AntiUSAbah

The initial cost for a dark fibre on a power pool is very low and can give you low latency and high bandwidth.

Starlink antenna needs a lot more energy and has a high montly cost.

That shouldn't be very economically for long.

And to add to this: They still have packet loss when they switch the satelites every 1-4 minutes.

For something relevant? Why would they do this? Dark fibers is an easy thing and you need to put power to these remote towers anyway.

Lets be honest here, Trump attacked Iran for 2-3 basic reasons: 1. he thought it would go like venezuela 2. he did this for his business partners.

Iran in its pre Trump state existed with the Khamenei family for quite a long time.

The smart people don't care what the endgoal is. They are happily enjoying themselves building hightec. And they earn a lot of money doing so.

Elon Musk on the other hand has a construct of multiply billion dollar companies he has to feed and keep alive:

xAI investment burns one Billion per month. Space X makes 8 Billion per year. X cost him 40 Billion when he bought it but is not profitable. Tesla struggles to grow, had the very costly Cybertruck, and has a lot more opposition than 10 years ago.

I do not understand at all what his endgame is. His finances are hidden enough. But his motivation is for sure selling his story.

his story is the future and it doesn't matter very much if its doable or not or usefull. Tesla as a company is still overevaluated for years now. If Tesla would drop to what its worth, Musk might need to pay back a lot of loans and other stuff and he might just be gone. He said often enough in public that it was very close etc.

If Space-X and Tesla wouljd just be good running companies with profits in the billions, he wouldn't need to be that weird but it could just be that he believes in it here are plenty of interviews showing him not knowing that much about his technology.

He is not the expert, he is the pusher and unblocker

5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.

This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.

My problem is not the doing thing but the economy of it.

We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.

Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.

Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.

His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.

I'm not rejecting the basic idea in itself. There is nothing in this idea which we as humans can't do today. No issues here. Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.

The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.

A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.

I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.

In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.

Why was this flagged?

Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:

Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.

snicker

And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.

Or lets say they are joining already anyway.

For china its a future investment. Its R&D, an image topic and its the job of a state anyway to do fundamental R&D.

Google has so much money, I don't know why they are doing this, perhaps because they can, because the people in their lab would like to shoot something up, but thats not the core selling point of Google.

Blue Origin, you are referencing, is doing Terawave its a Starlink competitor. Which is not a AI DC in Space.

Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.

You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.

One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.

The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.

Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.

250.000 * 5 square meter of area.

This alone increases the potential debris in space.

And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.

Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.

The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?

And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.

You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.

Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous

The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive

Whats your critisism with 'brownish stuff'? That space is free? Space doesn't disrupt anything?

Like sending up a lot of satelites doesn't hurt/poisens our atmosphere? That space debris doesn't matter? Disruption to astrophotography doesn't matter? Building a spaceship, the fuel for it and everything is ecofriendly?

But the natural ecosystem thats your issue?

Its 2026. This google maps brown areas are VERY VERY BIG. I would say we have enough space on our planet for a few hundred more years. Especially as we as a society are struggling anyway to expand as we are not even remotely able or capable of educating and handling enough people properly anyway.

'once provisioning' -> Until then lets provision on earth

cooling -> yeah lets just leverage the heat produced by these data centers as an affordable distant heating for housing first? What do you think how much people would enjoy a DC close by if they would get very cheap heating?

automated scaling in space -> how about we start automating earth?

off-planet mining -> you watched to much scifi at this point. Do you even understand how big the machines on earth are for mining? How much we have to transport them away? If you mine anything with a little bit of gravity, the more you mine, the more energy you need to move it around.

Do you even know how to refine minerals in space?

Yeah i think 'shitting' on our planet will be the most maintanbale and cheapest option as long as Musk is alive. Easily.

Microsoft did that already and they canceled this 'idea' because it was too hard to maintain that setup XD