[aeternum]

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late.

Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

[CuriouslyC]

There's a difference between "infeasible given materials and manufacturing capabilities of the time" and "infeasible as a scalable solution due to the laws of physics"

[rbanffy]

There is also the very practical question of "what problem is this trying to solve?"

[xnx]

To which the answer for SpaceXaiTesla is always: Hype up gullible investors about the glorious future just around the corner.

[Natfan]

*spacexxaiteslacursor

[aeternum]

What law of physics do orbital data centers violate? You must have learned some strange physics.

[grim_io]

How about the physics of space radiation and radiative cooling.

The guy has to rent out his terrestrial data centers because he can't make use of them.

We probably don't need to pollute space with dead GPU's.

[root-parent]

>> What law of physics do orbital data centers violate?

None. That is why they are...in practice... an engineering impossibility :-)

Nobody is disputing you can have a 1kW of compute in orbit...you have that in the space station. But that is a matchbox....

[CuriouslyC]

note the scalable in there. Even under best case assumptions, it's only a good fit for edge coprocessing where latency is super important. You're not going to power the world's compute with a self healing Dyson sphere (but if you think that, I've got something to sell you).

[dreamcompiler]

Thermodynamics.

[automatic6131]

Almost no one said those were impossible, just hard. This is completely different. Rather like... a train in a vacuum tube hard. Definitely harder than making a subway with autonomous trains under a modern city. And much harder than being a third rate AI lab, though Elon did hit that target perfectly.

[chuckadams]

Train-in-a-vacuum-tube isn't even restricted by the laws of physics, and it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum anyway, just low pressure. Data Centers IN SPAAAAAACE have the teensy little problem of cooling that you can't just brute-force a solution to. Those giant things dangling off the ISS that make up most of its footprint aren't solar panels, they're heatsinks, and they still have issues managing heat.

[rbanffy]

Well... If the launch cost is low enough you can just pack a radiator large enough. Good thing this might drive the development of a wider Starship and Ultraheavy booster (or a Superheavy-Heavy where three Superheavy rockets boost a bigger, heavier Starship). Eventually we can get to the Comicallyheavy booster.

[chuckadams]

Perhaps, but I don't see the costs getting anywhere near being worth it. You'd need a space elevator or to manufacture the sinks IN SPAA— er, in space. The latter is theoretically possible but still extremely remote, the former still requires unobtanium.

[rbanffy]

It all depends on how far you are willing to go to make your server invulnerable to a police raid.

[throw310822]

The police will just arrest you and/ or anyone who operates the downlinks or connects to you. The server can stay in space.

[aeternum]

Energy radiation scales T^4 so physics is really on your side here. If you can engineer GPUs to run a little hotter you get significant decreases in radiator size required.

[adrian_b]

That will have to wait 10 years, or even a few more years, for a transition from silicon to a semiconductor with a wider bandgap.

[aeternum]

I doubt that, there really wasn't much effort put to allowing GPUs to run hotter. You can always add a heat pump to create the thermal gradient of the GPU can't handle it itself.

[rose-knuckle17]

Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?

From the SpaceX S-1: "For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net." In plain terms: SpaceX's rocket division charges outside customers roughly $102 million per Falcon 9 launch — but it charges Starlink $0.

SpaceX appears to be heavily subsidizing Starlink in the launch cost sense.

There is a mix of clever and sketchy accounting going on in Muskworld making it hard to see which elements profitable/sustainable and what isn't.

[boxed]

> Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?

This is always a funny "gotcha" people bring up. Except the gotcha is always different somehow. Sometimes it's "the US subsidizes it" because NASA gets amazing deals on launches it would otherwise pay 10x or more for. Sometimes it's Starlink that subsidizes the launches. Sometimes it's the launches that subsidizes Starlink.

Maybe the answer is just what is obvious: vertical integration and economies of scale makes starlink/falcon 9 profitable. The combination is the thing.

[Mountain_Skies]

It would be interesting to see how much of Starlink's business is due to global conflicts, especially the one in Ukraine. If peace should break out, how does that impact Starlink's bottom line? I have strong doubts that rural villagers in the Amazon are a high profit customer base. In my area everyone was clamoring for Starlink to rescue us from DSL. Then fiber came and everyone lost interest in Starlink.

[rbanffy]

This is not about something being impossible, but something that solves no problem except keeping launchers busy.

The only reason I can imagine for space-based data storage is being out of reach of most police investigators. Recently, a very corrupt banker in Brazil was arrested and his phones were confiscated and, up to now, two have been cracked, with a big effect on the approaching election. If the thing is in orbit, it's a lot harder to confiscate it.

[toss1]

I used to make similar arguments.

But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.

Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.

Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".

SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.

But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.

If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.

[rbanffy]

> you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.

Ideally, you pass your meme stocks to greater fools before they collapse. You then move to the next meme, rinse and repeat. You can do well for a surprisingly long time.

Not being a misanthropist has been expensive to me.

[toss1]

Same here; it's expensive to not be a crook at heart (at least short-run expensive. I think it is far better long-run) .

[rbanffy]

I understand the point of being able to sleep at night, but lacking a yacht and a business jet of my own, alongside several holiday residences on different tax jurisdictions, is certainly an inconvenience.

[xnx]

This is a very good summary.

[dreamcompiler]

Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter.

He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to have lost interest in EVs unless they're robotaxis.

Just recently he scammed Wall Street with a horrific overvaluation for a company whose only profits come from Starlink and whose biggest rockets blow up before they reach orbit.

Now he's talking about orbital data centers which make no sense to any engineer who understands thermodynamics (and sadly, many don't) and which are unnecessary because within the next 5 years 90% of inference will be done on local machines in users' homes because the hardware and the algorithms will be good enough to enable it and every Joe and Jane are fed up with surveillance capitalism.

[Mountain_Skies]

On the plus side, there's enough surplus Tesla equipment that a boutique vehicle factory in Detroit is planning on using some of their cast off engine hubs to produce Kei style truck kits.