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Notes -
Starship bet update
A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:
The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.
I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.
That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations." Or, as Heinlein put it:
Space Libertarianism runs afoul of the problem that any credible space colony is going to have a level roughly the same level of personal freedom as a warship. It's all the problems of dense urban life magnified a hundredfold crossed with all the problems of being in the military. Maybe you volunteered to be there, but now that you're there you're going to be living under the strictest regime imaginable. Your penultimate link seems to explicate a fantasy more of being king of your own desert island than escaping the abstract tyranny of living in a society. And you're far more likely to end up there as the Space King's serf than as the Space King.
The "good" reasons for space colonization for the foreseeable future are:
While I am positively disposed towards both reasons, we should not pretend that these are going to economically fruitful or politically emancipatory any time soon (and by the time we reach a point where they are economically fruitful, they're not going to offer much hope of escaping from pre-existing political systems).
But plenty of people define freedom as their community getting to boss people around without the imperial overlord getting up in its business. The median human being who has ever lived was a peasant farmer living under the tyranny of the village, itself subject to a brutal but remote empire. There's a deep instinct to favor local elders' petty tyranny and resent central leadership.
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Commonly added as a third is "as an insurance policy in case life on Earth is destroyed"; do you dismiss this?
If life on Earth is destroyed, off-world colonies are probably fucked. I'll allow it is a theoretically valid reason, but I think it's going to be a very long time before truly self-sustaining colonies are possible.
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This is true and I think extremely under considered by Space Libertarian types. Even without the harshness of the governance, I think the fact is that that the spaceship would be a quintessential nosy village, with little room for privacy or property, the very thing that many libertarians are trying to escape. This would render space colonization a very unpleasant prospect for many libertarian types.
However, on the other hand, I think it's more compatible with Right Libertarian sorts than one might expect on the tin. It's also worth noting that the United States originally went through the exact same transformative process (both Jamestown and Plymouth were very harshly regulated early in their infancy) and from those kernels came forth a society with a very high opinion of liberty (or at least ordered liberty).
I suspect there's more of a causal connection there than ideologues (left, right, and libertarian) are willing to admit. A society full of self-disciplined people can afford to be very libertarian; it has little need for governance because its people regulate themselves. But most, perhaps all, people do not self-discipline. They must learn it. Some learn as children; some learn in college or on the job, some learn in the military, and some never learn. I don't think it strange for a society that has had tremendous constraints placed upon it (whether the strictures of military governance, or of ship-board discipline, or of simply needing desperately not to starve) would create a culture of self-discipline, which would lead to a culture of liberty (although perhaps one dissimilar from what we might think of when we imagine the term.)
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It's an interesting Eliezer post to raise...
I think the key thing that's sort of hinted at is that governments and institutions are not things that are for self-improving and optimizing towards clear goals from the point of view of well-intentioned people who live within them. Govts are their own kind of living thing and they live or die by the sword, by fire and famine and civil war. Not rational argument. How would it be if my muscle cells could protest if I was getting them killed? Traitors (cancer) will be shot!
If anyone could just easily change a system to optimize it, these govts would be like animals without an immune system. They'd immediately get eaten by something that does have an immune system. You want a nice garden but instead you get a whole lot of ants that eat the beautiful plants and then insects that eat ants, then bigger insects, then birds, then cats and eventually some ugly hyena that seems like it should be extinct (Approximately 60% of cubs die during birth, primarily from suffocation). But no, the hyena is good enough! They just cram out more kids, the kids kill eachother, survival of the fittest - species of Least Concern regarding extinction.
The USA is not powerful because it is well-run! The US is run pretty badly but America's other strengths in size and wealth production are so great that it can compensate for this. US governance failures, of which randomly poisoning children barely rank in the top 100, fail to inflict severe enough damage to break the wealth creating machine. And so the show goes on.
Trillions down the drain on that alone. But unless the PLA march into Washington or the US fails to pay its soldiers and security forces, the show goes on!
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Unless our current model of physics is totally wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. The real answer is, of course, violence. As national governments reduce violence, they reduce their own capacity for it, which inflates the value. Eventually the value gets high enough and the numbers of people who can produce it low enough that the two meet and a revolution, coup or invasion happens. This is almost always a losing proposition for the country in question, but it offers a platform to try radical new things, and the ones that work get more widely adopted.
The French Revolution was a disaster for France, and most of Europe. Most of their innovations were insane bullshit and were swiftly forgotten. But they did fix a bunch of issues with the legacy legal system and spread that to most of Europe, giving the continent a much better set of legal standards which contributed to trade, diplomacy and the eventual peace and unity of Europe. Just needed a dozen major wars, two world wars, a few genocides and a lot of ethnic cleansing to shake it all out.
Progress is produced in blood, not economics, philosophy or science. In the most anti-progressive and civilizationally corrosive manner. "Creative destruction" as an economist might say. It is by this bloody cycle that humanity progresses.
...what in physics forbids space being a population frontier?
Distance and speed caps. FTL isn't possible under current physics.
Hmm. If you say
I think of stuff past the Kármán line. Interstellar travel is its own thing.
I don't think this is a laws of physics obstacle on human interstellar space colonization; the laws of physics permit both hibernation and time distortion via relativistic travel.
This is debatable – the Alcubierre drive doesn't technically violate the laws of physics, it just uses weird stuff to not do that – but even if FTL travel is not possible at all, it doesn't rule out space colonization (or interstellar travel).
You debate it. Unless our current physics is very wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. Hibernation? Of humans? At scale?
It's a lot of handwaving to get out of the psychological reality that earth is a zero sum game and it's the only game in town. Believe what you will, interstellar colonization is as real as the divinity of Jesus, as belief systems go.
I think, under normal definitions, that "space" starts in earth orbit. We've got space stations; it's already a population frontier, if you're generous with your definition.
What in the laws of physics prevents this? If your argument is that it's very unlikely, I agree. But we know that mammalian torpor is real. As far as I can tell, it's premature to rule it out, right?
This is handwaving.
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That's the point. People act like "not forbidden" equals possible and technically it does, but only technically. Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.
Being a population frontier has to mean being realistically somewhere will populate. The Americas were unpleasant in many respects, but they were on Earth and people believed they contained pretty good farmland, which often did turn out to be the case. They were also breathable, and full of lumber etc. Finally, people weren't really able to communicate with them, leaving space for hope.
Space just doesn't compare in that regard. If you can't make space at least as comfortable as the Americas then or e.g. the Congo now, people aren't going.
Sure, but I don't invoke the laws of physics to say you can't do that.
Making it that way is not particularly difficult as a physics challenge. Building underground domes on Mars or the Moon or a spin ring in orbit is physically doable, no question about it. I agree that it remains to be seen if human desire to do these things outweighs the difficulty to do them, but they're not laws-of-physics sorts of problems, and most of them have been on-paper solved for 50 years or more.
But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.
The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will. The same way it precludes underwater settlements - it’s not that we can’t build on shallow waters but that physics makes it less pleasant than the alternatives.
No, I am not, not in this conversation thread. Insisting that something is physically possible is not the same thing as insisting that it is plausible and rewarding. It is physically possible to eat gravel; it's not plausible that I had it for dinner and it would not be rewarding for me, had I had it for dinner (I didn't), but if you said it was physically impossible I would dispute the claim – unless you were a child. Then I might encourage your naïveté on the grounds that enlightening you as to the possibility of lithophagy at such a tender age might not prove conducive to your continued health and well-being.
I think it's quite possible that space travel will indeed be so dangerous, dull, and expensive that no one will attempt space colonization! That's well within the realm of possibility! But I think it's unusual to describe this as downstream of the laws of physics. Indeed, one might argue that the laws of physics dictate the opposite: a sufficiently large object traveling in space can be so comfortable that the vast majority of people who live on it would never dream of going elsewhere.
If there are any laws that dictate what you're claiming, they are almost certainly economic.
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The incredible costs of doing anything in space, the incredible distances and travel times involved, the sheer hostility of the environment of any place that isn't Earth, the complete absence of any economic sense to it.
As they say, colonize Antarctica or the bottom of the Ocean, make those colonies hum and turn a profit, then consider yourself ready for putting humans into near space long-term.
This is a "this will be difficult" argument, not a "laws of physics forbid it" argument.
My understanding is that Antarctic-related for-profit activity is already lucratively profitable, but due to government regulations most of the profit so far is simply on the journey, as it's illegal to open, e.g., a resort there, out of a desire to avoid awakening the Great Old Ones.
The "it's expensive" argument smuggles in a hidden assumption that economic growth on Earth will taper off. Otherwise (logically) at a certain point establishing a colony on Mars will be as economically trivial (as a percentage of global value) as establishing year-round stations in Antarctica, and since we've done the latter essentially for research and entertainment, your priors should be that we would do the former, too. (And this argument holds true even if you argue that economic growth on Earth cannot grow to an infinite or indeterminately large value – you have to argue that growth will stall out before we reach the Mars-colonization-is-trivial point.)
I'm certainly open to arguments that economic growth on Earth will taper off before we reach that point, but it's probably not worth assuming without justification.
Sometimes the difficulty is in fact too great. And yes, blaming it on physics is a contraction. It's all the fields derived from physics: Engineering, the mechanics of space travel, economics, biology, etc.
True, but please let me move the goalposts. Not to get one up over you, but because I was sloppy before - I think it's necessary to modify my statement about antarctic or oceanic colonies with a "self-sufficient". Given the vast distances involved in space, to turn it into a "population frontier" as I understand the term, human settlements out there will need to be self-sufficient, which given the inherent infertility of any place in space means making them closed-cycle bottled ecosystems under extremely hostile environmental conditions. To my knowledge, the Antarctic settlements do not meet that requirement even given the Antarctic's relatively high habitability.
My argument is more that no matter how much the economy of Earth grows, space is inherently uneconomical. There's nothing up there except death. What little value one could imagine here or there - minerals in asteroids, solar power, free real estate - is so extremely far away, and accessible only under such extremely hostile conditions, that there's no economic sense in getting any of it.
So let me reiterate. Colonizing Antarctica or the Ocean Floor are, to me, necessary proofs that it's doable at all, at small scale, assuming nothing ever goes wrong. And even then, it remains a bad idea, because there's no point to it, and things will go wrong, and as soon as they do everyone involve will die.
That is my opinion given what we currently know and can predict with any degree of confidence. I hope to be proven wrong eventually, but right now I don't see any predictions of space colonization that aren't mostly just wishful thinking.
By this definition of "population frontier," I question whether there's ever been a population frontier. No country on Earth today is self-sufficient, and no near-term contemplated space colony would be self-sufficient, either. It would be ridiculous to say "because your space colony intends to watch the BBC, it is doomed to failure."
Now, I definitely see where you are coming from. But I don't think the proper metric is "self-sufficiency," it is probably self-sufficiency in housing, food, water, and power. If a space colony starts somewhere, it will be reasonable to believe that software, entertainment, and microchips can be imported from Earth.
It is also not correct to assume that a space colony must be a closed-cycle bottled ecosystem, particularly if you include colonizing other planets as part of "space colonization." The moon, Mars, and asteroids all have water ice. If I thought that a true closed-cycle bottled ecosystem was an integral part of space colonization, I would be much less inclined to raise my eyebrows at the "physics rule out space colonization" – a true closed-cycle ecosystem, it seems to me be very close to an insurmountable challenge at any plausible scale, but in any likely space colonization scenario you're likely going to be able to import (and export) a lot of matter from your ecosystem pretty trivially, which means it is not closed-cycle.
My problem with this argument is that it does not predict past actions; therefore, it is hard to believe it is a good guide for future actions. The International Space Station cost billions and in terms of economic efficiency, it would have been more cost-effective to cash the money and burn it to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine and sell the electricity. But because humans are not driven entirely by cost efficiency, humans have been in space continuously for 25 years.
This is not to say that I am saying that space colonization is inevitable. I just don't find these arguments that it is impossible persuasive.
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Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth uninhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
It depends on where on the sea floor you're considering. Even the continental shelf is under 10atm of water pressure, though that's relatively tolerable. The sea floor is much more difficult than space when you're instead looking at oceanic crust away from continents. Lower pressure differences are much easier to deal with than higher ones, and structures in tension are much better behaved than in compression. When the ISS hull has a failure at 0atm, they just need to replace a couple pounds of air per day while they analyze it, and "drill through the hull in front of the crack to stop propagation, then quickly epoxy it all" was a serious (well, Russian serious) scheme to fix the problem. When the the Titan hull had a failure at ≈300atm, it probably killed everybody within milliseconds.
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Okay, pardon me, but any arugment premised on catastrophes literal billions of years in the future aren't particularly strong in any way. Human civilization is, if you want to be very generous, 10,000 years old. A billion years is one hundred thousand times that far into the future. A hundred thousand times the entire span of human civilization. Forty million generations of baseline humans. Looking that far ahead is just not practical.
The assumption that interplanetary colonization, nevermind interstellar, is just a matter of dumping some cash into R&D, greatly undersells the extreme difficulty of doing anything in space beyond low Earth orbit, especially anything as ambitious as colonizing other planets or even star systems. Skipping the seafloor and Antarctica isn't some pragmatic measure because oh, doing either of those wouldn't protect us against X-risks. It's solid proof of our not being sufficiently capable. Putting a self-sufficient civilization onto the moon, onto Mars or another star as insurance against some cosmic phenomenon wiping out humanity is an undertaking so massive, with costs in money and effort and resourecs and lives, many many lives, that running prototypes on Earth isn't a waste of time but an absolutely necessary step in iterating our way into space at all, nevermind to the stars.
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
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This is a purely hypothetical tyranny, of course. The United Nations has less power, and a lower budget per head, than your high school student council.
I also note that the internationally recognised government of Somalia has not controlled its internationally recognised territory for decades, meaning that de facto sovereignty was there for the taking. And the only people to take it were a group of locals who got their act together (Somaliland), pirates, and jihadis. And the pirates and jihadis aren't about freedom, they are about using "borrowed" Somali sovereignty as a base for predation.
I'm happy to concede that Kowloon Walled City prospered as a libertarian loophole, although every account I have written says that it wasn't as libertarian as it looked because the Triads enjoyed de facto sovereignty in the gap between Chinese and British de jure sovereignty.
Westerners tried projects of the sort you're implying here repeatedly in the ~60s-70s in various African nations. My understanding is that they stopped doing this when Western governments (that I think could be fairly described as "the UN") made it clear that they would not tolerate further such attempts. If those same western governments gave the green-light to private colonialism by their citizens, I think Somalia would have very different outcomes more or less immediately.
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Cute, but no. Luna and Mars are not elsewhere. They're nowhere.
No breathable atmosphere if any at all, no biosphere obviously, extremely cold whenever not extremely hot and both far beyond what's considered habitable on Earth, no economic use and will forever be dependent on Earth and thus extremely expensive inhabit, you live insite a tiny bottle of conditioned and recycled air and you're always one small accident away from dying horribly with little to no slack in the system, and you can only ever get there if and when the richest man on Earth lets you, and the only other people there are the ones he selected.
I hope to be proven wrong, mind you. It would be cool. But I don't see it yet.
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The visitor's incredulity about such things should fall under "beware fictional evidence". If things are that way for good reasons, the visitor's society should have them be that way too. Eliezer, by asserting that the visitor's society doesn't have them, is cooking the books in the way that "beware fictional evidence" warns against.
The visitor is implied to be from dath ilan, Eliezer's setting where the median person is Eliezer Yudkowsky and home to characters like Thellim and Keltham. It is said that in dath ilan, everyone is an economist, the same way everyone on Earth is a scribe or a calculator from the perspective of medieval times; hence why they can avoid falling into this sort of trap.
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This is a great article on that exact question: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/08/16/the-only-reason-to-explore-space/
The project of interstellar civilization may seem incomprehensibly vast, beyond the ability of anyone to influence. But it is not inevitable. Like any great work, it will only occur through planned and deliberate human action. Given the scale of distances involved, we will need to carry out the work not only with unprecedented ingenuity and mobilization of people and resources but also with generational continuity of mission and succession. This will need to be done without the expectation of economic profit or military advantage. There are many precedents for such projects in history, but they have only been carried out successfully by two kinds of institutions, usually working together: governments and religions.
In all recorded history, states have basically only acted on three motivations: national security, economic growth, and political legitimacy. The first two are unreliable or incoherent for interstellar civilization. The third, however, fits like a charm. Legitimacy is as vital to states as economic or military security. As a result, states have spent immeasurable quantities of resources, for decades and even centuries, on projects that, at first glance, seem to have had no material purpose or value. Think of the bronze ding of ancient China, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe. These projects were not, in fact, useless but fulfilled the need for legitimacy according to the beliefs, values, and tastes of the peoples who built them. In that sense, they were priceless.
The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
The best comparison I've found for space development/settlement isn't settling Antarctica, but climbing Mount Everest.
You're spending a horrible amount of money and a good chunk of time simply to exist in a place that is trying it's damndest to kill you. As in, there is a non-zero chance you will just keel over dead suddenly, without warning, even with all the precaution put in place to adapt you to the environment.
And yet, people still do it.
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Profit is an extremely powerful motivation but not the only one. There are Olympic athlete whose feats are rewarded with multimillion dollar bran deals, and there are priests.
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
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Notionally, space colonization removes the shackles of terrestrial resource limits for mineral resources, energy, and space. The long-term possibilities seem open-ended, but you're not wrong that capitalizing on those within a reasonable time frame from a finance perspective seems questionable. Can corporate structures handle payoff periods longer than a human generation? Maybe some of the closer-term prospects (asteroid mining, space data centers), which are all still not close, can make it viable sooner.
There are economic use cases for space, but they’re for ‘oil rig in the ocean’ human presence, not building full scale colonies.
There are civilizational reasons for expanding off earth- dark forest hypothesis, manifest destiny, etc- but even if you agree with them, earth simply doesn’t care. In another age, we’ll care more, when western civilization rebirths itself once more. But that might be in centuries, only this time with mature technology.
Asteroid mining isn't oil rigs in space, as @hydroacetylene put it, but building giant vehicles just to retrieve the littlest specks of matter. The tyranny of the rocket equation is much reduced when you just go orbit to orbit, true, but it's not gone. And the distances from anywhere to anywhere else in space are enormous - it still takes and will forever take a huge amount of rocket to get anything done.
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The dark forest hypothesis isn't true, but if it was the aliens would just kill us on Mars too.
I don't know why we'd assume that.
The 'pure' dark forest hypothesis argues for fringe-science superweapons to sterilize large areas of space. But if it is true, then the far more physically plausible method would be long range relativistic bombardment of known inhabited planets- and earth is much more likely to be targeted at extreme range than mars.
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If I remember correctly, the canonical dark forest theory assumes an attack on the scale of supernovae or larger, eradicating entire solar systems anyway.
Your comment kicked off a near day-long scrounging through my local files and online search in order to find the actual goddamn source of my mental recall. This is coming in late, but as I have suffered, so you must suffer with me.
The core of 'The Dark Forest Theory' has been around much longer than Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. They just gave it a fancy name.
Charles Pelligrino in 'The Killing Star' was postulating such scenarios as far back as 1995, and I doubt he was the first;
And, later on, as he puts it;
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Which may simply be physically impossible.
It doesn't seem physically implausible for a supernova to be triggerable by targeting the star in some fashion. Such an "unnatural" supernova could even be more destructive than a regular one, and regular supernova can already be dangerous to life in nearby solar systems.
Then there's stuff like nanites that can just scourge arbitrary areas, etc.
I agree it may be impossible, but it's really hard to tell with our still rather limited understanding (and, arguably, intelligence).
Yes it it. But not because of pesky things like the laws of physics - which I am fairly certain are probably more bendable than most physicists think. After all even now it is 50/50 whether we are living in a finely tuned universe, so someone figuring out how to access god's tuning fork is not out of question.
But that any way that you could make a star go supernova means that you could do so much more fun and dangerous than that - that you shouldn't bother.
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It seems absolutely physically implausible, and the possible properties of a synthetic supernova are barely even conjecture. If pigs could fly, stars could be blown up on demand, and that would surely be very impressive.
Fun fact about nanites: There isn't stuff like them.
And I think it makes more sense to work with the boring, limited knowledge we have than with the wild imaginations of science-fiction.
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Who cares about profit or loss provided that first-rate technology is being developed and improved? Amazon barely made any money for years, they were busy investing in their business, improving their logistics, expanding.
Beancounter financialism is a huge burden on the West. People obsess about costs in money yet seem to scarcely consider the longer-term returns of investment. Or when investments are made, they're conducted very badly. $41 billion is peanuts compared to all the nonsense that goes on in the public sector, much of which is actively detrimental to society. That's about half HS2 in Britain, a single high speed rail line going a few hundred kilometres. In Australia it's about 2 Snowy Mountain 2.0s, a crappy power storage system. Or it's about 1/3 of US spending on the Iran war, not to mention lives lost and economic or strategic damage, or that the war is still ongoing and costs sure to rise further!
There's nothing excellent about HS2, Snowy Mountain 2.0 or the Iran War. SpaceX at least has achieved excellence in space. Compare to Boeing Starliner - that cost about 7 billion and it's crap.
Technology is real wealth, money is just an accounting convenience. An important convenience certainly but just a convenience.
The issue from an investment perspective is that the valuation is largely driven by the AI portion of the operation. If I believe in the space part of SpaceX, but also believe Grok is a waste of money that is going to be outcompeted by Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google, then it is still reasonable for me to believe the company is overvalued. Take AI out of the equation, and the company loses 93% of its value based on the IPO (this part is covered around 11 minutes in).
So by buying SpaceX what you are really paying for is Grok. And thus arguments about the rocket business largely stops mattering as it is such a small part what the IPO price is based on.
2 trillion marketcap for Grok does seem high but 41 billion in losses for a massively world leading space launch capability and a few other things seems very low!
If you could buy SpaceX just for the space business without Grok, and the pricing was in the range of 100-200 billion, then the arguments for it being a good investment opportunity become much easier to swallow. In that case, you would still be paying like it is one of the biggest companies in the world, even though it is not currently earning enough for that to be the case, betting that the space capabilities would eventually make it grow into something worth a trillion or more. But at the current price, it seems like you are paying as if all their goals have already been accomplished or that it is guaranteed to happen in the future. That seems really risky to me.
Well one has to accept risk for future reward. I don't own any SpaceX shares personally, I'm wary of all the locked-up insiders. But in principle, finance should be supporting aggressive moonshots, investment and innovation that doesn't necessarily lead to quick profits. Broad prosperity and technological capability are more desirable than captured profits. I think there's excessive negativity about Musk and AI based purely on these financial factors. There are other valid reasons for negativity about AI and SpaceX as investment, certainly. I just don't think that these companies should be judged so narrowly on profitability when the tech is so powerful. This is not pets.com and it's not 'insanely profitable short form video' either, AI and economical spaceflight are extremely powerful general purpose technologies.
Apparently Costco is worth 400 billion USD. How could spacex be worth significantly less than that? How can the sky be less valuable than a supermarket with a membership fee?
I think you really underestimate what goes into running a supermarket with a membership account. There's a reason that Yeltsin's visit to a run of the mill grocery store practically heralded the end of Bolshevism and the USSR.
The sheer scale of the global supply chains from production to transportation to last-mile distribution that go into ensuring hundreds of millions of people can eat practically any food they like from all over the world at only 3% margins are easily one of the greatest achievements of humanity as a whole.
I think you really underestimate the difficulty of rocket science! Starlink is keeping Ukraine afloat in a major conventional war. SpaceX has put more mass into space than everyone else combined, even with a 50 year head start!
What is Costco doing that Wallmart can't, or many other chains? Where is Costco's true excellence? There are supermarkets everywhere and only one SpaceX.
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Presumably, the supermarket chain has a proven business strategy and is already making lots of money. SpaceX might make a lot of money in the future but isn't yet. SpaceX doesn't actually own the sky yet, it just might in the future. I would expect the risk that SpaceX might never make significant money to result in a lower price.
Of course, I completely missed the ball on AI stocks, so maybe I am the one in the wrong here too.
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More examples: For around $20 billion you can make zero particle accelerators and zero miles of Californian high speed rail*. So for about twice the cost of fuck all they made reusable rockets. I'd say that's a good deal.
*I'm only counting the cost so far. The total cost for zero miles of high speed rail will balloon past 100 or 200 billion longer term depending on which estimates you use and assuming they keep running the money furnace that is the high speed rail project. Someone is getting that money so I predict they'll keep destroying billions this way.
You have to be able to pay money for zero things. If you instead say "since money was already paid, we can't shut down the project" 1) that is a sunk cost fallacy, and 2) it creates really bad incentives where cost overruns are guaranteed to lead to more funding.
You don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.
Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.
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-->You are here. You have been here for decades.
No we haven't. I've been on a number of government projects cancelled due to budget overruns. You just don't hear about them because there's no incentive to report on them.
Including the particle accelerator I linked above. They sold the idea to congress on a budget. Then blew by that budget repeatedly asking for more and more money. Then were cut off.
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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:
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:
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.
P.P.S. China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology's Long March 10B's first stage has just been recovered by their clever net capture barge, making China the second nation with reusable rocket technology. This, of course, is bullish for SpaceX.
The reason the bets are timed is that I wanted them to be resolvable within a reasonable timeline. I made the original bets 3 years ago, and 2 of the 3 users I made them with no longer seem to be posting here, so I think it's fair concern. I agree that it's possible for me to win them due to uninteresting factors, which is what I called a "technical" win in the top level post.
Closest I got was here. It's not a specific prediction about Starship, it's a general prediction based on the hype-cycle of his products / companies, and it boils down to:
This was about Tesla, but I get the feeling that Starship is SpaceX Roadster/Semi/Optimus, where Elon bit off more than he can chew. It's mostly based on instinct though, but in my defense, I've made a few long-shot predictions on my instinct, on this very forum, that turned out to be true.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc. I'm not arguing for physical impossibility, I'm arguing against the "make insane marketing promises, and let the techies figure it out" management style.
Maybe. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about, and I admit I was influenced by them. On the other hand, my "I don't have MDS" argument is that I don't actually want to win these bets. I want to lose them, and lose spectacularly. A world where I get btfo'd is by far better than the one where I win, and the reason I'm betting the way I'm betting is because it sounds too good to be true.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out? It certainly shows a lot of political / business acumen, but I didn't get the impression that that's the sort of "it" he's supposed to have.
I don't challenge your reasoning for making resolvable bets, my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
All of these efforts being meh (so far) is not very informative. Cybertruck is just a goofy car, there's only so much you can achieve by making a big electric pickup with edgy body panels. It adds very little to Tesla's current position. Car people are somewhat insane in paying so much attention to car models. FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work. Optimus is a legitimately good robot, it's just not the time for robots yet, and China is way ahead of Elon on the entire robot supply chain except high-end chips (both the brain and external compute). Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already. There is no way for others to overtake him on any reasonable timeline.
He did, and no doubt their data has contributed a lot. But the base model is in-house, and I see that RL was done on xAI's stack. This is impressive because the original xAI team has completely fallen apart, there was the impression that xAI has become a mere compute provider for Anthropic. He has crashed and rebuilt a near-frontier lab from the ruins. This suggests at the very least good capability for delegation outside the hardware domain.
In absurdly compressed timeline. Something like 3 months. Even with homegrown meth labs I can't see how they can deliver in such a short time.
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I just wanted a way to get out of the "would the Enterprise win against a Star Destroyer" type nerd slapfights. I agree it was far from optimal, but it was the only thing I could come up with, and no one actually stopped to raise that particular objection at the time. The bet-takers thought Elon is great, so he will surely crack this trivial problem in no-time, which was part of the problem I was meaning to highlight.
Well, hold on. Waymo has a very different approach to Tesla. It's armed to the teeth with sensors - cameras, radar, lidar, audio... the works. I think they even do a high-definition scan of the cities they deploy in. Elon claimed he could crack it with cameras and AI alone. Using one as an example for why the other could work seems wrong. What's more, he was constantly promising that all the hardware for a better-than-human FSD is already inside each and every Tesla, and it's just a question of working out the kinks in the software. That soon (next year, next year, next year... no matter which year we were currently in), at the press of a button, every Tesla would become fully autonomous. Recently they said some of the older hardware might not be enough, and that they will need to upgrade it, and more recently still they gave up on even that idea. People paid a pretty steep price for a feature that never arrived.
Did they make some great leap recently that I'm not aware of? I think every other robotics company I've seen came up with something more impressive. It even looks like they're remotely controlled during their demos.
Well, but if it's not time for robots, why is he acting like this is the very thing that will take the entire company to an entirely new level? Transform human society, even. Shouldn't his car company focus on cars, and leave humanoid robots as a niche R&D project?
Maybe. Like I said your arguments for why it can work sound reasonable to me, but the problem is they sound similar to why FSD can work. I also saw what I think is a very similar next year / next year / next year dynamic with it. He used to do these semi-regular all-hands meeting at Starbase, where he'd talk about Starship (I think I linked to them in the old post I referred to in the previous comment), and from what I recall they started off with saying Starship V1 will be able to take 100t to orbit, a few years later that V1 could take (100 -X)t to orbit but V2 will be able to take 100t, and a few more years after that, that V1 could take (100 - X - Y)t to orbit, V2 (100 - X)t, but V3 will be able to take 100t.
Maybe they'll finally crack it, but it looks like "fake it 'till you make it" to me. I used to work for a guy like that, that would make insane promises to clients, and than expected me to deliver. If I have MDS, it might just be PTSD that Elon is triggering by reminding me of the experience.
About SpaceX being ahead of the competition: yes, but this used to also be the case for Tesla, and now BYD overtook it. There are other companies who are still in the nipping at the heels phase, but it's not obvious to me why it would stay this way given how difficult Staship development is proving to be, and how far they already got with their own rockets of similar class.
Optimus is great. Very good hands (some Chinese stole them), powerful, iterates quickly, and more importantly I can trust Elon to mass produce it, as he mass produces lots of things. Sure it's a bit quaint compared to the Chinese robotic supply chain and scaling potential of Unitree and UBTech and others. But regulatory barriers will all but ensure that Western markets heavily go to Elon.
The problem with Optimus and with Tesla taxis is the same: it's a bet on the exponential, and you don't know your exact location. Elon's theory of victory for FSD is that good enough AI will make do with human-level sensorium; arguments about lidars being expensive are of course nonsense, the costs of lidars can fall like costs of any other component. He's obviously correct on the substance; the question is what does it take for "good enough", how much more data, pretraining and onboard processing? He keeps discovering that the answer is "more than you have". But at some point, very likely it just works and Waymos become overengineered toys.
I can't muster the outrage. His corporate governance experiments have trivial explanations, and he'll have the cash to burn on it all.
I think you miss other variables changing.
The problem is they haven't gotten far. If rocket reliability requires exploiting Wright's law, Elon is very much ahead.
Well, at least as far as Starship is concerned, neither has SpaceX.
If. All the Falcons they produced didn't seem to help them get to a running start with Starship.
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I disagree, that is the primary "it" that he has, and the most important one by far. It doesn't really matter how elegant your product is, how technologically advanced, how innovative. The ability to create a solid business plan and actually execute it (eventually) is the critical factor. SpaceX is the best example: none of the technologies involved are especially novel: keralox rocket engines, aluminum alloy rocket bodies, carbon fiber fairings, etc. The actual innovation of SpaceX was figuring out a way to build and operate these things in a way that made them profitable at scale. This is an unpopular view, I know, due to the implications about whig history, but is something I think is true of all the great industrialists.
Elon himself is very well aware of this. I sometimes say that he's spiritually Chinese, which is lost on his greatest admirers in the West, who imagine his success is due to some brilliant insights. No, it's similar to what guys like Lei Jun do, just with American capital scale and more chutzpah. It's maybe the most potent recipe there exists.
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Is the point of datacenters in space to keep them out of Yudkowski's airstrike range? Or, with less cheek, to keep them away from regulator?
The bull case for data centers in space is that the bottlenecks for getting data centers constructed are going to be
a) permitting / regulation
b) power generation / storage
Data centers in space have the potential to solve both of these bottlenecks, in exchange for introducing the manyfold engineering challenges of getting them into space (which other posts have already described in great detail).
I'm not entirely sure I believe this thesis, but it's at least fairly plausible to me that the engineering challenges can be overcome while NIMBYism gets ever more dysfunctional and terrestial power generation remains a bottleneck.
It has nothing to do with airstrikes though; any serious nation already can or soon will be able to strike assets in LEO all the same, not to mention that if push comes to shove the owners and operators of data centers in space are very much going to be within the reach of nation states.
SSO, but you're still correct.
The bear case for data centers in space is that the engineering challenges need to be overcome in the right order. I know the anti-data-center craze is literally crazy right now, but earth-bound solar+battery-powered passively-cooled centers are probably no more likely to be strangled by red tape than orbital centers. The orbital centers may look cheaper in back-of-napkin calculations right now, but only because battery prices haven't yet crashed as far as solar panel prices have and chip prices are so high that you want to run everything on a 100% duty cycle. If battery supply improves enough, or chip supply does (or if chip demand falls), the numbers change.
Solar prices are already creeping up as China has ended subsidies and the global demand is surging. The Chinese will do all they can but at the end of the day PV panels have scarce physical inputs (like silver). The lowest realistic price for batteries that I've seen was something like $15/kWh (if Sodium-Ion works out at scale). That's about $300000 for year-round battery+solar 1MWh supply (given seasonality and losses), probably more. Plus immensely more costly solar installation (lower area efficiency, overbuilding due to day-night and seasonal cycles, weather protection, land)…
Might as well just yeet it into orbit.
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In just a few short years, SpaceX went from "it's impossible to land an orbital rocket booster, and SpaceX's attempts keep exploding" to "here's a hilarious video making fun of all the hardware we blew up developing our incredibly successful rocket booster recovery system."
In just a few short years, SpaceX went from "an LEO constellation with thousands of satellites is insane" to being the most lucrative internet service provider in the world.
I have very little doubt that SpaceX is capable of turning "Starship is impossible and keeps exploding" into "here's a hilarious video making fun of all the hardware we blew up developing the most capable orbital launch system ever flown."
I kinda want to buy a piece of SpaceX because I think it's cool, but I'm also guessing that there really is a huge bubble right now and I'd be stupid to buy in.
Man, I wish I had the slightest idea about investments.
I also feel like SpaceX is a bubble, but I also thought that Bitcoin was a bubble.
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It's a huge gamble. In 20 years everyone will either agree that it was a huge bubble or that it was a huge opportunity, but without hindsight it's really a huge gamble. I would have been thrilled to buy in during most of their previous private fundraising, but by IPO time the huge upside possibilities they have were clear to everyone, and IMHO that upside is now more than adequately priced in. I'm not planning to directly buy any shares unless there's a big unwarranted dip, and even then my motivation would likely be "I want to help ensure their employees' options are worth what they deserve" more than "I'm using the Kelly criterion to maximize expected utility of my portfolio".
Lesson 1 is very short and yet very effective: "Diversify". Get a NASDAQ-tracking index fund, and you'll have a small piece of SpaceX, but you'll also have enough other weakly-correlated-with-SpaceX stocks that you won't have to worry about losing big if things go bad for SpaceX in particular, just about downturns in tech as a whole or the stock market as a whole.
There's something to be said for the fun of wild gambles over sensible investments, of course. I made my first ETrade account around age 20, picked two stocks, and was so excited by the one that quadrupled that I didn't feel too bad when the other went bankrupt. (And even that was a mini-lesson in diversifying! Imagine if I'd bought the same two in serial rather than in parallel!) Just remember that high-variance gambles, even positive-expected-value ones, are the sort of thing you want to do with disposable income when you're 20, not with base retirement savings or the kids' college funds when you're 40.
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You won't see this because you've blocked me, but this isn't true and several people have tried to do the math. Here's the most recent. To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters. The article doesn't discuss solar panel sizing, but using star cloud's numbers of 400 W/sqm we're talking about 2500 sq m before we consider redundancy. And that's just power and cooling for a single MW. In fact, it seems to me that it's the space DC boosters who refuse to engage on this and show their work.
This is an interesting report but I want to highlight one section in particular:
We're not really debating if space compute is feasible, we're just debating if it will scale. Given that it's technically possible and useful in niche functions, small space datacenters are probably going to be made. Whether bigger ones will follow is an open question.
Indeed. It's quite clear that you can compute in space. My contention is that it will not be cheaper than terrestrial computing (contra Elon), large satellites (100+ MW range) will be infeasible (given the technology under discussion), and small satellites will not be useful.
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What I want to know about space datacenters is what's the plan for repairs and maintenance. Or is the idea: "YOLO, just deorbit it, and launch a new one"?
Gosh, I hope so. Imagine if sending objects into orbit became so cheap that just launching a new datacenter took roughly the equivalent amount of money and effort as shutting down a terrestrial server, fixing/replacing the broken part, and then turning it back on. By that point, the Futurama joke about landing on the Moon in less time than it takes to count down from 10 could be real. But that was the year 3,000, which still leaves a large range of time between now and then when rocketry will get that good.
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For small-scale nodes, i.e., AI1-sized, I suspect that the node would just either operate in reduced capacity or be retired. They probably would not be designed for serviceability. On the flip side, properly engineered, there would be few moving parts, and low risk of environmental damage. Something like 99.8% of Starlink satellites are operational with a median age of a little over 5 years, so it doesn't seem implausible on first impression that AI satellites would experience similarly low rates of failure.
I dunno, man. Space Routers sounds a lot more simple than Space Datacenters...
They're almost entirely microchips in either case. The main complication is the need for circulating coolant through passive panels, but this is not an exotic field of space engineering at all.
Yeah, but I can hook up my router and let it accumulate dust until approximately forever (I never had one break), my desktops were also quite reliable, but I sometimes had to get a new part. The SysAdmin guys taking care of the servers at the companies I worked for, OTOH, were always running around and tinkering with shit. Pointless busywork? Upgrades that aren't going to be a part of equation here (but if so, isn't that a pretty big downside for putting these things in space?)?
Heh, this is my day job. Most of the time, the tinkering is replacing very old stuff with less old (or, ideally) new stuff. Sometimes stuff that was deliberately underprovisioned for business reasons that has to be upgraded later. And if it's a business office, physical networking often needs to change to suit the needs of the office workers. But often as not the old stuff coming out has been operating continuously for many years on end with ~0 maintenance and still works. I routinely pick up enterprise gear from work for my home that was retired and removed in perfect working order, but is no longer supported, surplus to requirements, or replaced with something more capable and more efficient. Usually if there is a failure, it's a spinning hard disk or a cooling fan; eliminate those and enterprise gear is generally pretty bulletproof and service lifetimes of 10 years or more are not uncommon at all. You observed that desktop PC hardware is already fairly reliable, and that's after having every cost cut to the absolute bone. Enterprise gear largely avoids those cost tradeoffs for reliability.
True that upgrades in the satellite model are precluded, but after almost a decade of service they probably wouldn't be upgrading in any case. In an industrial datacenter, there is a lot of infrastructure in the form of buildings, facilities, and power distribution that makes ripping the racks and replacing a sensible "upgrade" path. In the satellite model, what infrastructure there is, is largely degradable (solar panels and mechanical components), so there's not much benefit to upgrading them. Additionally, since each node is self-sufficient, its entire lifespan can be monetized without sacrificing efficiency, at decreasing revenue rates over time, unlike in a data center where there's a constant need to cycle in new hardware as soon as possible to maximize electrical efficiency. Compute per watt efficiency just matters a lot less when your electrical cost is 0.
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Serious question, do you think that all of these engineering organizations who are going all in on this concept haven't done the math themselves?
I was skeptical about the cooling issue myself but I did the math myself and it turns out that if you're willing to run your chips a little hot you can get away with less radiator surface area than solar panel surface area. It's simply not the issue that people seem to think it is.
The math not mathing hasn't stopped repeated attempts at solar roadways (and solar railways, etc.). Sure, you can technically cover the road with solar panels and get some amount of power out of them, but for far less money you can get far more power by just building them in an empty field or the desert etc.
Similarly, you technically can run a datacenter in space, but it gives you effectively zero advantage over a terrestrial one (or even exotic ideas like building them out on the ocean or in Antarctica) while adding tremendous amounts of cost and complexity. I mean, I guess you get twice the amount of power per square meter of solar panels, at only an order of magnitude or two higher delivery and installation costs. And you don't really escape terrestrial legal jurisdictions any better than you would have by building the DC on a container ship out in the Pacific or something.
It's a retarded idea being pushed because it hypes normies and other retards (like venture capitalists).
Zero serious engineering organizations were involved in any of the various "solar freakin roadways" proposals. I give a lot more credence to SpaceX, who have a decades-long history of actually delivering on serious technical challenges previously considered outlandish under conventional wisdom.
In both of these places you are adding bandwidth/latency challenges, and Antarctica is forbidden from commercial exploitation.
I absolutely believe SpaceX can make a space datacenter work. I'm questioning the practicality and economics of the entire idea, not whether the engineering needed for it is possible.
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What do you mean by "serious engineering organizations"? There were several of those built in Europe (Germany, France, and the Netherlands, off the top of my head), and they were, predictably, all boondoggles, but I assume they were built by "serious engineering organizations". Now, it was all most likely corrupt political deal-making, but someone "serious" put their name on it.
I mean organizations with a track record of delivering on ambitious projects.
Does the Colas Group count?
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Antarctica is closed to economic exploitation by international treaty. It's the complete opposite of escaping terrestrial legal jurisdiction. As for oceanic datacenters, they have a lot of technical disadvantages compared to orbital components. Large vessels would be preferable for stability, security, and navigational control, but power generation becomes impractical unless you permit commercial maritime nuclear reactors, which seems unlikely, or plan to have LNG refueling tankers visit every few weeks, which is expensive. A constellation of small solar powered vessels scales a lot less conveniently in the ocean, given communications constraints from the ground, security difficulties, and the scale of ordinary maritime maintenance that is necessary.
So, I think you are wrong - there are other advantages. In orbit, security is a non-issue, environmental degradation is minimal, solar power is abundant, communications are easier, and in general the floor cost per node is lower, meaning that scaling down incurs fewer penalties.
Space is also covered by various international treaties, and nations on Earth would be quick to update any such treaties to cover datacenters even more strictly if companies were using such datacenters to flaunt the law of countries. And at least in their current state, these treaties basically make satellite operators subject to the laws of their host nation.
Long distance oceanic LNG shipping is about 3 to 5 cents per KG. I imagine it would be cheaper when you're just shipping out to international waters from the coast. Starship's most optimistic projections for price per kg to low Earth orbit is a little under $100 per kg, but could end up closer to $1,000 per kg.
As opposed to the cost of sending people into space to fix the space datacenter? Most space DC proposals I've heard have actually proposed not having any human maintenance at all because of how expensive it would be, instead opting to add extra redundancy for essential components and just writing it off when a GPU or PSU fails.
Please, please, please show me your math for this. Even use the $100 per kg to LEO price if you want to make itas favorable to your argument as possible. I would be willing to bet you $100 donated to the charity of the winner's choice if you math shows it being cheaper than a container ship (or oil platform type structure) 370 KM off the coast (i.e. in international waters) of some LNG processing hub.
People didn't do some very basic pricing math with Solar Roadways and similar grifts. Solar Roadways would cost a metric ton more per km than just using asphalt, and a metric ton more that just sticking solar panels in a field or the desert or on a rooftop somewhere etc., while being a worse road surface and producing less power.
Space datacenters face similar economic disadvantages, and none of the proponents seem to be saying anything about the financial math here. I personally find the discussion of stuff like "How are you going to cool it?" irrelevant and a distraction, except inasmuch as they affect the cost. Cooling the datacenters is absolutely feasible, but it definitely complicates the engineering (and drastically increases the amount of material that has to be launched) far above and beyond what would be needed for a nomal terrestrial datacenter or some of the other exotic options I mentioned.
First, you have to determine what is a minimally-viable node in each context. SpaceX is proposing essentially a single-rack node with 120KW power at a mass of about 2 tons. Let's assume that the same Nvidia racks would be used in an oceanic platform, so we can disregard the silicon costs. Starlink satellites are constructed at scale at a cost of about $1M/ton, so a reasonable cost estimate for Starmind satellites is about about $2M per satellite. Add $200K in launch costs and we're about $2.5M/node up front, with ~0 ongoing costs.
If we assume that solar arrays are impractical for oceanic data processing, the minimum viable node would have to be some kind of hull with active station-keeping and enough fuel storage to fuel a diesel generator and station-keeping for extended periods between refueling (30 days?). It starts getting sketchy here, but working with requirements of about 25 tons fuel capacity, it seems like you're looking at a 30-40 meter DP1 vessel. I couldn't find costs for new construction, but listings for similar class vessels decades old are around $3M (e.g., https://maritimesales.com/DAB17.htm), so that seems like a reasonable conservative estimate. And this the up-front cost only. Assuming it's autonomous, it will still need monthly fuel deliveries, regular PMCS and overhauls on engines, gensets, and thrusters, other seaworthiness maintenance like painting, cleaning, and lubrication, and you can expect substantial wear and tear and damage from environmental forces. Fuel replenishment alone is going to be at least $30K/month. And this is all for a single Nvidia rack!
Now of course as you start scaling up, the economics shift, but my point was that one of the advantages of orbital deployment is the ability to scale node sizes down.
If you're scaling things down to a single rack, then for $2.5 million I'll gladly stick it in my basement (which has gig fiber internet, I'll upgrade to the 2.5 gig plan if they'd prefer for that kind of money) and handle all maintenance for them.
If the point of space datacenters is being able to do them at a very small scale, there are a million better and cheaper options that don't run into the same sort of political/NIMBY resistance that big datacenters have. There's plenty of vacant office buildings with good internet and electrical hookups that would be far cheaper and easier to maintain than chucking a rack into orbit.
The economics of this literally make no sense, there's no point in doing this stuff at a small scale because you lose all the benefits of economies of scale.
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Space datacenters don't have to be cheaper than ground datacenters, they just have to be cheaper for processing space data than ground datacenters. The latency and bandwidth of space-to-grond will make space datacenters naturally attractive as space scales.
That's maybe a trivial compared to the actual core question, which is whether space datacenters can make sense for processing ground data. I think that's an open question. But the economics will become known as space datacenters are built to process space data.
What are you smoking? Firstly, there's hardly any space data other than scientific probes by various space agencies, and communication satellites operated by both public and private entities. The latter, by their very nature, need to communicate with the ground.
Secondly, the latency difference would depend largely on where both the datacenter satellite and the source of the space data are located. In LEO, space datacenters would be less consistent in their latency than ground stations because they're orbiting the Earth roughly every 90 minutes (or you'd have to be constantly passing the data around to different space datacenters to keep latency somewhat consistent, but this data transfer would likely kill any gain you got from the latency reduction and then some).
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It's puzzling to respond to a report with numbers worked out with an appeal to authority and a "it's not an issue". Puzzling, but perhaps typical of this discourse.
Please show the math.
SpaceX gives values of 150kW of compute power and 110 m^2 of radiator panels (220 m^2 of total radiating surface area since they are double sided).
A typical radiator has an emissivity of about 0.95.
So, per Stefan-boltzmann:
150000 = 220 * 0.95 * 5.67e-8 * T^4
T^4 = 12.6579e9
T = 335K or 61.85 C
If you run your chips at 80C (not unreasonable!), that's a 20 K delta from the chip to the radiator, which seems very reasonable to me? My gaming PC does about 40C from my chips to ambient and I'd expect SpaceX to be able to engineer a better thermal solution than me.
Of course you can make the radiator smaller by making the satellite smaller. But you lose any economies of scale by having a big cluster of compute, which is presumably why Starcloud is targeting a massive DC.
My point is not that you cannot run a computer in space, obviously. My point is that small DCs are unlikely to be useful and large DCs are unlikely to be feasible.
It doesn't matter much for inference, which is what the satellites are for. Heck, you can run inference at home on your PC if you want to fork out for the hardware.
Indeed, you can run inference on the ground. Exactly my point.
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I think I get it now
You think a "space datacenter" is a monolithic piece of hardware, a single satellite bus that's carrying 100% of the compute that's intended to be operated in orbit
You do understand that they're going to launch more than one of these, right?
I am indeed aware of that. There's advantages to having the compute collocated, which is why StarCloud is doing it that way.
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Numbers presented without showing the math can be dismissed just as readily.
That said assuming you construct the radiator as a "fin" so both sides are exposed to space you would need a 50m x 20m structure or maybe 5 10m x 20m structures mounted along a truss to ensure 2000 square meters of radiating surface. That actually sounds pretty workable.
For reference the primary solar panels on the ISS are 36m x 12m a piece and there are 8 of them.
As explained, it's a simple application of the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
2000 sq m is for a small DC. StarCloud proposes a radiator of nearly 8 sq km.
Show your math then.
I did.
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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.
Uh, okay. Manhattan has an area of 20 square miles. What's the relevance to space radiators?
Hmm. What is StarThink?
I think it's quite clear that mass is not the concern I raised wrt the size of the radiators, which is why my post did not say anything about mass. Huge radiators cause drag and are vulnerable to micrometeorites. Redundant cooling loops can mitigate micrometeorites, but then you need bigger radiators.
But since you brought it up - the radiator you posted is solid state, SpaceX says they will use circulating liquid radiators, same for starcloud. I expect this is because circulating liquid radiators scale more than passive radiators like the one you are looking at. Just a guess on my part, though.
Now, StarCloud says each data center will be 5GW. They are cagey about how exactly they will dissipate 5GW, but with a simple water/glycol loop we are looking at 50,000 kg/s of flow which is massive. All those pumps will of course also need to be cooled.
On top of that, the radiators need to be filled with coolant. Back of the envelope math, again for a simple coolant loop, suggests perhaps 100,000 tons of coolant in the radiator, so we're looking at $10B just to get the coolant up there across hundreds of launches and nothing else. They do not go into the math of this in their whitepaper, probably because single phase liquid coolant is totally infeasible.
Tedious bluster. Please save it for Twitter.
It matters because it deflates the context-free appeal to "omg 2000 square meters". Ok. 2000 square meters is just 40 * 50 meters. Is this supposed to be a lot?
It's not clear, because mass is the only interesting concern there is. Drag, too, is an issue of mass (for ion thruster fuel). Your link says: "And that’s the best-case scenario. Additional problems are hidden in the low Earth orbit environment itself. Space exposes radiators and their coatings to a chemically hostile brew of ultraviolet light and atomic oxygen, quite the opposite of a clean-room environment. Over a LEO satellite’s typical 5-year lifespan, these elements degrade the radiator’s surface properties and lower its ability to shed heat. … Including this degradation in the model reveals that as the radiator degrades from a “fresh” state to an “end-of-life” state, the physics demands a further penalty. To maintain that same 60 °C operating temperature for the GPU chips, the required surface area jumps from about 1.4 square meters per chip to nearly 2.0 square meters. In other words, the physics tax rises by 40 percent. Therefore, you must launch at least 40 percent more radiator mass, endure higher atmospheric drag, and sacrifice valuable launch volume just to survive the degradation of the thermal coating."
Or you can simply launch a little higher. No matter how you cut it, it's all ultimately about mass.
Huge solar panels cause drag and are also vulnerable to micrometeorites. This issue, just like the radiator issue, is negligible. Neither solar panels nor radiators lose function quickly from random point damage. At, say, 500 km the lifetime of an inference node with several thousand square meters of total area can be a decade. How much economic value does a decade of compute with free power provide? That, cost per kilogram to orbit, and costs of hardware are all that matters.
Since you dislike X, I'll cite it again. NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG: 1GW AI FACTORY ON NVIDIA ARCHITECTURE COULD COST NEARLY $100 BILLION
So, maybe $450B for that 5 GW you talked about. Cooling alone is likely a fifth of that. I guess popular reporting can create the impression that Americans are actually standing up tens of gigawatts of capacity without problem, like so much coal plants in China. This is not, in fact, happening. Most Blackwell compute is still not operational. All this space math only matters in relations to costs on Earth.
I hope I didn't mislead anyone into believing that 2000 square meters is a megastructure. Nevertheless, most people have never seen an Ascend 950 so I don't think that helps contextualize anything for anyone. 2000 sq m is fairly large for a space radiator - the ISS has only about 400 sq m.
Perhaps. And yet, Starcloud plans to operate in LEO. I assume they aren't totally retarded and have thought through the choice of orbit. It's difficult to have a discussion about this when you ignore the details from the actual proposals in favor of advocating for stuff they aren't doing when it's convenient. Either the people working on this are smart and have chosen the best parameters for this, or they are stupid to the point that the internet peanut gallery can do better and therefore aren't going to succeed. You must pick one.
If you're pumping coolant through a tube that's open to vacuum, you're going to have some problems.
I don't really understand what drives a man to repost second hand all caps claims. I'm not even saying that he didn't say this, but surely you must understand that this is simply not convincing to anyone?
Space based DCs also fail the "not currently happening" test, so this part is a wash.
You know what, fair enough. Let's ignore Starcloud since this is primarily about SpaceX. They've just issued a concrete design: Starmind
• 150 kW peak compute payload
• 120 kW average compute payload
• 70 kW per ton
• Wingspan: 70 meters
• Deployed height: 20 meters
• 110 m² deployable liquid radiator
• Redundant pumping loops
• Integrated micrometeoroid shielding
• 150 kW solar array
• 250 W/m²
• High-speed laser links interconnect satellites and beam AI results back to Earth through Starlink. Low-latency, high-bandwidth connection
• SpaceX-manufactured solar technology from Bastrop, Texas
So, that's 917 square meters of radiator per 1 (sustained) megawatt, and more importantly 70 kW of capacity per ton, at SSO. I see Starship has the theoretical capacity of 40-60 tons to SSO, let's say 50. At, say, $200/kg that's $8M to deliver 2.8 MW of compute. As per Jensen, 1 MW can go for $100M. There's plenty of slack in this. Even if Jensen is off by an order of magnitude, the "getting it into space" part is almost a rounding error and can make straightforward sense given terrestial/political constraints.
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I was too lazy to de-caps it, and I hope that people of this forum will find the issue of the costs of 1 gigawatt of capacity on Earth more salient than the funny detail about all caps.
Problems of space compute have straightforward engineering solutions, the costs of which can be estimated. Whether these solutions are worth the cost depends on the costs of building the same capacity on Earth. So arguments about radiator area, micrometeorite damage or coolant mass are kind of… weightless unless grounded in comparison to the baseline.
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This. Basically, space is the last place you want to put your data center. Putting your computers basically anywhere else, be it in high altitude balloons, the summit of Mt Everest, the Mariana Trench, Point Nemo, downtown Manhattan, on harnesses worn by stray cats, the surface of the Moon, the rectal cavities of cybertruck drivers, Antarctica, Gaza (to just brainstorm a few not-so-good ideas) is going to be much less of a hassle than LEO.
While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.
There are also other minor objections (e.g. if satellite data links would scale to backbone ranges, we would not rely on expensive undersea cables instead, how do you service your equipment? and Kessler syndrome makes you extremely vulnerable to sabotage), but cooling is the big one.
It is not that computing in space is impossible per se (every cubesat does some, after all), it is just that it is extremely painful compared to computing dirtside.
As an analogy, there is no reason why sex in the vacuum of space should be impossible, one could certainly design pressurized space suits which have docking ports in the correct places. It is just that we already have much more convenient places to have sex, including space stations, beds, parachute jumps, submarines, mini-golf prop houses, presidential offices, fields of nettles, BDSM dungeons and many more. Until we saturate these environments, there will be little economic demand for space suit sex (beyond the novelty value).
I busted out one of my old textbooks and found the equation to compute the area required to radiate a given amount of energy in a vacuum. "A = W / (E * SB * T ^ 4)" where A is the radiator area in square meters, W is the wattage, E is a value between 0 and 1 representing the efficiency of your radiator, "SB" is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant, and "T" is your operating temperature in Kelvin. So lets do some back of the napkin math...
A = 1,000,000 / (0.25 * 5.67e-8 * 400^4)
A = 1,000,000 / (0.25 * 0.0000000567 * 25,600,000,000)
A = 1,000,000 / (0.25 * 1,451.52)
A = 1,000,000 / 362.88
A = 2,755.73 square meters.
Per my reply to @sarker above I actually think that sounds pretty doable. For reference the ISS has just over 2,500 square meters of solar panels.
I am not saying that it can not be done. I am just saying that it does not seem cost-effective. The ISS costs 100G$ for development and running over a decade, so lets call it 10G$/year. Of course, the solar panels (a modest 120kW) are likely not the most expensive part, and mass production would drive the costs further down.
Still, back dirtside I can get a 1MW peak solar plant for less than 1M$ (to generously allow for the lower efficiency as compared to LEO; excluding land prices), which is possibly less than the ISS spent on space-certified bolts to mount their solar arrays.
As a further complication, transporting electric energy is a lot easier than transporting heat. If your compute is all in one place, you will want convection cooling, which means pumping some fluid to heat exchangers. I am not sure what the ideal fluid for space cooling is, actually. With water, you would have to build pipes to handle the vapor pressure of about one atmosphere, which will likely be heavy. And if space junk punctures your heat exchanger (which is a concern with 50mx50m panels), that will quickly lead to a loss of operating fluid for that loop.
As an alternative, you could spread out your electronic components evenly over the area of your radiator. However, your H200 (TDP 600-700W) will take about two square meters of radiator for cooling, so you will want at least heat pipes instead of relying just on conduction.
Or you could double down on fluid pumping and use a heat pump, so you can run your radiator at higher temperatures than your electronics. The coefficient of performance for cooling is T_C/(T_H-T_C), so if you want to run your radiator at 800K, you will need as much energy for your compressor as for your electronics, for an 8x reduction in required radiator area. Most refrigerants have a critical temperature (beyond which the refrigeration cycle does not work) lower than 800K, R-110 comes close with a critical temperature of 700K. Of course, the critical pressure is 39 atmospheres, so you would require massive pipes per Barlow's formula.
As a kicker, one 1MW-facility would cover 1/50000th of humanity's data center needs.
Google's AI claims that electricity costs are about 10-20% of the TCO of a data center (and only 60% of the operating expenses). This means that even if Musk shipped your solar panels to LEO free of charge (or even provided them for free altogether), all the hassle with radiators and comms and lack of equipment replacement options means that it would very likely not be worthwhile.
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Note that your value for Emissivity is very low. Radiators with emissivity around 0.95 are common, which cuts your radiator area nearly 4 times, and the total compute power per satellite given by SpaceX is about 150 kW, which further reduces radiator area by about 6.6 times.
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OK Bill Clinton.
I tend to agree that building compute in places where the most efficient electricity option is hamsters in wheels is probably an easier engineering challenge than cooling datacenters in space.
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I think you're greatly exaggerating. Deep ocean is a much more hostile and inaccessible location than LEO by almost any possible metric I can think of except, possibly, the energy cost of reaching it. The Moon is much further away, requires much more Δv, and isn't even sunny for half the time. Antarctica is extremely energy-poor and is unavailable for commercialization in any case.
At 400K, your panels should be able to reject over 1KW per m² to deep space, continuously. That's actually pretty efficient! You can do better with air cooling of course, so long as you don't care about environment heating at all, but that's also at some energy cost.
Dirtside computing can be infinitely painful, depending how uncooperative governments want to be with regulations and lawsuits. At least in LEO there's limited jurisdiction.
To be fair, LEO is also not always sunny. For a simple equatorial orbit, you are in the shadow of the Earth almost half of the time.
Of course, Sun-synchronous orbits (which use the precession due to the Earth's shape to adjust the orbit by about one degree a day, so you can always ride the terminator line) exist, but they also tend to have worse radiation exposure, and so far nvidia has not built a radiation-hard variant of the H200.
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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:
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 logisticsat 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.
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This is at least a solvable design problem, if not a trivial one --- terrestrial temperatures being generally comfortable compared to the extremes of hot and cold in space. It's a bit different for LEO because the Earth is a big object in view, but otherwise the Sun is hot and dark space is very cold.
The entire planet sits in (mostly) thermal balance between solar radiation, terrestrial energy, and radiative cooling to space. No particular reason a satellite can't do that too, although again not as trivially as "slap a heat sink and fan on it" that works down here.
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I agree. I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”. Power needs could theoretically be solved by using nuclear reactors instead of solar panels (which is still pretty impractical compared to just… building a reactor on Earth) but the absolutely ludicrous size of the necessary cooling radiators (and what happens if/when that radiator gets hit by a micrometeor or a piece of debris? how easy is it to repair? how long can you wait?) makes it a non-starter, barring some borderline-magitech advancement in cooling that would surely also make it easier to build on Earth. Cooling and especially power are the limiting factors of datacenter construction, above the raw land requirements.
Maybe there’s a future case for datacenters on the moon, using some sort of geothermal-esque cooling system with boreholes? I imagine the underground temperatures of the moon are pretty damn cold, I bet we could use it as a heat sink. But there a whole lot of steps to cover before there’s any benefit at all to doing that instead of just building a normal datacenter.
I think the only real economic case for what we’d recognize as sci-fi-level space development is mining, whether that’s helium on the Moon or rare earths from asteroids, etc. I think this would require launch economics to get vastly cheaper before anything could come of it, but it could potentially take off as both a sovereign and zero-pollution (on Earth anyway) means of acquiring certain resources. I think it’ll happen eventually. But not very soon. Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.
I'm not convinced that the sizes are that "ludicrous", especially if Starship actually delivers on even a fraction of it's promise.
We're not talking about orbital megastructures here, we're talking about something on the scale of the ISS
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but the radiator for a spaceship itself is basically just a big piece of metal, right? It's what the condensing stage of the cooling unit dumps heat into to reject it? As an HVAC tech I'll say it should work fine if it has a hole in it, just like plenty of condensers on earth work fine with hail damage on the fins or dirt on them. Not ideal, but fine.
Typically there is a heat exchanger on the exterior of the hull with coolant that is circulated between the interior components that need to be cooled and the exchanger. These are the matte white panels you see around the base of the service module on the Apollo and Soyuz capsules. On the Shuttle the heat exchangers were on the inside surface of the cargo bay doors which is why you never see the bay closed while in orbit. Meanwile most satellites as well as the ISS have radiator fins mounted perpendicular to thier solar arrays such that when the solar panels are oriented towards the sun the radiator will either be in shadow or edge-on
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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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Well, space is a vacuum, yes, but the radiative heat sink is extremely cold. People have suggested testing cooling in a vacuum chamber to prove the infeasibility, but this misses the critical factor that the vacuum chamber walls are not ~2 K, and the efficacy of radiative cooling scales by the differences in temperature to the 4th power.
But, see, we've been to space, and had to cool shit down up there. It would seem like NASA has the table to know exactly how much radiator surface is needed for every heat load and the heatload is theoretically calculable based on existing chip design. I suspect that the datacenter inside the satellite would need to be redesigned down to a very small level due to the lack of a cooling medium, but 'how much radiator do we need to get rid of heat' doesn't seem like something we'd debate without really knowing the answer- it's not exactly the drake equation of building datacenters in space.
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Have you actually done the math on this, or has someone else? My understanding is that it's totally doable with relatively modest radiators; I'm open to this guy not knowing what he's talking about, but all I've seen from the other side is sneering.
The bigger issue is probably that chips are designed to work immersed in air, which conducts heat away. In orbit, you'd have to either build a pressurized system or redesign the chips to have a different kind of active cooling. It's getting the heat to the radiator that would be the problem.
We already know how to fluid-cool chips and get the heat to a radiator.
Indeed, I've had a fully submerged mineral oil PC rig since before Covid.
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The economic case for asteroid mining is also dubious as far as I can tell.
Indeed, and I have seen people discuss that a niche for space datacenters might be processing satellite data up there rather than beaming it down (for latency and availability reasons). Perhaps, presumably you wouldn't AI-scale DCs for that so it might be more feasible.
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Yes, but how fast? Money can be spent to reduce failure probability (even if just by taking more iterations to fix failures), but it can't always be spent to reduce time to success. SpaceX had $24B cash on hand at the end of 2025, but still spent 7 months in between the last Block 2 and the first Block 3 launch, roughly the same as after the Test 1 launch pad debacle, probably because the regressions between the last Block 1 and the first Block 2 weren't a cycle they wanted to risk repeating. Even after that delay we still saw some regressions, albeit not such serious ones: an upper-stage engine-out, though it was compensated for and left them on target, also left them paranoid enough that they skipped a planned engine relight test; a wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt led to mass engine failures, though that was in their first attempt at something envelope-pushing and non-mission-critical.
I think it all depends on two things:
what kind of cadence can they keep up with Block 3 this year? It looks like they'll only have a couple months between the first and second launches of it, which is a good start. If nothing goes wrong and we get Flight 15 this year too then I'd bet at least that goes orbital.
what do they want to "spend" this years tests on?
On the one hand, though I don't yet know if they've hit their engineering goals (only ≈44 metric tons payload in that last test, and although in prior tests they've only launched 20-60% of their claimed max to LEO, I'd bet their max is still under 100, their goal for fully-reusable launches) block 3 is at least impressive enough (compare to ≈17 tons for Falcon 9 reusable; Falcon Heavy's same-as-9 fairing means it's only been useful to launch stuff farther, not to launch more stuff) that they'll be tempted to use it operationally while tweaking the design, same as they did with Falcon 9 (originally ≈9 tons and expendable). This would mean going to orbit ASAP, except:
On the other hand, their political goal is "put a manned lander on the Moon before China or Blue Origin can", and refueling a lander of Starship scale requires a serious combination of payload and cadence. Even if they can launch 90 or 100 tons to LEO soon, only doing that every month or two won't cut it. They need some combination of more infrastructure (which they're working on, with multiple additional pads and much bigger factories, but this itself is a timeline risk), more payload (not as crazy as it sounds; Gross Lift-Off Weight is over 5000 tons, and small fractional improvements in dry mass have outsized effects), or rapid reusability (which seems achievable with the booster at this point, but the upper stage still has me worried). The latter two options both would benefit from risky testing, not just gradual tweaking, but the trouble with risky testing is that you don't want to leave any test failure in orbit if you aren't absolutely certain you can get it down safely, which means that they're going to want to stay suborbital with any test that includes a major system upgrade or a major flight profile change. That wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt in Flight 12 might have been born from a hope to shave off many tons of extra boostback fuel that get expended in a more gradual burn, and although they're not getting too wild (e.g. upper stage engine-out compensation capability is another extra expense and it's a good thing they didn't risk forgoing it), they're at least still in "major testing" mode, not "fine-tuning" mode.
I do think they'll be in orbit by the year's end, but it's nowhere near a guarantee at this point. One sufficiently nasty explosion in the next test, and that's that.
I have to agree with your chances now, but do note I said "sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival", which is not quite the same as "make it to Mars". Mostly the distinction is "probably to crash on arrival", but there's also a finer distinction where, if they actually do make an attempt but miss the launch windows on the "nice" side of the porkchop plot, it's not impossible that they'd launch a later-starting longer trajectory that only reaches Mars entry (or failure-of-entry) in 2030.
It wouldn't be too crazy for them to make such an attempt, in the admittedly-unlikely event that the rest of their timelines are going perfectly at that point. Counter-intuitively, a trajectory to Mars is much cheaper (under 3 km/s ΔV at the best times) than HLS (≈3 km/s just to get to the Moon, then another ≈5 km/s for descent and ascent under the current plans). Yeeting an upper stage interplanetary might be worth it just to get Mars-entry-with-Starship-heat-shield data a couple years earlier, even if they're not ready to land or do anything useful if they do.
And that's even before you get into the other racers. There's probably an effortpost worth of new detail out there about the New Glenn static fire explosion, and their dedication to repair the wrecked pad and launch again before the year is out, and/or about RocketLab/China/etc, if I only found time to write it up.
Yes, this is why I said I would only technically be winning my bet, as, if SpaceX achieves all that was promised, just a few years later, the letter of my predictions would pan out, but not the spirit. Conversely, if with the new cash injection they will actually beat my deadline for going to orbit, but crash and burn because they threw all their money at the AI trend, I said I would be losing only technically.
I mean, again, technically... No worries, my assumption was they won't make an attempt. The most expansive scenario where I'd claim a win, was if they suffered a major failure outside Mars' gravity well, and even then you could talk me into accepting it as a tie or a win for you,
Yeah, but what would be the point? I don't think they have a contract for going to Mars, and there's not much they can do to make money from this. Well... I suppose there's the hype factor I keep bringing up.
We could probably settle that now, despite you being on track to win in a way that makes the question moot. My inclination would be that "they go interplanetary, but not within expected error margins of their initial trajectory, and they can't course-correct with a later burn before the year is out" counts as a win for you, whereas "they start on their expected interplanetary trajectory, under full control, but they fail a normal course correction burn (or plane change burn, attitude control, whatever doesn't get them from a good Mars transit trajectory to a good Mars entry trajectory) after they're out of Earth's gravity well" counts as a win for me. Fair? IMO "heading to Mars but not quite making Mars entry" still counts as "sending" like I said, even if I was imagining burning up in the atmosphere rather than missing it. But since "they make their initial trajectory and afterward have some kind of restart or attitude control issue" has been a problem in 2 or 3 out of 8 flights that did make the intended trajectory, and that's despite trying to restart control after a delay of only minutes rather than weeks, if they do manage to yeet one off on tight timelines then problems with more frozen valves or what have you are surely a significant failure mode risk.
I maintain that the hype is an incredibly important factor for them, just not because of the stock market, rather because it's how SpaceX manages to retain a whole lot of SpaceX employees, despite how many of them could find lower stress or higher pay or both as Blue Origin employees or RocketLab employees or Boeing employees or so on. If SpaceX is managing Moon landings by 2029, though, that might be enough "we're on the way to Mars" hype for more delays on the direct part of the path to be forgiven.
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Ironically you won your bet mostly due to SpaceX being so far ahead of the competition they can afford to proceed with much more caution that they previously have. Starship has undoubtedly been capable of achieving orbit for over a year now, each launch deliberately bringing it just under that threshold, and the only reason it hasn't is because SpaceX doesn't want to run the minor risk that an uncontrolled re-entry results. This makes it likely that once they are confident that uncontrolled re-entry is a mitigated risk orbital starship launches will go from "never" to "always".
Any guesses as to when?
If test flight 12 had been issue free, my answer would be "in the next 3-6 weeks" but as it stands if test flight 13 (currently scheduled for July 31st) successfully demonstrates reliable in-flight re-light capability for the raptor engine I would expect test flight 14 to go orbital.
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There's a chance of this year, but given the current cautious pace, I think next year is a little more likely. BO's pad mishap has removed even the small amount of competitive pressure they were bringing, for now. If the next flight has a successful relight with no issues, they'll go for it on the flight after. If no manufacturing or testing delays, that would probably be later this year. If there are any flight glitches or testing issues, that will slip. The gigabay production facilities nearing completion in both Texas and Florida will mean an increase in flight cadence is very likely in either case.
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Thanks for the reminder. I checked, and Starship is slated for the first transatmospheric flight, Flight 13 to be specific, sometime after July. It was intended to be a true orbital flight, but likely will get bumped down to a suborbital one after recent technical difficulties.
(At least according to https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starship_Flight_Test_13)
With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was too optimistic. 90% CIs should cover way more space/time than a 3 year forecast. Clearly I wasn't adjusting for Elon time even while trying to adjust for Elon time, though my comment notes that that guess was off the top of my head with no additional research. I'd give 70% odds of a proper orbital flight and recovery within 2 years, 50% within 365 days.
I still do not think the hype is unjustified. There is nobody else around that's at SpaceX's level, especially after BO's setback.
I made a blocklist for uBlock Origin to make fandom.com links readable. With those in place, it's better than vanilla Wikipedia IMO.
Nice work but I wish there was a mega-repository of similarly useful scripts and software somewhere.
I've been halfway-considering making an LLM workflow for it. They aren't that complicated, and teaching them my taste shouldn't be that hard either. If I wanted to go super-fancy, it could intercept my traffic (when permitted, of course...) and rewrite the sites on the fly to avoid ads, dark patterns, distractions, etc.
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Or replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com: https://starship-spacex.breezewiki.com/wiki/Starship_Flight_Test_13
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I believe that SpaceX is extremely undervalued. At a minimum, SpaceX is going to form a core part of the next generation of American hegemony as military tech is put in space. In a medium case SpaceX is going to create a multi-trillion dollar space economy around telecommunications, computing, and satellite sensors at a scale previously unimaginable. In a maximum case...
The general tendency of SpaceX is that Elon wildly overpromises impossible deadlines that he fails to meet, and he still ends up years ahead of what everyone else in the industry thought was even remotely possible. For this reason I don't consider it dispositive that SpaceX misses all its deadlines and you've won all your bets.
The best argument against SpaceX, I believe, is that Elon likes to double down on his bets and he is going to continue to risk the entirety of SpaceX to reach the next run on his ladder. He could always fail and the whole thing comes crashing down. But at this point SpaceX has created a potential multi-trillion dollar space economy and I think the upside is so enormous that SpaceX is now too big to fail.
What I mean by "upside" is: Elon's new cheap orbital economics are going to fundamentally change the entire global economy. I think it's more than a question of the American military wanting to put spy satellites in space and therefore keeping SpaceX on a perma-subsidy that scuppers their downside. I think that SpaceX is unlocking huge, real productive economic value. Starlink provides internet access in remote and expensive locations that can't be serviced by traditional cables and landlines -- mining operations in the darkest jungles, oil rigs, planes. Continuous satellite imagery is going to unlock huge economic value in real world productive terms -- weather forecasts, crop yield measurements, infrastructure maintenance. How much is a better weather forecast worth? How much is continuous monitoring of an Atlantic hurricane worth over sporadic discontinuous images? How much was the shift from photos to video worth?
SpaceX is going to create a global nervous system of bandwidth and sensors and feed. This is more than simply putting better research telescopes in orbit and redirecting government monies based on taxing the productive earthbound economy. I think what SpaceX has already produced represents trillions of dollars in real wealth. Valued still at just one trillion -- a sale!
This should probably be "rung" rather than "run".
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An interesting thought is that even if SpaceX under Elon 'fails,' the technology on offer is mostly proven, there's tons of manufacturing capability and engineering talent on tap, and they're right now like the ONLY real commercial path to orbit, and certainly the cheapest/most reliable.
So we might see some other aerospace company swoop in and purchase the whole kit and caboodle at a minor discount, rather than let it be parceled up. Elon also seems to be trying to combine his various companies into one like so many lego pieces. There's a potential outcome where Tesla is doing so extremely well that if SpaceX falters, Tesla steps up and snags it.
People have pointed out that there's a potential parallel to Railroad companies and how the first company to lay out the track and start service were often not the ones that survived. In this instance, I don't think that really applies, insofar as it isn't trivial to bring another rocket company up to speed, whereas with railroads, any dude with some startup capital could hire some Chinamen and start laying track (kidding, but only with respect to the Chinamen).
If SpaceX fails I don't think it fails like Enron. There'll certainly be knock-on effects, but I think it will still exist as a going concern.
Yeah this is a plausible scenario to me. Or like how Ford declined from its dominant position because it didn't fully accept the logic of the business model pioneered by GM. Ford created the production lines and the factories and then let GM extract all the value from customers.
But for now it's SpaceX's game to lose and it will probably take a generation for its dominance to be contested.
I also would challenge anyone who thinks SpaceX or Starship are doomed to show their predictions about the success of Starlink.
Did you predict in advance that they would pull that rabbit out of their hat? Did you expect that it would manage to find a market that rapidly? I sure as hell didn't.
There were some doomsayers about Starlink but I feel confidence now that the product is here to stay. If someone didn't account for that in their larger prognostications then they should probably make sure to allow for a lot more uncertainty as to the surprises that might yet be in store.
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I think there’s also a good chance it turns into an East India Company situation where SpaceX is the only entity in the world with access to Mars and Luna.
Never happen, regardless of the commodity fetishism of it all: the east india company was able to do what it did at the barrel of a cannon and the edge of a bayonet; the US government, despite the best efforts of Theil-et-al i still not cucked enough to let space x have their own army and navy.
Probably, but given the state of the competition, I don’t think SpaceX would need and army or a navy. At least for the first half century of resource exploitation.
SpaceX exists at the sufferance of the state, which has to suffer quite a lot from a retard like Musk. They are happy to be in the cuck chair at least a bit for now on account of all that neoliberalism, but that won't last forever, or even that much longer imo. Nobody wants their orbital launch capacity chained to the AI child porn generation bot.
Well sure, that’s exactly what happened to the East India company eventually: it got too big for its britches and got eaten by the British government. But that took a century and all those investors that got in early still made a fat mint.
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To say nothing of SpaceX being unable to foot the bill for a defence budget regardless.
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Difficult to see how that happens for the moon given that at this point China, India, and Japan have landed on the moon.
Well as you saw with the both the Apollo and Soviet moon programs, being able to crap a washing machine-sized probe out on to the moon does not a lunar base make. The real test is having enough heavy lift capacity to make five to ten flights a year to the moon not really a big deal.
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Small probes are irrelevant next to ~100 tons of soft-landed payloads.
Indeed. Of course, SpaceX's tonnage delivered to the moon to date is 0, lagging the space programs mentioned above.
Wrong, Falcon 9 has delivered several lunar missions. Disregarding even missions to lunar orbit:
1,000 kgThis is enough to put SpaceX above every nation except China (barely) and the USSR, with just Falcon 9/Heavy.
I mean, it landed, but I thought we were discussing soft landings rather than impacting the surface at a high rate of speed.
Same deal.
Counting only successful landings we're at 3600 kg. Chandrayaan-3 had a launch mass of 3900 kg, so SpaceX is only exceeding Japan.
I admit I was mistaken about 0, but copy pasting AI slop in response doesn't inspire confidence.
Those landing failures had nothing to do with SpaceX. They delivered the payloads to the correct insertion velocity, so the SpaceX portion of the mission was successful.
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China is the only one of those with launch capacity even remotely close to SpaceX's, and once Starship is online SpaceX will utterly dominate all competitors in terms of total launch capacity (both in weight to orbit and total number of launches).
I could believe that SpaceX will be the most cost effective way to the moon. However, national space programs do not operate in a free market and it's a mistake to think that SpaceX could drive the Chinese or Indian space programs "out of business" any more than the East India Company drove the Portuguese navy out of business. To extend the metaphor, the only way SpaceX could monopolize the moon a la the EIC would be to shoot down any other rockets that try to land. Perhaps you believe this will happen, but let's say I am skeptical that it will pan out this way.
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People were saying that about Tesla, and he was doing well for a while, and then he started promising goofy stuff like autonomous cars, robo taxis, electric trucks of various sizes, and humanoid robots, got absolutely nowhere with either of these things, and then got overtaken by the competition. xAI can't even keep up with it's competition from the start, and is a giant money pit that can plausibly sink SpaceX all on it's own. The only company that remotely fits your description is SpaceX itself because of how much more they launch than other providers, and I'll just repeat " $41.3 billion in accumulated losses" as a response.
I just remembered that I considered adding a "lessons learned" section where I also mention a few things that happened, which made me think that I was originally too harsh on Elon, but when I read stuff like this I figure I need to double down on negative coverage to compensate for the lalaland sci-fi predictions.
Autonomous Tesla robo taxis started operating unsupervised in Austin last December, and in like 3 more cities this year, though I think they're at least delayed in 4 others, and in indefinite "you must ring a bell in front of your auto-carriage so as not to spook the horses" supervised status in California. I also wouldn't categorize prototypes as "absolutely nowhere", but at the very least the phrase "lalaland sci-fi prediction" should not be used to describe literal, physical things that I look out my car window and see driving past, don't you think?
Yeah, all 39 of them. Is that what's supposed to carry the company?
Absolutely nowhere in terms of generating profits for the company, and being able to justify it's valuation in a rational way, seems accurate to me.
The things Elon predicted / promised can't actually be seen. The Cybertruck is not an indestructible post-apocaliptic tank, and he didn't produce millions of them as he was telling his investors. His autonomous cars aren't safer than human drivers. The Semi can't economically beat diesel, let alone rail.
In technology, the gap between "0" and "39" is a hell of a lot larger than the gap between "39" and "tens of thousands"...
Not really. The gap between a small scale demo that can be hand-debugged if issues come up, and a finished product, ready for prime-time, to be deployed at scale, is often bigger than the gap between "0" and the small scale demo.
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True. But if you're confident in them, the horizontal scaling is also such that making tens of thousands of them is comparatively cheap, but despite clearly having the ability to do so (literally a factory), they haven't, and there are more Waymos in the area, and Waymo has been scaling aggressively. The only obvious reason there is that the technology isn't really ready and reworking lots of units would be expensive.
The flip side is that Tesla gets a lot more data than Waymo.
Is that still true? I'm unconvinced "but every Tesla sold could be uploading it's driving camera data over 5G" is quite the win here. Waymo has a lot of vehicles these days, and could be sneakernet-ing all their data (including LIDAR as a source of truth to train video models) nightly too, just without the bandwidth limits.
Not to mention the entire Street View corpus, which seems likely to cover much of the available value there.
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Which is the only company that I was describing.
Which is the same trajectory, Elon is willing to double down on black. SpaceX isn't down $41.3 Billion because they have failed to invent fundamentally productive technologies. SpaceX is down because Elon is leveraging previously-unimagined technological success into hither-further unimaginable giga-tech. It's possible that this blows up the company.
But Elon did invent the cheapest and most reliable rockets in the world, and this is a trillion-dollar industry at worst, and SpaceX has a huge moat it will take competitors years to cross. This is not la-la-land, even something as simple as continuous real-world weather monitoring and crop data is worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is the internet worth? How much is it worth to have a near-monopoly on access to servicing ~3.5 Billion people? The entire world can be connected now, you don't have to build and maintain physical cables in inaccessible locations, you just need a few hundred dollars for a Starlink receiver. What's the bear case? That the schizos were right and global population is dramatically overestimated? That there's no economic value in putting the rest of Africa on the net? It seems to me like the market is so large that not even xAI could sink it.
The best argument remains that perhaps Elon is too unstable and his competitors will reap the boring rewards of actually making money while he chases a car he can't catch. But that case has to confront the fact that -- we somehow got here, didn't we?
That what he has doesn't scale, and what he has is currently maintained by investors / borrowed cash. That Starship isn't "unimaginable giga-tech", it's necessary for the whole thing to not collapse (this certainly seems to be the impression Elon himself has).
I don't know man, I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so high on hype. Make a specific prediction within a reasonable time frame, as in the past, I'll be happy to put my name on the other side of it. That's the only way I found I can have a productive conversation on the topic.
High on hype? Come on, make an argument. My argument is bounded by the theory that the US Government will bail out SpaceX in the worst case because it's important to a generation of American military power, and that SpaceX will be extremely economically productive in the medium case because -- blah blah blah I'm repeating myself. Did you even read what I wrote? It was actually pretty measured.
Do you disagree that continuous satellite imagery and communications servers (already proven technologies) represent huge industries? Why does an email from five years ago give you the impression that Elon thinks it's all going to collapse? (And despite the real problems they are having, they are producing more Starship Raptor engines now than they were at the time of Elon's email.)
I've given you a get-out-of-flail-plea card by noting that Elon could bet the company on yet-unrealized tech that becomes vaporware. You could have just agreed with that. The point you raised instead is a prediction from Elon that SpaceX would go out of business if something that wouldn't happen, didn't happen. SpaceX still hasn't gone out of business. In fact, quite the opposite recently.
My bet is that SpaceX is undervalued and its stock will rise. Tell me where you think it will be in ~2 years.
I think "it's not scaleable" is an argument. It might be wrong, but it's an argument.
I haven't a clue.
Because he said they need to launch an enhanced version of Starlink, and that the Falcon 9 is unable to do it, and because they have not been launching these enhanced Starlinks with Starship, or in any other way (to my knowledge).
You zeroed in on exactly the kind of bet I don't want to make. Stonk prices are irrational. Tesla is worth more than all other auto makers combined, and has delivered nothing that would justify that valuation, why would it be different for SpaceX? If I thought I could predict stock price movements, I wouldn't be making bets with internet people, I would be speculating on the stock market.
Objectively, as a matter of fact, it's already scaling. The last five years have put almost as many satellites in space as the previous fifty years put together, and SpaceX is responsible for
50% of that. Starlink has10k satellites already and only 12 million customers. And SpaceX has been growing its launch capacity every year. This is already enough to make SpaceX an enormous pile of money.Because of Starship delays SpaceX configured the v2 Mini in 2023 and has since launched thousands of them on Falcon 9. v2 has ~4x the capacity of the old v1.5. SpaceX is not on the verge of bankruptcy but has grown its core business, and your information is five years out of date. This is a classic case of Elon promising impossible deadlines and catastrophizing doom if they don't materialize, failing, and in the process achieving huge success that is beyond what anyone else in the industry thought was possible.
So what?
I do acknowledge that Elon's companies have benefited from an enormous amount of hype. But this is priced in. There is a lot of money betting that this is all smoke and vapor and there is even more money betting that it's not. That's how markets work.
Name a different bet then. Satellites in orbit by 2028? Launches? Payload sizes? Cost per launch? Starlink capacity? Everything is going up.
Tesla is worth that much because it might disrupt the entire auto industry. Cars turned out to be worth more than horses. Tesla's valuation prices in the Expected Value of what would happen if fleets of self-driving cars fundamentally remake society.
But SpaceX is also different from Tesla because it has already demonstrated trillion-dollar technologies. SpaceX's valuation prices in its total dominance over an entirely new economic sector.
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The democrats are going to get back in office at some point, and they are almost certainly going to try to permanently remove Musk's access to anything resembling wealth or power when they do so. This creates an obvious avenue for generating a fiscal crisis for SpaceX correlated with an obvious obstacle for the sort of bailout you're suggesting. At a minimum, I would expect a "bailout" under such conditions to require the removal of Musk and all Musk loyalists from the company's leadership, and the installation of people deemed politically reliable. I would expect such a "bailout" to effectively destroy the company.
Interesting that you can see the case for the collapse of SpaceX, but not the implosion of the Democratic Party as a nationally competitive entity. The national party is losing the fundraising race badly
The Dems next top prospect for President is apparently caught up in a corruption probe. Their bench is critically thin.
Whilst the GOP can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they've got a better talent pool in the near term. This seems like an even-odds bet at best.
The Democratic Party will simply be supplanted by the Democratic Socialists of America, which will inherit all its NPCs but none of its scandals.
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I am fairly confident that our current democratic party is well-positioned to outlive America as a coherent sociopolitical entity.
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This is misleading. Dems funnel all their money from billionaires and foreigners through assorted informal and dark money webs. Expect them to outspend Reps anyway.
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The immolation of the Democratic Party and the rise of Zohran Mamdani Thought would be a development not necessarily in Elon's favor.
A two year long wiretap campaign that hasn't led to anything on Newsom. At this point if you aren't being investigated by the Justice Department you are simply not a viable presidential candidate.
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While I know this is possible and is widely perceived as plausible by many, I think the chances of this are overrated. In order:
Destroying SpaceX would be among the most dramatic uses of federal power in American history, it would be like creating the Chinese system out of whole cloth overnight. I think a likelier scenario is that Elon is personally targeted in a kind of Trump-like show trial that avoids really destroying him but gives lots of politicians lots to say. Or that SpaceX is targeted by hostile and bad-faith investigations that make it bleed but not bleed out. Because, ultimately, actually destroying SpaceX would damage the foundations of American military power and American capitalism. I guess it's always possible. But this is such a bad outcome that I think people are severely underestimating how much power the Democrats would have to have to pull it off.
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Yeah, I hate this. If this is how it pans out I will not claim credit for any of the predictions.
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The route to stopping Musk for a Democratic president and majority is getting harder. Unlike Tesla where it’s possible they could lean on institutional shareholders to pressure him out (although they’d be very loathe to do so given it would tank the price), Musk has a supermajority of SpaceX voting rights. They could try to use the SEC to force him out of management, defense production acts to take control of operations etc but they would be stayed by a conservative fifth circuit judge, then blocked by SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS. So they’d have to pack the court first, which requires abolishing the filibuster, which would make some on the center squeamish, etc etc. There’s also no real competition in a lot of places eg Starlink, NASA contracts are so long term they’re hard to change quickly. I assume they’d try to fund competitors, maybe offer generous tax breaks or state funding or exploratory contracts, but they couldn’t actually replace them, not quickly. They can investigate him for DOGE actions, securities law violations etc but I expect Trump will give him a blanket pardon for everything that he ever did in his entire life up until January 20th 2029 when he leaves office.
I'm told that it's difficult to run a trillion-dollar company from prison, even white-collar Club Fed. They might have to find something he did on January 21st, but that shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.
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"harder" is not "impossible" or even "sufficiently hard to successfully deter the motivated", and it seems to me that the Democrats and Blue Tribe generally are at this point highly motivated.
Packing the court is likely to happen soon in any case.
Loss of actual capabilities is not a significant obstacle; the federal government is very comfortable wallowing in infrastructure and technology mediocrity for indefinite periods of time.
I would not be comfortable betting my freedom and well-being on Presidential Pardons being the norm that shall forever stand, but I'll grant that a pardon is likely and should offer at least some protection short-term.
What would be the obstacle to a federal wealth tax aimed exclusively at trillionaires?
And of course, straightforward murder is always an option.
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How about the FAA or the EPA? I'm pretty sure someone creative could fish out a few other letters out of the soup to screw him over with.
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