of stuff of real substance.
I think the point others are making is this is a more accurate description of Musk ~10 years ago. In the past 5 years its been what, the cybertruck?
610. But … but what if we had solar-powered AI SREs to fix the solar-powered AI satellites… /in space/?
611. Solar can always just go on the roof...
612. without having watched the Big Short or having read the article, my first impression from the quote is "Megacorporations are failing dramatically, and the billionaires at their helm are freely doing financial gymnastics to pull the covers over the eyes of shareholders, while gaming the system to fully circumvent taxes and regulation -- the people with the power to do anything about it (legislators and regulators) watch idly (maybe profiting), the oligarchs make off like bandits despite copious failures, and the end consumer/taxpayer is either robbed or clueless this is going on, but most likely both, when there was a world where accountability could have been had and the common man was treated better."
the article headline immediately screams "financial gymnastics" to me so the rest followed from the quote.
613. * no electric bill: if you use solar panels to provide your own power, you also have no electric bill on Earth.
* no cost for land: land in sunny places where crops don't grow (for instance) is good for solar power and very cheap compared to building out a datacenter
* no charge for maintenance: sorry, I really don't get this one. Why don't the computers in space need any maintenance?
614. > A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station.
The ISS is powered by eight Solar Array Wings. Each wing weighs about 1,050kg. The station also has two radiator wings with three radiator orbital replacement units weighing about 1,100kg each. That's about 15,000 kg total so if the ISS can power three racks, that's 5,000kg of payload per rack not including the rack or any other support structure, shielding, heat distribution like heat pipes, and so on.
Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload, that's 12 racks launched for about $100 million. That's basically tripling or quadrupling (at least) the cost of each rack, assuming that's the only extra cost and there's zero maintenance.
615. I don't know, 10 years seems reasonable for development. There's not that much new technology that needs to be developed. Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs. Other systems may be able to be lifted wholesale with minimal integration. I think if there were obstacles to building data centers on the ground then we might see them in orbit within the next ten years.
I don't see those obstacles appearing though.
616. Seasons mess that up unless you're burning fuel to make minor plane changes every day. Otherwise you have an equinox where your plane faces the sun (equivalent to an equatorial orbit) and a solstice where your plane is parallel to the sun (the ideal case).
617. > Bring back NASA.
NASA is still here. Unfortunately, NATA fell victim to enshitification by government contracting. NASA even if it wants to simply cannot today design and launch a rocket. :(
618. for 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
619. The fact that it had to be successively bailed out by xAI (which itself was funded by Tesla) and now SpaceX shareholders is exactly what makes the acquisition a failure.
620. Considering we’re not actually “stripping the earth bare” and that’s fear mongering hysteria… I’d be interested to know the facts if true.
621. Hate to say this, but manufacturing bitcoin would make the most sense. And hard to see how even that would work.
622. This is why I come to this site. Obviously, Twitter's financials are struggling and theres more than a few people rich people who don't want to take the hit... but we can all drop that for a second to discuss the plausibility of data centers in space. Some links and comments I enjoyed:
* https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
* "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
* "I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets."
* "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap."
* "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper]
* "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth."
* "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"
623. It might be less about caring and more about pointing and laughing.
624. I really would like to see a cost and cooling breakdown. I just can't see how you can do radiative cooling on the scales required, not to mention hardening.
I thought this was a troll by Elon, now I'm leaning towards not. I don't see how whatever you build being dramatically faster and cheaper to do on land, even 100% grid independent with solar and battery. Even if the launch cost was just fuel, everything else that goes into putting data centers in space dwarfs the cost of 4x solar plus battery.
625. I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.
626. Reminder that space only allows for radiative cooling (since there is no air to absorb heat) so data centers in space are going to have massive cooling panels.
627. > There is practically infinite land in which to build a datacenter
This is absolutely not true. I’ve worked on some of this stuff. Permitting costs months, which in dollar terms pays for launch costs ten-fold.
628. > Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs.
"Minor" cooling changes, for a radically different operating environment that does not even have a temperature, is a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and will actively heat things up via incoming radiation? "Minor" ? Citation very much lacking.
629. "Satellites have to be boosted all the time because of drag."
On Low Earth Orbits (LEOs), sure, but the traces of atmosphere that cause the drag disappear quite fast with increasing altitude. At 1000 km, you will stay up for decades.
630. I wanted to come and express this thought, but you did that already very well, thanks for that.
I am saddened too by the fact that the system is designed so that people like him can waste a large amount of economic and human capital.
631. Whilst I agree that this glosses over a huge number of technical obstacles, space based solar power could scale more easily than that on earth. Lack of variable weather and gravity means rather than using photovoltaic cells, you can just set up paper thin huge mirrors to focus light and generate steam.
Caveat: my understanding of this largely comes from the book The High Frontier, which is really old and probably inaccurate. I can't think of a reason why this particular point would be wrong though.
632. Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.
Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.
By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
633. > The private sector is far better when it comes to money.
I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.
I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.
634. Tesla's goal was to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy by building a comprehensive ecosystem of electric vehicles (EVs), solar generation, and battery storage.
Looks to me they delivered on 2 of the 3
635. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_attitude_determinat...
636. Elon's usual modus operandi: take the thing that is losing money and merge it with the thing that is making money.
Prediction: at some point SpaceX will acquire all Tesla stock and take it private.
637. Because X and xAI are both losing money. X needed cash to operate, so Elon rolled it into xAI to use xAI’s cash to help fund it. xAI is likely burning egregious amounts money, but will have trouble raising more capital. By rolling it into SpaceX he further covers up the financial issues because SpaceX is actually profitable. He can then raise more capital without having to worry (for a while) about how awful the burn is…
I, by and large, have a strong dislike of Musk to put it mildly. The one thing I will give him, and I think this is his real gift, is he’s absolutely brilliant when it comes to raising capital. He has proven to excel at raising capital, and deploying it well, for extremely capital intensive businesses. I do however wonder if the chickens are coming home to roost because both X and xAI are extremely unprofitable.
I think it’s almost inevitable we will see Space X and Tesla merge. The conditions of that merger will, I believe, say a lot about whether this move was brilliant or batshit.
638. Oh man, I sure hope he disclosed that
639. They both have X in their names, just imagine the synergies!
640. does he need spacex/xai to prop up tesla or the other way around?
641. Nothing, save for advertising that you can. And Musk obviously can't, or he would have by now.
642. The bottleneck is deploying solar physically, not making the cells.
We have increased the manufacturing of pretty much every piece of technology you see in front you by 200x at some point in history. Often in a matter of years.
643. >Is financial fraud consistent with our national prestige?
You're right, that may be all we have left to show for it if people can't come up with something better.
Whether it's Musk or anybody else who's a real example of outright fraud, in a top position where honesty and straightforward dealing mean more than anything.
644. > How much maintenance do you need?
A lot. As someone that has been responsible for trainings with up to 10K GPUs, things fail all the time. By all the time I don't mean every few weeks, I mean daily.
From disk failings, to GPU overheating, to infiniband optical connectors not being correctly fastened and disconnecting randomly, we have to send people to manually fix/debug things in the datacenter all the time.
If one GPU fails, you essentially lose the entire node (so 8 GPUs), so if your strategy is to just turn off whatever fails forever and not deal with it, it's gonna get very expensive very fast.
And thats in an environment where temperature is very well controlled and where you don't have to put your entire cluster through 4 Gs and insane vibrations during take off.
645. It's only fraud if rich people lose money
646. Ground stations would be the major problem.
Maybe if Elon launched himself and the dev team into orbit and didn't use any ground stations and just Starlink terminals he could start getting into legal loopholes.
647. This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!
648. He's broken pretty much all the other financial rules.... for example, the amount of blatant self-dealing he gets away with is staggering.
As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats.
649. "If you mix raisins with turds, they're still turds" - Charlie Munger
Another consequence of US NatSec being gradually privatized is that once your income stream derives mostly from government spending, it becomes an imperative to influence politics to secure that stream. Yet some of these companies will remain vulnerable to shifting political winds.
650. I suspect SpaceX will acquire Tesla at some point. It’s the most profitable of these companies. So basically SpaceX employees and shareholders are covering up for the failing Tesla business and the already-failed xAI business.
Let’s not forget, xAI is the parent of Twitter/X (the social network). So now, taxpayers are paying to keep Twitter/X alive. After all, it is taxpayer money going to the contracts the government gives SpaceX for launches. Nice way to subsidize what is effectively a one sided campaign machine for the GOP and far right.
651. Thoughts:
1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.
2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.
quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.
652. > If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.
Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.
653. > 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.
654. Do you mind expanding on "society-destabalizing"?
655. > I suspect SpaceX will acquire Tesla at some point.
Tesla will have to lose its meme status first, otherwise they would be paying real money to make the acquisition close. The other acquisitions are using VC valuations which Musk has a big hand in. Matt Levine did a whole thing on it when xAI acquired X.
656. Yes but if the solar panel area scales linearly with radiator area, the problem doesn't get worse?
657. It's worth noting that the EACTS can at maximum dissipate 70kW of waste heat. And EEACTS (the original heat exchange system) can only dissipate another 14kW.
That is together less than a single AI inference rack.
And to achieve that the EACTS needs 6 radiator ORUs each spanning 23 meters by 11 meters and with a mass of 1100 kg. So that's 1500 square meters and 6 and a half metric tons before you factor in any of the actual refrigerant, pumps, support beams, valve assemblies, rotary joints, or cold side heat exchangers all of which will probably together double the mass you need to put in orbit.
There is no situation where that makes sense.
-----------
Manufacturing in space makes sense (all kinds of techniques are theoretically easier in zero G and hard vacuum).
Mining asteroids, etc makes sense.
Datacenters in space for people on earth? That's just stupid.
658. It’s hopium for his investors. Just like his robots.
659. You can just use the cheap solar panels that were gonna be launched into space (expensive) and not launch them into space (not expensive) and plug them into some batteries (still, cheaper than a rocket launch)
660. Conveniently, about the amount of time it takes for the average person to forget and/or rematerialize in a new parallel dimension
661. It’s not SpaceX’s fault. It’s still a company to admire, it’s just that nobody appears to be able to stop Musk.
I wonder why SpaceX investors aren’t revolting.
662. And? Donald Trump's presidency has made it clear that "this is bad for our country" isn't a sufficient argument.
663. > By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space! Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.
Apparently optimus robots don't work and he needs to start his final grift, space datacenters, while his datacenters on earth are powered by gas turbines.
Most likely he's just trying to bury his epstein involvement where was exposed lying by his own daughter.
664. I think that line of argument would work in my country of birth, the UK, but I don't think it works in the USA.
665. Notify me when you launch the first private space company who can go on mars, or the first car company in the US in 100 years. Or build a top AI cluster in less than a month.
666. Do you genuinely not think that "Elon" (xAI) is player in the AI space?
You don't have to think they have the best models of course, but they are clearly a very significant, and some might argue, leading player in the AI race.
667. >> Dyson Sphere
> What do you think the limiting factor is?
You need to be able to harness enough raw material and energy to build something that can surround the sun. That does not exist in the solar system and we do not yet have the means to travel further out to collect, move, and construct such an incredibly huge structure. It seems like a fantasy.
668. "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
669. False, come up with new talking points please:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw
If these things were so safe the rich should build them next to their homes.
670. I will not be left holding this bag. This is such financial engineering nonsense, and if we had any sort of regulatory controls this would never be allowed to happen - especially BECAUSE of national security reasons.
671. I don't follow his promises but have seen first hand how far ahead Tesla FSD is compared to competitors in the consumer space. It's not even close.
This current announcement seems silly, though.
672. Not physics defying, just economically questionable.
The main benefits to being in space are making solar more reliable and no need to buy real estate or get permits.
Everything else is harder. Cooling is possible but heavy compared to solar, the lifetimes of the computer hardware will probably be lower in space, and will be unserviceable. The launch cost would have to be very low, and the mean time between failure high before I think it would make any economical sense.
It would take a heck of a lot of launches to get a terrestrial datacenter worth of compute, cooling and solar in orbit, and even if you ship redundant parts, it would be hard to get equivalent lifetimes without the ability to have service technicians doing maintenance.
673. So the csam generator can live on? Why not just pirate radio style it and cool it with ocean water....
674. Reminder that SpaceX has received an estimated $38 billion in government funding over the years, and all of its returns are going to a small set of private investors.
Socialized losses, privatized profits. As is the American way.
675. How do you cool them? Getting rid of heat is one of the number one challenges on the ISS.
676. From a technical point of view this doesn't make any sense.
From a finance and accounting point of view this makes everything more cloudy. Which certain types of people really like.
677. > 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
Which satellites are operating from "deep space"?
678. You're talking about two different things. Robotaxi's are different from the self-driving style features of a personal Tesla vehicle. You specifically said RoboTaxi but now are referring to a pivot related to their Tesla vehicles.
679. Tesla cars made in Shanghai are sold in Europe and other places. That is helping them be competitive and they haven't had much price pressure until recently. Just because the Chinese have their own internal competition and deflation which drove their prices down aggressively doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build there. Also the idea the Chinese couldn't figure it out without an American company coming there first to show them is pretty silly.
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
680. He buys twitter at an inflated valuation. Runs it to the ground to a much lower valuation of $9B. [1] Then, his company Xai buys Twitter at a $33B, inflating the valuation up. Then SpaceX merges with Xai for no particular reason, but is expected to IPO at a $1T+ in the upcoming years. [3]
I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/12/31/elon-musks-x-fidelity-valua...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/02/elon-musk-spacex-xai-ipo...
681. I wonder why they did not start with a freshwater body.
682. Money! Also power source is just solar - not too difficult. I don't think radiation would be too much of an issue either since they're in low earth orbit. Heat is probably the biggest problem. Or manufacturing & launch costs. Pretty silly idea anyway.
683. Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features.
Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.
684. Yes X was merged into xAI last year I believe.
685. Let’s be honest - this is just a way to prop up Twitter/X. It makes SpaceX shareholders subsidize X, and also American taxpayers who are giving contracts to SpaceX for highly sensitive things. The government should ideally refuse to give SpaceX work unless it unwinds this.
686. Name a unicorn whose early round pitch decks are 100% free of wishful thinking
687. > For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?
Do you not understand how satellites work? They don't send repair people into space.
This has been a solved problem for decades before the AI gold rush assumed they have some new otherworldly knowledge to teach the rest of the world.
688. even at 10% (say putting it on some northen pile of snow) it is still cheaper to put it on earth than launch it
689. Don't worry, a musk stan with a physics degree will be around shortly to inform you that 5km^2 of radiators is completely reasonable
690. Which is precisely why I said originally that data centers in space have never been a thing and will never be a thing. Because the whole premise is "it's cold in space so that's great for data centers", but that fundamental premise is fundamentally wrong and based in a misunderstanding of the physics involved. There is no other redeeming argument for it, therefore it's not going to happen. Anyone trying to sell you on data centers in space is grifting.
691. Oh, ffs.
692. you would need 200 times the number of solar cells. I don't think you appreciate the scale that 200x is, especially when China is already:
1. quite good at making solar cells
2. quite motivated to increase their energy production via solar
693. Why? The government is paying less for SpaceX than alternatives. It th cheapest and best service.
694. That's a lot of weight to launch into orbit
695. I think you mean "California High-Speed Rail", not light rail.
Light rail, generally refers to urban rail, "trams".
696. I suppose one of the ADR’s read something like “…who cares about bitflips, man. Isn’t AI all about probability?”
Knowing the insane level of hardening that goes into putting microcontrollers into space, how to the expect to use some 3nm process chip to stand a chance?
697. I think this is why he gets away with it. A "win" is a product delivered years late for 3x the promised MSRP with 1/10th the expected sales. With wins like these, what would count as a loss?
698. There's an epic conflict of interest here with Musk owning most of both companies. And they're in entirely separate fields, there is no plausible synergy here to be gained.
699. Business ability, ok. Engineering? I've seen no evidence to date musk has engineered anything in his life, unless you count zip2
700. But there are no clouds in space and with the right orbit they are always facing the sun
701. SpaceX does real work at a profit, and its competitors will need even more time to catch up than they did Tesla.
Obviously there's a pattern of financial engineering, and it's inefficient, but the winners do offset the losers so there won't be a total collapse.
702. Heat and noise. The noise and the increased electrical bills are the main things people living near data centers complain about.
703. You’re just not going at the speed of light as this guy’s brain is, time dilation is a thing
704. No one buys into Elon's firms because he's expecting dividends.
His investors are not investing because of his success rate in delivering on his promises. His investors are investing exclusively because they believe that stock they buy now will be worth more tomorrow. They all know that's most likely not because Elon delivers anything concrete (because he only does that in what, 20% of cases?), but because Elon rides the hype train harder tomorrow. But they don't care if it's hype or substance, as long as numbers go up.
Elon's investors are happy with his success rate only in terms of continuously generating hype. Which, I have to admit, he's been able to keep up longer now than I ever thought possible.
705. The radiators would be lighter compared to the solar panels, and slightly smaller surface area so you can line them back to back
I don't think dissipating heat would be an issue at all. The cost of launch I think is the main bottleneck, but cooling would just be a small overhead on the cost of energy. Not a fundamental problem.
706. But the "fraud" here is being done mostly to VC investors with deep pockets and lawyers, at least until he tries to take this entity public. And I can't imagine them just taking this lying down, but then again maybe they realize that offloading this steaming pile on public market investors is the best way out. But even then... SpaceX seemed like it was quite viable on its own, the investors there are the real losers here.
It is all very puzzling to me.
707. 1. It's cheaper to make a vacuum on earth around a computer than it is to send a computer into space.
2. That would also presumably work on earth, unless it somehow relied on low-gravity, and would also be cheaper to benefit from on earth.
708. Because it's another tool to move money on books and make it seem that spaceX and or xAi look good to investors when needed. That would be my guess.
709. Right now it is.
However, the amount of available land is fixed and the demand for its use is growing. Solar isn't the only buyer in this real estate market.
710. Some guy on hacker news argued they could just use radiators.
711. I fly satellites. None of them have a zero operational cost. None. Even the most automated cost money to keep running.
712. I am just talking about (non-existent and will never materialize or exist) robotaxi. not about “full” “self driving” features of regular teslas (I own one)
713. xAI’s models are really not pioneering at all. They weren’t the first to do MoE. Not the first to do open weighting, not the first to have memory or multi-modal vision.
So no, I wouldn’t say Elon is a major player in the AI space. People use his models because they are cheap and are willing to undress people’s photos.
714. He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
715. >Just imbest[1] and it will grow exponentially.
That's how that argument sounds like, particularly when you hear it from someone who is as broke as it can be.
It's easy to type those ideas in a comment, or a novel, or a scientific paper ... bring them to reality, oh surprise! that's the hard part.
1: The dumb version to invest
716. Unless you have a modern car with a HUD
717. [Nearly] all is possible when you have a board of simps/cultists
718. these same comments pop up every time someone brings up satellite data-centers where people just assume the only way of dissipating heat is through convection with the environment.
719. Has SpaceX figured something out related to photonic chips that dramatically reduces waste heat generation of compute?
720. If we (as in "civilization") were able to produce that many solar panels, we should cover all the deserts with them. It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.
721. You know it!
722. Too me this smells of projected cash desperation. Do people actually pay for Grok?
723. Here you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862869
724. It is a good read. Thank you.
725. > This looks increasingly a good idea.
Why?
726. I found that surprising, so I looked on Wikipedia.
Soyuz-2 capacity to LEO: 8,600KG
Falcon 9 capacity to LEO: 22,800KG when expended, 17,500KG when not.
Soyuz-2 Cost to Launch: $35 Million
New Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $70 Million
Used Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $50 Million (cost to SpaceX: ~$25 Million)
Soyuz-2 cost per KG: $4000 (data from 2018)
New Falcon 9 cost per KG: $964 when expended, $1250 when not.
Use Falcon 9 coster per KG to Customer: $893 when expended, $690 when not
So realistically, Falcon 9 is roughly 20-30% the price per KG when new, and dropping to a minimum of 17.25% of the price when used.
Plus you get a larger diameter payload fairing and the ability to launch a payload up to 4X the size.
I'm pretty sure that even used as an expendable rocket, 1/4 the price per KG (if you need the capacity) is a pretty significant improvement. Now I understand why satellite ride-shares are so popular!
727. You do not lose your right to free speech by providing contractual services to the US government.
728. Yes. Mostly kids, because of the DOGE ransacking of USAID
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...
729. Of course it isn't "too big to fail". Even banks aren't. Despite recent history large banks have failed often throughout history. There's no such thing. It may take down the supporting sovereign government (Dutch East Indies) but life goes on and new political orgs appear. People be people.
Too big to fail is a very recent modern myth. Go back 100+ years and lots of banks failed leading into the Great Depression.
Every system has a break point.
730. You forget the "in 2 years" part.
731. I was shocked to learn recently how China is crushing it in renewables and electric cars. BYD sold 600,000 more electric cars than Tesla in 2025, becoming the world's largest EV brand. Tesla's sales have been declining since 2023, while BYD sales are rapidly growing, so the gap is likely to get even larger in 2026. This is an important trend, regardless of how one feels about Musk.
Sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee8001
https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
732. > SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…
> [Kenyan Economist] Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.
> SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
> Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/kenyan-economics-expert-devel...
733. > Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year
Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)
734. You mean unlike Hyperloops, Cybertrucks, Teslabots, Neuralinks, and all the other insane stuff that moron cooks up?
735. The show For All Mankind kind-of hinted at how the labor problem would be solved: recruit like the military and promise huge bonuses that will probably not be realized because space is risky business
736. I have so many conflicting thoughts that I cannot properly articulate yet. I can say though, this is not going to end well for most, it is clumsily premeditated and starting to feel like dude is just trying to be a Neal Stephenson character.
737. And our tax dollars.
738. A lot of people who are a little bit ignorant think it's really easy to cool things in space because space is notoriously very cold.
Physics, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than this and it turns out vacuum is an incredibly good insulator and more (much more) than offsets the temperature differential in terms of how easy it is to cool something.
739. It has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public.
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti...
740. When you’re connected to Epstein, you’ll always be too big to fail
741. It's about creating a flywheel for scale.
Getting better at creating and erecting solar panels & AI datacenters on earth is all well and good, but it doesn't advance SpaceX or humanity very much. At lot of the bottlenecks there are around moving physical mass and paperwork.
Whereas combining SpaceX & xAI together means the margins for AI are used to force the economies of scale which drives the manufacturing efficiencies needed to drive down launch etc.
Which opens up new markets like Mars etc.
It is also pushing their competitive advantage. It leaves a massive moat which makes it very hard for competitors. If xAI ends up with a lower cost of capital (big if - like Amazon this might take 20 years horizon to realize) but it would give them a massive moat to be vertically integrated. OpenAI and others would be priced out.
If xAI wants to double AI capacity then it's a purely an automation of manufacturing problem which plays to Elons strengths (Tesla & automation). For anyone on earth doubling capacity means working with electricity restrictions, licensing, bureaucracy, etc. For example all turbines needed for electricity plants are sold years in advance. You can't get a new thermal plant built & online within 5 years even if you had infinite money as turbines are highly complex and just not available.
742. yeah, I am not a huge fan of Musk, but this move is just going to bring down arguably the only decent thing he's produced.
Leave SpaceX alone you child. Gwynne has it in excellent hands.. find some other way to pay for your juvenile brainfarts.
743. You mean you operate them like Microsoft's failed submerged data center project [1]. When pointing at validating past examples you are generally supposed to point at successes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick
744. One reliable method of pushing envelopes, attracting investment and hiring smart people is to get excited about unrealistic timelines.
The best case is you meed the unrealistic timeline, the average case outcome is you solve the problem but it is delayed several years. And the worst case is it fails and investors lose some money.
If you try to hire people but your message is: we want to reduce the cost of access to space by 20% in thirty years, you are going to get approximately zero competent engineers, and a whole lot of coasters.
And no investors, so you'll be dependent on the government anyway. Depending on the government is great until people you do not agree with or are generally anti science, are in power. I assume this part should not need an example nowadays?
745. Atmospheric derating brings insolation from about 1.367KW/m2 to about 1.0.
And then there’s that pesky night time and those annoying seasons.
It’s still not even remotely reasonable, but it’s definitely much higher in space.
746. No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
747. > Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
Starship is not all of SpaceX. Saying, maybe because one hates Musk, that SpaceX is going to become irrelevant is wishful thinking.
In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.
Then out of, what, 14 000 active satellites in space more than half have been launched by SpaceX.
SpaceX is, so far, the biggest space success story of the history of the human race (and GP is right in saying that SpaceX is now a national security matter for the US).
748. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi
749. You’re really asking whether anyone at a private company is publicly speaking up against the famously emotional and vindictive owner?
750. Well if they plan to put a crap ton of new satellites in the air specifically for running xAI on it, I think there is a decent chance that it isn't purely financial shenanigans. Obviously the finances are probably a big part of such a decision, but companies also do these kinds of things all the time. I don't see why this is considered "shenanigans" or how the quote would relate to what is happening.
751. Why?
752. The deal they made values xAI at $230 Billion. It’s a made up number, with no trustworthy financial justification to back it up. It is set to provide a certain return to xAI’s investors (the valuation decides the amount you get per share), who in turn are bailing out the earlier acquisition of X (Twitter). All of this is basically a shell game where Elon is using one company to bail out another. It’s a way of reducing the risk of new ventures by spreading them out between his companies. It’s also really bad for SpaceX employees and investors, who are basically subsidizing other companies.
The thing is, everyone knows Elon is not a real CEO of any of these companies. There isn’t enough time to even be the CEO of one company and a parent. This guy has 10 companies and 10 children. He’s just holding the position and preventing others from being in that position, so he can enact changes like this. And his boards are all stacked with family members, close friends, and sycophants who won’t oppose his agenda.
753. We’re at a point where propaganda is so much more powerful than reality that the people in power literally can’t tell the difference. When your source of ethics is the stock price, little details like physical impossibility stop seeming relevant.
754. That's still a smaller ratio than the ~4X gain in irradiance over LEO. But if you're doing it at scale you could use orbital tugs with ion drives or something, and use much less fuel per transfer.
It's probably not competitive at all without having fully reusable launch rockets, so the cost to LEO is a lot lower.
755. knowing elon, he will make this actually work, thus fully vindicating both the financial engineering and his arrogance!
756. That's what the headline is, yep. Wild times indeed.
757. The fuel costs alone would dwarf a data center build out.
758. With that number of more satellites in orbit, launching a manned rocket into space is likely to be too risky due the amount of more debris and satellites.
And will it be net energy positive solution ?
759. They must have linked the wrong press release /s. I would have expected a press release about SpaceX acquiring xAI to talk about why they did that. Or at least mention xAI beyond the first paragraph. This is just Elon talking about space data centers
760. for solar panels that are say 25% efficient, that means 75% of optical energy is turned into heat, whereas the sand had a relatively high albedo, its going to significantly heat up the local environment!
761. I'm not sure if this is meant to be sarcasm but is there really a need in the car market for on-demand CSAM? What actual use does Grok or any LLM have in a car ?
762. but then you have answered the earlier question: solar panels in space pay themselves back ~7-8 times faster
763. Their viability is what I called physics-defying. Without some drastic changes to our current level of technology, the added costs of putting something in space along with the complexities of powering, cooling, and maintaining it once it's there is just too much to overcome the alternative of just building it on Earth.
764. I'm not aware of this - What's that?
765. Galloway and Swisher have been speculating about this (as well as a Tesla roll up) for a while. It makes tonnes of sense from Musk's perspective- he's got this behemoth monopoly that'll be worth a trillion on the stock market, meanwhile he's got xAI and Twitter which are both sub-scale money losers. It's easiest way to bail out his bad bets (and keep his investors sweet). The only question is whether eventually Tesla joins the party, it makes the most sense for xAI and Tesla to be joined, but I just don't see how that can happen. The benefit of xAI and x.com is that they were private so there weren't meme stock valuations to compete with, the investors would take a resonable payout know, safe in the knowledge SpaceX will IPO to a meme stock valuation. Tesla's valuation has to return to earth before SpaceX can bail it out and by that point it'll be like catching a falling knife.
766. >Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...
Lets go through this one by one
[1]Robotaxi.
Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.
[2]
Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.
[3] Lunar Lander
Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.
[4]Space Datacenter
Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?
Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.
767. You need to understand more of basic physics and thermodynamics. Fighting thermodynamics is a losing race by every measure of what we understand of the physical world.
768. I can't imagine the world view you would have to hold to think that people who manage to command tens of billions of dollars to invest are idiots, just tripped over the money and just go off vibes.
769. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM
770. Are you trying to say it'll be delayed or that it'll never work?
One is obviously true, and the other is very likely false.
771. After a few decades, you need to start replacing all the solar panels.
And the robot army being used to do the construction and resource extraction will likely have a much shorter lifespan. So needs to be self-replicating/repairing/recycling.
772. > Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload
Casually six times more than it has ever lifted.
773. national security is pretty felixaeble
774. Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.
775. Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar install, everything else was pretty straightforward. Also, running a pretty sizable array at our house, the seasonal variation is huge, and seasonal battery storage isn’t really a thing.
Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
776. Cool!
777. Man the real story in a few decades is going to be whether SpaceX was onto such a kille business that it survived being used asma fiscal dumping ground for the losses being incurred by mismanagement everywhere else.
778. > 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. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.
> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?
779. Yes, it's so much more effective, ... at sea level Earthly conditions.
780. Thinking a bit, ORBITAL ai makes little to no sense, nowhere to dump your heat, your gpus are going to be slag or only operate part of the time. But what if he put them on the moon? the lag time is what ~1.2s? That seems like an amount of time that a current AI query can take and still seem reasonable.
Not that I think it's anything but him allowing some investors to cash out when spacex goes public. Hell didn't he just shift 2billion from tesla to xai?
At the end of the day he will never see whatever bullshit he's peddling in the media about this sale his drug habit is going to kill him before then.
781. I'm dumbfounded, most light incident on a solar panel is not reflected, so logically photons were absorbed, some generated useful electron hole pairs pushing current around the load loop, others recombined and produced heat.
Its an entirely reasonable position in solar panel discussions to say that a 20% solar panel will heat as if 80% of the optical energy incident on the panel was turned into heat. Conservation of energy dictates that the input energy must equal the sum of the output work (useful energy) and output heat.
Not sure what you are driving at here, and just calling a statement ridiculous does not explain your position.
782. How many is "many"?
783. Being combative and wrong would be an unfortunate combination. Combative, wrong and ignoring counterexamples that disprove your assertions and hurling ad hominems puts you firmly in troll territory. Good day.
784. True, the solar panels would need to be enormous too.
785. That's fair. I meant they would need a clear path to open space not blocked by solar panels, but yes, a hot and cold side makes sense.
The whole concept is still insane though, fwiw.
786. It doesn't matter what their perceived, by you, biases are. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THAT HEAT?
787. ...and costs pennies compared to putting anything up there, so it can even enjoy those cosmic goodies.
788. Might 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.
789. Mixed-use buildings with restaurants on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors are very common. Not sure what prisons have to do with anything.
790. Elon is a pathological liar and it’s crazy that he still gets sanewashed after all he’s done. It’s insanity that he hasn’t been kicked out of leading his companies, and it’s also insanity that he hasn’t been prosecuted by the SEC.
You’ve spent too much life force trying to even understand the liar’s fake logic.
Let’s start right here: there is no such thing as becoming power/grid constrained on earth. If you replaced just the cornfields that the United States uses just to grow corn for ethanol in gasoline just in the corn belt, you could power the entire country with solar+batteries+wind. Easily, and cheaply.
If you don’t even believe that solar+batteries are cheap (they are), fine, choose your choice of power plant. Nuclear works fine.
The truth is, xAI combining with SpaceX is almost certainly corrupt financial engineering. SpaceX as a government contractor and that means Elon’s pal Trump can now siphon money into xAI via the federal government.
791. “This scale” is not realistic in terms of demand or even capability. We may as well talk about mining Sagittarius A* for neutrons.
792. > a vast network of AI servers in orbit
That story makes no technical sense. There's no benefit to doing this. Nobody should believe it any more than boots on Mars by 2030.
793. The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
794. I mean yeah if you consider the "scale" to not be a problem there are no problems indeed. I argue that the scale actually is the biggest problem here... which is the case with most of our issues (energy, pollution, cooling, heating, &c.)
795. While what you say is mostly correct, the lifestyle switch to farming was determined not by some random gradual accumulation of knowledge during the previous million years, but by accelerated accumulation of knowledge during a few thousand years at most, which was caused by the dwindling hunting resources, which forced humans to abandon the lifestyle that they had for a couple million years and switch to a lifestyle where the staple food consisted of plant seeds, with anything else providing much less of the nutrient intake. Only after a few more thousand years, raising domestic animals allowed the return to a more diverse diet.
Switching to a farming lifestyle was certainly not done by choice, but to avoid death by starvation, as we now know that this has caused various health problems, especially in the beginning, presumably until experience has taught them to achieve a more balanced diet, by combining at least 3 kinds of plant seeds, 2 with complementary amino acid profile and 1 kind of oily seeds for essential fatty acids (the most ancient farming societies have combined barley or einkorn or emmer wheat with lentils or peas or a few other legumes less used today and with flax seeds).
796. Not sure who determines the threshold, he certainly goes to court more than your average person, but these are not start ups, they are large companies under a lot of scrutiny. I don't think the comparison is valid
797. 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.
798. Let's call it for what it is, a payday for Elon. Paper billionaires have figured out they cannot cash out with out tanking their paper, so now you have these circular deals to extract as much as possible. If we had a functioning government they would step in and put an immediate stop to this on national security grounds.
799. That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far?
[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/spacex-boss-elo...
800. No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth.
Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.
Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.
</comments>
Based on the content above, return a JSON object with this exact structure:
{
"article_summary": "A short paragraph summarizing the article",
"comment_summary": "A short paragraph summarizing the overall discussion",
"topics": ["Topic Name # description of related ideas", ...]
}
Generate up to 20 distinct topics from the comments, focusing on the most interesting and prevalent themes. Each topic should have:
- A concise name (2-6 words) before the # separator
- A description after the # separator
For each topic, the description after the # separator should be 20-80 words identifying ideas, phrases, subtopics, and/or themes that appear in the comments that relate to this topic.
Remember: Output ONLY the JSON object, no commentary or markdown formatting.