DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12hr ago
To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters
I've unblocked you just to respond to this, though I don't remember why I blocked you in the first place.
In short, even if we assume 2000 square meters, this is nothing. Ascend 950 SuperPod has an area of 1000 square meters for the actual scale-up compute unit that works as one GPU.
«Redwire Q-Rad Deployable Radiator (commercial, TRL 5-6): 3.5–4.9 kg/m² areal density. Source: Redwire radiator datasheet lists; brackets our StarThink V1 assumption as plausible near-term path.» Let's say 4. This is just 8 fucking tons. This is peanuts. At $100/kg it'd be merely $800000 for delivery, 8% of Starship capacity, or four more big Starlinks. 1 megawatt of compute costs… let's see, a modern-ish GPU that draws 1 kW in a rack can go for $20K at least, and actually we'll see prices creep towards $50K. Well there you have it, $20 million as the floor (and GPUs are just ≈40% of BOM). 1 megawatt is 8760 MWh/year. Google tells me wholesale electricity in the US is like $45. Almost $400K a year of free power. None of this matters of course, when inference margins are >80% even with hardware depreciation, and all that matters is deploying as fast as possible, as much as possible.
You don't know the relevant numbers in any of the involved verticals, and for some reason (unfathomable to me) you want to believe that the numbers support your (quixotic but perplexingly popular) case against compute in space. They don't.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12hr ago
and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.
Why do you think you can just say this and not show the math for radiative cooling? The prose about stray cats and sex in a vacuum is cute, again, very Russian-engineer-coded, but the boring reality is that a Starlink satellite is substantially made of, well, chips, which do computations, and it dissipates just fine with a primitive one-sided radiator on the hull. How do you imagine anything ever works in space? How does ISS work? Do you believe that 20 kW is workable but 120 is where physical limits kick in? Care to show this? For example:
Net heat rejection per square meter:
q_net = ε σ (T_rad⁴ – T_sink⁴) – q_env
From there, two quick steps give us the mass:
Required radiator area: A_rad = Q_waste / q_net Radiator mass: m_rad = A_rad × (kg/m² areal density)
At 295 K (est. Starlink V3 baseline), net heat flux is 288 W/m².
At 350 to 355 K StarThink (V1/V2), net heat flux rises to 484 to 569 W/m²
Staying at 295 K would require about 828 m² (StarThink V1) and 1209 m² (StarThink V2) of radiator area. The model’s higher-temperature operation cuts that to 72 m² and 129 m², a massive difference.
…… Near-term, ≈50 kW/ton designs can be closed with conservative assumptions: two-sided, ε ≈0.9, 4 kg/m² areal density at 370 K operation.
This is an engineering question. And your objection is the «Mars has radiation, bet you never thought about that eh» tier smug dismissal, it's plainly disrespectful and incurious. I suspect that you thought of that one too, well, I recommend to read on Suncatcher.
Other items are also trivial.
The fact is that the US cannot compete with China on power generation in the medium term due to political schizophrenia, pathetic industrial base outside some bloated military supply chains and third world logistics at sufficiently low cost per kilogram to orbit, yeeting inference nodes into one makes straightforward economic sense. Freed from gravity, atmosphere, moisture and hail hazard, solar panels become like 50 times more effective per unit of mass (likely more because you can move to lighter substrates). You don't need batteries with 24/7 noon. You don't need cabling. You don't even need a lot of structure.
You have it entirely backwards. Having sex in spacesuits is what we have been doing all this time, running electronics in the wet dirt. Carbon life is made for Earth. Metals prefer the orbit and vacuum.
I haven't been following Starship progress over the last 12 months, and all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors like the political environment, Elon's newest distractions (attention and finance wise), stochastic problems and causes for caution, so I won't comment on them. Ignore if you're in this for the pure love of the game.
But bets aside, you make a categorical prediction:
I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO.
No we're not. It's not going to happen.
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X. Musk has a lot (as in, millions, a significant percent of X population) of extremely annoying fanboys of the lowest castes – crypto bros boosting #grok who got rich off $DOGE pumps, bots, edgy right-wingers, desperate $TSLA investors who are literally, well, invested in his success. He is obnoxious himself, prone to making false promises, grandiosity and loathsome behavior. So there's a reactionary cohort that naysays everything he does. But isn't this beneath human dignity to let that influence the judgement of the technical project such as Starship?
Starship, at this point, essentially can't not work. We know of no compelling reason why it won't, and a plethora of reasons why it will. Exactly a decade ago, there was vigorous skepticism that Falcon program can work. Russians in particular, being pathologically proud of Soviet space industry, dunked on the idea of rocket reusability with our typical overwrought literary wit, which hopefully can evoke some cringe in you today:
The Flying Spaghetti Monster of Elon Musk
My young reader! Of course you attend a rocket-modeling club, and you're curious why Russian engineers laugh like horses at this Canadian schmuck Elon Musk—in the engineering sense, not in the sense of a clever swindler who has shoved the Invisible Hand of the Market elbow-deep into the American budget. (And if only he'd stayed within the American budget, along with his patrons in Congress—God bless them, those light-fingered little thieves—but we're going to talk about the actual engineering nuances, the kind nobody bothers to remember in the age of "qualified consumers.")
First, the boring part.
Rocket engineering, as a branch of mechanical engineering, incorporates the knowledge and technologies of metalworking, materials science, instrument-making, mathematical modeling, flaw detection, and so on. Every last squeak in this industry is protected by patents—often umbrella patents. All parts, assemblies, and finished products are tested repeatedly on ultra-expensive test rigs, with their own requirements, restrictions, tolerances and fits. This knowledge accumulates over years and decades, and the whole complex costs not merely hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars—government trillions, trillions out of the American people's pocket.
But if you, as a government lobbyist, have a trillion-dollar NASA at your disposal, which, being a government organization, is accountable to a bunch of stern doctor-auditors, and yet you really, really want to steal, then you need to come up with some ultra-expensive project that can be inflated on the stock exchange like a toad through a straw, while simultaneously pumping money out of the budget.
To do this, you:
- hire a chatty dude with shining eyes,
- hire a team of PR people, "dezigners," and others as energetic as they are unprincipled,
- register a private company in California—and this private company is not obligated to disclose the details of its financial health (heh heh),
- dump into this outfit: patents, technologies, completed projects, technical documentation (thousands of volumes and hundreds of thousands of blueprints—but since this constitutes the most shameless privatization of state intellectual property worth hundreds of billions of dollars from the people's pocket, you declare the chatty dude a super-duper Inventor), and ready-made teams of real inventors (this is important—whole teams at once) taken directly from NASA,
It goes on for a while but the conclusion is obvious already: Falcon is Another American Grift, the metal will get le tired, defect inspection will be prohibitively costly, the construction is suboptimal modulo reusability, and anyway the first landed unit didn't qualify for reuse, so QED. Coming from an engineer by training, this all sounded persuasive to my engineer friends at the time. To me, it sounded like status anxiety. It sounds quaint today, when Booster B1067 has a record of 35 launches, when Falcons provide the majority of LEO lift capacity for the planet, when the shortest turnaround is a bit over a week, and the safety track record of Falcon has exceeded that of Soyuz, painstaikingly built over half a century. The metal seems really vigorous and not tired at all. My understanding is that Elon's hypothesis was: all of the industry was thinking too small, these paranoid quality standards and laborious procedures are mostly downstream of cost ker kilogram to orbit, you can just do propulsive landing well enough that the vehicle takes negligible damage, and this unlocks a whole different regime of unit economics; and this is a mere issue of engineering. Seems like he was just correct. Then Starlink happened. Similar dismissals, similar outcome, SpaceX acquires the perfect demand sink and revenue stream and can seriously invest into what is functionally and economically near-equivalent to a reusable SSTO with 100+ tons of payload. But you know Starship's pitch, of course, and how it renders SLS and all other alternatives obsolete. Mars or Moon – in the context of full reusability with these payloads, does it even matter? These are mission details, what is important is what kinds of missions you can begin to plan at all at $1000/kg to LEO, at $100/kg, at $50/kg… and, much as I loathe to agree with @Shakes, the military can come up with quite a few. «Spy catellites» is thinking too small, for sure. On the civilian side, the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis; and this can trivially become another Starlink. You can start to actually think about microgravity manufacturing, as well. There is a lot to do in space, once you can get there cheaply. The last Starship feat that I've watched was the chopstick capture, it looked like they're really close to maturity. It can take a year or 5 years, but the probability of Elon running out of capital on the way there in the American system is… remote. So what's the actual crux? You say it's not scaleable and cite an article about Raptor production from 2021. They're on Raptor 3 now, all the concerns in that email are, far as I can tell, obsolete. Do you have some physics-driven argument as to why Falcon works but Starship does not? I am confident that you don't, because I've never seen any and apparently neither have SpaceX's investors, for all the hate Elon gets.
There is another strong reason to think that Starship can work. We had more ambitious designs in the 20th century, and today other companies are doing similar things. New Glenn works, 9x4 will haul 70 tons, and although they've had a setback with explosion on the pad, Bezos will see to it that they recover, they have their own constellation program that adds urgency, and will need heavy lift capability. More saliently, LandSpace has a pretty well-validated engine of roughly Raptor 2 class, and plans to use it in a Starship-class rocket somewhere after 2030; this far they've been fast-following SpaceX at a crazy pace, they've started in 2015 and have actually put the first methalox-powered rocket in orbit (3 years ago), so I'm optimistic about this schedule. Within a month they will likely make their second attempt at landing ZQ-3, which is basically a Falcon-9 with Starship characteristics (steel body, methalox). The first one failed in Dec 2025, but it was close and Elon himself said it's potentially better than Falcon. If they succeed, no doubt this boosts Elon's standing with the government and military again, because that'll make China the second power with reusable rocketry, and we can't allow a reusable rocket gap, can we? And if Starship doesn't work, then the gap is extremely likely - China can weld steel cylinders at scale and mass produce engines like nobody's business, like look at their shipbuilding or the recent pace of fighter jet delivery (they make ≈100 J-20s per year now, which above the total F-35 program output in 2024, though 2025 was a big year for LM with 191; and recall that J-20 is a massive twin-engine). They have something like 20 private companies competing for the launch provider market. On the state side, CASC's CZ-10B likely does its own launch and barge landing (very interesting mechanism by the way, initially explored by the US, abandoned) this week. CASC has a whole family of partially reusable Falcon-esque rockets in the pipeline (10A, 12A, 12B, maybe 8) and a very Starship-like superheavy CZ-9. They even have plans for space-based solar and compute. Regardless of how all this goes (I'm personally bearish on Chinese rocketry aside from LandSpace), it obviously bolsters Elon's narrative. In light of this, I don't even think the speculations about future Democratic hostility are convincing – the US has strong bipartisan support for any anti-China and arms-race-with-China initiative; Biden tightened the screws of Trump-1's trade war, Trump-2 didn't touch Biden's export controls. So Starship will almost certainly keep being funded and the only thing that can kill it is physics.
In sum, I'd like you to spell out your bear case that survives these objections.
P.S. SpaceXAI (what a lousy name) has just released a frontier LLM, I can vouch for it being genuinely on the same tier as Anthropic/OpenAI's latest (Fable/5.6 excluded), and with Chinese open source costs. Elon: «Grok groks engineering. Next month’s release will be another step-change improvement, as we close the loop on solving real-world engineering problems at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company.»
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
but I'm trying to make a larger point: China is supposedly on the cusp of global dominance, OK, where are all the people learning Chinese? Globally, who is actually adapting to a future of Chinese supremacy?
Well I disagree with your point because people who matter do. Russian elite is supposedly hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies for their children. American elite – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trumps – do the same. Some random Africans do. TraceWoodgrains did, like a quarter of this forum did. Hell, you did to an extent. High agency people learn Chinese. An average American isn't doing international business and needn't even be verbal or numerate (or independently physically mobile) to live a good fat life, so of course there's little demand for Mandarin in those circles. But Germans thought similarly, and where are they now? China is kicking them out of their main industrial markets, for all their racist hubris about "German quality" and, I bet, smug sense of superiority when they heard a Chinese engineer humbly speaking German just to accommodate them. A lesson in there.
More boringly, we live in an age where technology seems certain to make multilingualism a rather worthless skill. Real-time AI translation is getting really good.
Nuclear weapons and the power grid. Satellites and rockets. Cell phones and social media. Now it's AI and Falcon.
And what beyond AI and Falcon? That's your last frontier now. They're roughly where you were in 1980 in GDP per capita, and yet the technological gap has shrunk to about 5 years. The best current Chinese AI model is 6-8 months behind. They have a Raptor 2 class engine in testing, will probably land a rocket this month, and also show a Blackwell-level AI training cluster. They're even building fighter jets faster than you now, and people with a clue say that copes about J-20 or J-35 being junk or "not really 5th gen" will get people killed. It just, I dunno, it doesn't look intimidating. Pull out some other rabbit out of this future hat. The entire US is becoming an overleveraged bet on transformative AGI, and I'm not sure <12 months of lead will be enough for… whatever it is the plan is.
it is not the case at all that China is obviously poised to take over the future and America can't do anything but sit in the corner and watch
That is true but in practice American countermeasures mostly amount to tariffs, more tariffs on third parties, subsidies, export controls, and hare-brained attempts to rally or strongarm the "allies". Which is rather amateurish and primitive compared to their model of governance. Americans acting != Americans acting effiiciently.
This is not to deny China the incredible progress they have made modernizing, but to notice that at no point has China actually been in the driver's seat. … And it's reasonable to notice that most of China's development is merely copying what the West has produced first.
Have you considered that one reason China copies good stuff from the West/US but the opposite doesn't happen is simply that you can't, even if you honestly try, which you often don't because of hubris and brainwashing that prevent you from the recognition of a shortcoming? You're not a very adaptive society. You can't copy meritocracy, because it's at odds with democracy. You can talk about "wake-up calls" for decades but can't develop industrial policy that isn't just picking winners or corruption with extra steps, so you cope that this is what they do too. You can't have a decent drone manufacturer even after years of handwringing about the natsec threat of DJI. You can't form a non-primitive theory of how subsidies work, and you are still coping about "cheap peasant labor" after their wages grew 17x and the competitiveness didn't budge. Your solution to your fentanyl epidemic was begging China to help out on their end. You can't copy the "don't start pointless wars with no theory of victory" trick, and you've even lost the basic Western technology of recognizing failure instead of saving face. You famously can't build the high speed rail system or the secure quantum communication network, though I agree that's unnecessary. Over roughly 8 years of the trade war and "decoupling", more of "friend-shoring", you've become more dependent on their supply chains for your core, singular Hail Mary bet against them, but not the other way around, and your elites are still confused as to what is happening and believe the solution is more Being Tough On China. It's hard for you to reform the FDA the way they did their reforms – though you are trying, yes you are reacting to copy Chinese policy, yes there is a "we much copy the Chinese" mindset in some strata already. I think there'll be more of that; Trump clearly envies Xi in many ways, and one of his few great personal qualities is that he's not invested in saving face for the nation of the United States or for the American people, his ego is too big to care about you, so maybe he'll succeed somewhat just to make simself look good on merit of fixing the mess. But again, hard without meritocracy, surrounded by mediocre sniveling viziers. Trumpism is a very Oriental phenomenon.
And it's reasonable to notice that Chinese science still has deep structural problems that have to be overcome.
I wouldn't worry about their science. It's well-funded, it has a path to commercialization and it's flush with talent. That's everything that made American science great, except more so.
And what happens when China's population begins to age and the economy stagnates and someone has to replace Xi Jinping?
I wanted to call out an inconsistency but actually if you think they're far behind in AI, I guess this makes sense. America will have AGI and a new century of greatnessl the Chinese, being incapable of Real Progress, will have a "demographic crisis". Nevermind that they're running circles around the entire world in robotics.
What happens when tariffs from the West and export restrictions eat into the easy margins
Well that's plausible, if pointless except for getting to China. then they'll raise their own export controls (as they already do sometimes) and keep exporting to the entire rest of the world, watching as "the West" collapses like a house of cards, I guess. We've seen a small scale test with Nexperia. I repeat, this is insane hubris. The reason China is relevant today is their own productivity owing to human capital and adequate governance, not some charity from the West and certainly not minor market access tricks.
Right, so what? America also has companies that outperform India, Japan, and all of the EU in AI.
Just the point that their talent is not particularly valuable. They don't produce a lot of talent. Just how it is.
It was never close at all. Moreover, Japan was even an ally. At the time that Japanese auto companies were disrupting Detroit, American soldiers were stationed in Okinawa. Japan competed with America because America allowed it to happen, because that is the global system America set up.
This is more tryhard grandiosity and frankly close to "But I did have breakfast this morning" reasoning. You lost Detroit auto industry not because you casually permitted it to happen out of some leonine generosity towards an ally. The Japanese just were better and took it away. They were getting likewise better in chips. That you have imperial means of compelling Japan is irrelevant for purposes of the argument because you don't have such means in China, nor soldiers in Shanghai. So the real comparison you should make is to "how would we fare if we could NOT compel Japan AT ALL".
You proclaim that China is larger than America, but China is not larger than the global system at which America is the center. Yes, America is the center
This is, hilariously enough, a very traditional Chinese posture, almost word for word. They tried this thing with tributary states, it was net negative. The job of the champion is to be able to bear all the costs of hegemony alone, only then do the vassals feel emboldened to contribute; if the champion retreats, he risks provoking a rout. You've already retreated a few times in the last 2 years. You're the center of a world-system where a treaty-bound ally can deny his airspace to your air force. This isn't a system you own or control, it's just something you earn rent on.
has not even properly begun to contest and replace America. It will take a generation or more for China to mature into this task, if it is ever ready, if it can ever be ready.
China has replaced the US as the physical center of the industrial civilization over the last generation. That is strength, that is what is hard, and that, not sentimental bullshit in the European manner about attractive culture, is what made the US the 20th century superpower. Factories, cities, jets, ships, rockets, Silicon Valley, exponentially growing material abundance. You also mentioned "cities" above, do you really think they still envy your cities? Does anyone outside, like, Latin America? One by one, these check boxes are getting filled. You need to keep making new ones.
People would rather hire graduates from Stanford and not Tsinghua
I'm really unsure about this, any statistics? Which people? I only recall that time Stanford students stole an AI model built by Tsinghua students, shallowly obfuscated and rebranded as their own for clout. That, too, is a perk of being the center of the World. Indeed, no such people would think of trying to enroll in Tsinghua. I bet they love America.
On balance it is actually extremely likely they will fail.
On balance they have, conservatively, 2x your industrial capacity, 3x intellectual and (very conservatively) no less capable governance or markets. Unless you show some unprecedented overperformance, it's wholly their game to lose.
I am sincerely curious: are you a conspiracy theorist? Do you think Musk, Jensen Huang, Google and everyone else are in on the joke, just peddling a physically nonsensical project because they know that the target audience (VCs) has the intuitions of an illiterate Ghanaian child? Is this the great blessing of living in a nation with a perfected cognitive sort – almost everyone can be clueless, but anyone can make 6 figures?
But space really is cold, by the way. 2.7K. It's not like your Stanley "vacuum" that has room temperature. Radiative cooling doesn't work when the radiated heat radiates right back at you. You've never actually touched cold vacuum, and yes it is a meaningful notion. In the vacuum of space, you radiate and lose energy like a long-wave infrared heater, and very quickly die. The cartoons are correct on this account, they just conflate "vacuum of space" and "absence of air".
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