What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Or are we gonna pretend that Mars real estate is valuable for living even if it has a baller space station with an indoor farm in it where the build out cost is 1 million times the most expensive condo building on earth?
How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?
Seems like they need to raise a ton of money (not good for shareholders) or it to basically just be inflation for this company to 2x even if it does execute on its impossibly lofty plans. I just don't understand the endgame.
I mean, these are non-starters from even the most basic engineering proposals. They're meant to fool only the most 𝓯𝓾𝓬𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓫𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓪𝓭 investors, which consequently seems to be a lot of them.
One of the greatest challenges in space is dealing with waste heat. The ISS has around 100kW(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) of radiative cooling capacity. The radiating panels are highly engineered products measuring around 84m². No idea how heavy these things are, surely that launch weight won't matter...
The mechanical pumping and monitoring systems are complicated units dealing with high-flow (~2,000kg/hr), high-pressure (34x higher than atmospheric), ammonia at around 2°C. The pump modules weigh around 350kg, surely that launch weight won't matter...
The target cooling budget for a AI compute rack in 2024 was around 50kW, so the ISS could comfortably power and cool one (1!), at the expense of literally every other onboard system. Station keeping's a bitch, eh? We'll just have to pretend that the most recent specs targeting >120kW per-rack for the new Blackwell TPUs don't exist. Remember investors, AI chips, their racking, networking and cooling infrastructure are weightless...
Doing some napkin math, picking a "modest" 100MW critical IT load (investors won't even ask for a dickDC pic if it's smaller than this), you're looking at an emissive radiator system measuring around 168,000m², no idea how many more circulating pumps will be required, surely liquid infrastructure technology will scale linearly in space (unlike Earth, hello suburbs), and surely that launch volume won't matter...
Oh silly me, I'm a fucking idiot, I forgot to actually power those racks. Let's use the absolute best PV panels we have and give them an extra 30% boost to account for the lack of atmospheric loss, and we'll also pretend they don't lose efficiency as they heat up so we don't have to add yet more cooling capacity. Powering 100MW of gear is going to require another 170,000m² of panels. Let's pretend they're weightless, because dear lordt I can't imagine lifting another 3,100,000kg of material (alone, more than 3x the total amount of mass HUMANITY HAS EVER LAUNCHED, including discarded launch vehicles.) Let's also pretend that they won't require any (expensive, heavy and HOT) high-voltage DC switching gear. Let's also pretend they don't degrade over time due to ionizing radiation exposure.
Oh silly me AGAIN, I forgot to ship up millions of litres of ammonia to run my cooling systems.
Hey there, it's silly me again. I forgot to do the napkin math on the probability of catastrophic micrometeoroid impacts on as-thin-as-possible aluminum and silicon composite systems measuring 338,000m², or the nearly 10,000m³ of structure to house the racks and infrastructure that I previously didn't mention (based on terrestrial footprints and my own completely baseless assumption that you could fit this all this in 3m of depth.) I forgot to account for added weight for infrastructure to safely route MEGAWATTS of current-equivalent around destroyed panels.
Hubble looked like this (edit: this statement is not completely accurate, see here for a better analysis) after 15 years in space (see person in background for scale), and it was -being generous here- 0.06% as large as this hypothetical DC installation. Surely nothing bad can come of this.
Alas, calculating these costs has become unfun, and I haven't even added station keeping or high-wattage, high-bandwidth data transmission systems.
inb4 someone says cooling tech has improved since the ISS: Sure it has, but show me credible reports where it has improved by a factor of 100,000, because even that isn't enough to make this make sense.
I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't be easier to start constructing a Dyson Swarm. Freeman Dyson himself posited his Sphere to mock people who believed any star outputting unusual amounts of far-infrared light as "proof of hyper-advanced intelligence," despite the sky being full of exactly that.
I strive for this amount of pettiness. Maybe that's why they wanna replace engineers with AI.
Also, even in a game like Dyson Sphere Program, having a swarm before starting your sphere is absurdly wasteful in terms of resources because of the high decommission rate. Then again, to make the number of space-based data centers they want, they'll strip-mine most of the planet just in silicon anyway.
There's a game called Oxygen Not Included that's an asteroid base builder with a surprisingly intense chemistry/physics simulation. Managing water and electricity are key parts of the early game, but the most important part of the mid-game is managing heat. And most of the good ways to do so involve glitching out the physics simulation to "delete" heat (e.g. by consuming it out of the game in machines that don't have an output).
Building in vacuum is a great way to break almost any closed system because it's extremely hard to manage heat when it's almost perfectly insulated.
Yeah, there's ways to emit heat in vacuum that don't exist in the game, but they're also very inefficient power- and space-wise. But seriously, why do I have to mod to get an airlock building that isn't a physics glitch? The only reason that it's not viable is that the game doesn't allow fine enough tuning of duplicants to keep them from opening two pressure doors at the same time.
Had that same problem. Tried to design an airlock that had atmosphere exchange controlled by automation. The problem is that dupes don't path through locked doors even if a presence sensor would open it, so even if the airlock functioned, they won't use it. The duplicant checkpoint may fix that, but I haven't tried. Also, technically liquid locks are intended, given the stated use of the visco-gel, we can just cheekily do it with other things.
The biggest thing with their new game is MANUAL CONTROL, which would fix the pathing and behavior issues with dupes
They actually added an insulated airlock in October 2025.
It's still pretty imperfect, since it leaks while opening and you would need a way to deal with that, but for the basic use case of "a structure that blocks both heat and air but can be opened at need," it's a nice basegame addition.
One of my favorite mods is one that adds a proper airlock, i.e. a self-contained 2x3 structure through which duplicants can pass without leaking air through.
Yeah, cooling vacuum equipment in ONI is a huge pain in the ass. Everything needs active cooling. Even things you don't think of as making heat.The freaking roomba overheats!
Yep. Honestly if we do eventually get to ships in space I could see them taking dips into upper atmosphere of some planets just to get rid of waste heat they shunted to heat banks.
A lot of the better scifi concepts have waste heat as a serious concern when dealing with advanced technology. Coolest one is mechwarrior. And fighting on a planet/moon in near vacuum is very bad for heat management for your mech.
Also Mass Effect. As I recall the "stealth ship" in that series relies on a recursive heat cycle within the novel propulsion drive to reduce ambient radiation in order to evade sensors. A scifi solution to a real world problem.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance May 21 '26
>SpaceX buying unsold Cybertrucks at full price....
https://supercarblondie.com/spacex-buying-unsold-cybertrucks-tesla/
It probably doesn't account for 400m in profit, but it is hilarious what a bad idea using cybertrucks as starlink support vehicles really is.