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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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