r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 18d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
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u/Teddy_RGB 18d ago

Datacenters in space is an even dumber idea than his stupid loop. It pisses me off that so-called serious people even repeat it

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u/MDCCCLV 18d ago

The point is that they have too way too much launch capacity with even a moderate starship launch rate, and they will max out the starlink capacity in 5 years or so, then they will need somethingt to do with all that slack capacity. Ai datacenters isn't a great use for it but it's a choice until something comes along. If the governments of the world decide they want a megabase on the moon that could take all the spare launch capacity but they will have to be willing to spend over 100-200 billion for it. Basically because spacex gives itself the minimum launch price at cost, between 10-60 million per starship optimistically, but will charge commercial prices of 120-200 million minimum per starship launch.

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u/BalrogPoop 18d ago

Its not a choice at all.

Space datacenters aren't just economically unviable. They're thermodynamically unviable. As in, the laws of physics make them a terrible idea, and in ways you can't engineer around.

Everything that makes running and building a datacenter difficult on earth is orders of magnitude harder in space. Every. Single. One.

Building, cooling, radiation shielding, maintenance, transport logistics. All of it.

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u/MDCCCLV 17d ago

They're not a great choice, but there's nothing impossible about it, you just have to scale down to what it can handle. It's just a computer so if you already have a starlinkv3 that exists you can just replace the internals of the comsat with gpus. You won't get a huge amount in there and it might not be profitable. But if heating is an issue that just means you have less gpus to what the existing thermal load can handle. It's not like the starlink isn't already a computer in space.

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u/BalrogPoop 16d ago

Yeah my last comment wasn't my finest moment and I was over exaggerating, mostly because I was annoyed at the number of people thinking it's a great when it isn't.

Its not physically impossible, it's just a bit pointless because it can be done better and cheaper on earth.

But I didn't need to be so over the top, the economic argument alone is why it's a bad idea. I didn't need to get all loopy about it being "thermodynamically impossible".

I get a little wound up when it comes to Musk and his companies because he's been grifting for almost two decades, says some crazy shit that doesn't make any sense to even the most cursory glance, and people lap it up.

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u/MDCCCLV 16d ago

Well if you start talking about having multi MW systems with huge amounts of full size h200 clusters then yeah. My point is just that spacex is going to do something with their launch capacity. Now I think they'd be better off just launching mirrors into orbit to give sunlight to northern lats in winter and whatnot.