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He again mentions data center in space. He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet. It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, coul
by AntiUSAbah 4mo ago
He again mentions data center in space.
He has to be the biggest richest idiot on the planet.
It should be a lot cheaper to just buy massive solar (wait, couldn't he just make them himself with his tesla roofs?) and batteries (which Tesla also makes) and put Datacenter in some dessert and put fiber to that place...
But it seems he needs some angle to push all this necessary investment into something?
Are we now in the phase of 'lets play scifi' just because we can't come up with anything else?
Btw. Starlink is already 'cheap', with only 8-10 Million customers and doesn't scale easily. So that will not just be able to keep up with his mars stuff...
- sschueller 4mo agoNobody seem to care about reality anymore or facts. You may as well put a data center at the bottom of the ocean which would be way easier but no one is doing that either. In the end in like 10-15 years when others land on the moon and build amazing new things maybe just maybe there will be a realization that playing scifi doesn't produce results.
- AntiUSAbah 4mo agoMicrosoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD
- kbelder 4mo agoThey tested it and decided against it because the economics didn't work out. That's how things are supposed to go. Data centers in space will work out or not. They have some engineering hurdles to get over and some bigger economic hurdles. If they succeed, great! If not, we've learned, and can turn to the next idea. We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.
- u8080 4mo agoData centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.
- philipallstar 4mo agoThis sadly has the core vulnerability of a child accidentally flying a spaceship on autopilot into it and firing mistakenly torpedoes while trying to deal with a few defense drones on board.
- jeltz 4mo agoWhy? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.
- u8080 4mo agoBut there are cheap drone swarms on earth which could destroy it.
- svantana 4mo agoI dunno if it's that clear cut. In space with a shadowless orbit you get 5x more solar energy per day than the sunniest place on earth. And it's always on, so you don't need batteries. Also, the lack of gravity and weather means that the structures can be a lot more brittle - I imagine something like a gpu on the back of a large thin film solar panel, where the panel also acts as heatsink. Could be pretty cheap!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- lukan 4mo agoYes, you get much more radiation from the sun and other sources. How do you do cooling? Radiators the size of small moons? Also hard radiation is not something transistors like.
- svantana 4mo agoThe joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.
- lukan 4mo agoStarlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.
- svantana 4mo agoI don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.
- lukan 4mo agoWell I was talking about heat. But regarding radiation, there is a long history of transistors in space dealing with radiation. But ... there is also a whole science how to deal with making it reliable: answer, expensive redundancy. And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced. If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.
- damnitbuilds 4mo agoElon is smart and employs many smart people. If the thermodynamics didn't work, they would know. I do wonder if shielding the multi-billion transistor GPUs will be a difficult.
- sschueller 4mo agoLike the hyperloop?...
- damnitbuilds 4mo agoThe problem with that was not based on physics, like the thermodynamics of datacenters in space.
- Geof25 4mo agoLike point to point rocket travel?
- damnitbuilds 4mo agoThat works, the physics is proven. It has not been tried commercially yet, so has not failed there, but that is not relevant to my point.
- le-mark 4mo agoJust shield them under the tons of heat radiators they’ll be deploying. One ton of compute will > 1 ton of hardware to radiate the waste heat. Does anyone know the multiplier?
- m4rtink 4mo agoRadiators need to be flat and thin - not really good for radiation shielding. But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.
- db48x 4mo agoThe radiators would be a lot smaller than you’d think: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80>.
- mapt 4mo agoOn the military side, "Starlink V3 with data center" looks a hell of a lot like an orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar asset, which requires both a big antenna and a good deal of onboard computation to mitigate bandwidth requirements. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A and specifically for the economics of AI vs surveillance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA-S1JGzph4
- jeltz 4mo agoPretty sure this is just a lie to increase the value of Space X before the IPO. Not sure why people still trust Elon after all his hype and lies.
- signatoremo 4mo agoSo you think China is also idiot [0], or Google [1], [2], or Blue Origin [3]? Do you have aerospace engineering background? what are your arguments? I don't know how all of these turn out to be, but when you keep repeat the same arguments, without anything to back it up, you should have some reflection. [0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-ambitions-for-tourism-mining-and-more-1KkGhxessTu/share_amp.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-01-29/China-unveils-space-am... [1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-data-centers-orbit-wsj-reports-2026-05-12/ https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-... [2] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/ https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl... [3] https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constellation-jolts-leo-broadband-race/ https://spacenews.com/blue-origins-surprise-terawave-constel...
- j_w 4mo agoI think the parent would say that all those entities are perfectly willing to promise things that are not feasible/not happening in reality.
- Yossarrian22 4mo agoCASC yes Google yes Blue Origin yes But yes I mean either idiot or duplicitous for marketing/stock boosting reasons. I wish there was a Kalshi market for TeraFLOPs in orbit by X date
- whamlastxmas 4mo agoWhat's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid
- halfmatthalfcat 4mo agoHeat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.
- 4mo ago
- UltraSane 4mo agoMusk isn't an idiot, he is an utterly shameless conman who will tell any lie however often he needs to to keep share prices high.
- logancbrown 4mo agoSolar doesn't work as well as you think in deserts because the decrease in light hitting the ground increases desertification. Desert plants require sun to thrive. Take that precious sunlight away, and the desert turns into an even worse dustbowl prior to the solar being there.