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by CamperBob2 7 days ago
No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there.

He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.
1 comments
arjie 7 days ago
There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably run a fiber line back to shore for interconnect but to get actual full decoupling, I suppose you'd use Starlink.

Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.

0: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nautilus-puts-sto...

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CamperBob2 7 days ago
No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite.

There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.

And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.

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arjie 7 days ago
But ships have night. The PVs would need backup batteries for the entire night-time period to say nothing of the 4x capacity loss. A satellite can just see the sun the whole time and it's getting nice clean sunshine. I think the powership works better.

Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.

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CamperBob2 7 days ago
If there's not enough power available on the ship, which for all I know there is (some of them have 100,000-HP engines, or 75+ MW), then you don't bother running the data center at night. Yes, now you need 2x as many of them, but you can afford them since they are 10x cheaper.

Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him

That's how it looks at first, agreed. But if you look closer, you'll notice something kind of funny. The only times Musk really wins big have been when the competition is either incompetent or lazy (launch services and satellite Internet), or doesn't show up to the game at all (EVs, self-driving and otherwise.)

Data centers and semiconductors aren't like that. Those guys aren't going to stand by passively and let him eat their lunch like General Motors and ULA did.

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arjie 7 days ago
Haha, I must admit that having 2x ships one on each side of the world and swapping them to keep it flying all the time is definitely good stuff. Very entertaining. And I did forget the engines. It is true, surface vessels do seem to dominate space. Fun chat.
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