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space is cold!
No, space is empty. If you want to be pedantic, space is very hot actually
I’ve had to explain these points a few times to my friends who love the muskrat. They think he’s a genius for wanting orbital data centers.
All without explaining heat radiation, total power budget, physical maintenance, etc.
Data transmission/delays and damage from debris not just radiation
Delays - if you use the internet and request an answer from an LLM, you won’t notice if it’s 300-500ms slower than usual. But if you deploy and run a software stack, a delay of 5ms betweenntze app and the database can make the difference between a usable application and an inperfomant one.
Once I was asked to troubleshoot problems with a screen share app. Turned out that the far-side was in Gurgaon. The packets were routed bia 2 geosync sats. One second up, one second over, one second down. 3 second latency.
Time for a classic: The Case of the 500-Mile Email
Every single time…
SpaceX has done some great things to revolutionize space access, and already launches to orbit 80% by mass of all the worlds space “stuff”
Now they’re getting close with StarShip/Superheavy, designed to carry 10+ times that every year. It will become much cheaper than anything before it, partly based on that economy of scale.
But where’s the market for that scale? How the heck are they launching 800+% of the world’s satellites every year? Business as usual will not support that. SpaceX needs to create new markets to drive that business, perhaps mars colonies or datacenters in space. Think of it as them wanting to create new businesses to justify their new product
Yeah, like when he undermines/debases mass transit to sell electric cars and shitty tunnel machines…for…Mars colonies…yea…there is a definitely plan in there, sort of…certainly not a grift.
You would need to launch so ridiculously much into orbit. The ISS is rounded up 200 kW of solar power. 0.2 MW. Say you want the equivalent of a gigawatt data center. 1000 MW. Yeah, that’s about 5000 ISS sizes objects. It needs a bunch more cooling, and a data center doesn’t need habital zones, so a pretty barebones ISS. Launch 3 roughly ISS sized objects per day and you’re done in 4.5 years. Somehow I don’t really see that as a realistic plan.
The current solar panel system of the ISS weights about 8 tonnes, the Falcon Heavy can deliver 63 tonnes to LEO. That’s about 715 launches of the Falcon Heavy, assuming space solar panel W/kg hasn’t improved since then, that Starship never becomes commercially viable, and doesn’t include batteries, cooling, or the working components. This still isn’t in the range of feasible for a data center, but could be an option for microgravity industry. The value of a more successful or precise silicon crystal production method, for instance, may make it worthwhile.
And yet another lost of reasons why these billionaires are fucking removed. Yes, im using the horrible R word, but “idiots” just doesn’t suffice.
These people are investing billions of dollars on unproven technology and now want to put trillions more in pushing those unproven technologies to space which is just removed levels of stupid. But the investments will happen, a ginormous amount of pollution will be made and it’s all nothing for humanity and a huge amount of money for a select few billionaires.
Fuck this time line, fuck removed billionaires
We need a wealth cap. Nobody should be able to do shit like this with impunity just because they have “enough money to do so”.
Give me a 1M wealth cap world wide and I’ll give you a world where everyone is happy at relatively equal levels of wealth
