[piloto_ciego]

SpaceX is literally the only company that has a reliable partially re-usable launch vehicle, and they're probably going to be the only company with a fully re-usable launch vehicle. Nobody else except maybe for some chinese companies and kind of RocketLab is even close. They basically have a monopoly...

They're launching like 150 rockets a year or something like that? It's bananas. They have star link too.

Honestly, I think people are asleep at the wheel with the valuation and shorting it seems stupid. They have the star shield thing, and hypothetically point-to-point QRF systems for governments with star ship. Then there's space data centers.

I know people gnash their teeth at that, but I'm pretty convinced the ass-pain associated with getting a data center constructed on the planet with all the NIMBY stuff will be will incentivize space data centers too.

[ajam1507]

> I know people gnash their teeth at that, but I'm pretty convinced the ass-pain associated with getting a data center constructed on the planet with all the NIMBY stuff will be will incentivize space data centers too.

You can build solar panels practically anywhere with enough daylight. Space data centers will never make any sense and it's clearly bait for people who will believe anything.

[piloto_ciego]

I would have agreed with you a couple years ago... but not in the last year or so? People complaining about change and construction near them is a real factor. We can't even build houses during a housing crisis because of NIMBY nonsense and a wildly bloated set of rules for what and where you can build stuff.

[XorNot]

See that detail of "near them"? Yeah it's a crucial one.

For some reason data center companies keep wanting to build data centers near existing utilities, near existing roads and transport infrastructure, and near existing electrical utilities.

Not in the middle of a desert. Or the antarctic. Or decommissioned oil fields.

[brianwawok]

Still cheaper to run power lines to a desert over run a data center in space

[ben_w]

I think it may be cheaper to use Starship as a point-to-point delivery system to put solar panels and compute modules in a desert, than to put the same compute performance into space.

Mainly depends on how much of a mess Starship makes taking off and landing.

[mensetmanusman]

-We should put data centers where no one is!

/s

[wat10000]

All the concrete stuff you describe is plenty justification for a really high valuation. Maybe a couple hundred billion, even. To justify a couple trillion, you have to really believe in orbital data centers, which just don’t make much sense. If NIMBY is the issue, it’s literally a thousand times cheaper to bribe the government of some poor country and put your stuff there than it is to put it in fricken space.

[piloto_ciego]

We will see, but I don't buy it. We can't build housing in a housing crisis, or build high speed rail anywhere it seems, things aren't going to get built under the current paradigm at the same rate. We will see, but I bet this is what we see.

[wat10000]

Who’s “we”?

If you can put the things in space, then you can put them anywhere in the world. They don’t need to go in American suburbs. I bet Mongolia would be happy to host you in exchange for the cost of a few rocket launches. Or put them on container ships and run them in the middle of the ocean. All sorts of completely crazy ideas are easier and cheaper than space.

[overtone1000]

SpaceX is now publicly traded, so go and place that bet!

[ben_w]

> and they're probably going to be the only company with a fully re-usable launch vehicle. Nobody else except maybe for some chinese companies and kind of RocketLab is even close. They basically have a monopoly...

Back in 2018 when dearMoon was announced, I was expecting this to be true for a while, a temporary monopoly while others caught up; but dearMoon was due to launch in 2023, got cancelled in 2024, and SpaceX have so little confidence in the vehicle dearMoon was supposed to use that it still hasn't had a fully circularised orbit so far, by mid 2026.

This means Starship has been slower to develop than the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, with many of the same problems as the Space Shuttle and the Soviet N1. Rather loses its shine when that's the comparison.

> Honestly, I think people are asleep at the wheel with the valuation and shorting it seems stupid. They have the star shield thing, and hypothetically point-to-point QRF systems for governments with star ship. Then there's space data centers.

If nobody else had a chance of catching up in twenty years[0], and if the world trusted Musk[1], then Starlink would be worth something like 100-200 billion in today's money. Realistically, it's probably more likely worth $50-100 bn.

Starshield and QRF is ??? money, because while the US government is very good at spending taxpayer money on military stuff, Musk's personally made a lot of political enemies and may just not survive a Democratic congress or President.

The space data centers… I really need to get back to editing my draft blog post, I've got a whole bunch of open threads I'm pulling on and around 8k words on why all possible variations of it are a bad idea. At presented scale, it's about the same difficulty as making an orbital ring[2], which would be a better use of resources, though still has the geopolitical trust deficit working against it.

[0] This is the relevant time horizon for valuations

[1] Highly divisive; while this doesn't matter in all markets, it matters more in the markets with more money to spend on Starlink.

[2] Contiguous structure with two parts, one stationary with respect to the ground, the other slightly above orbital velocity to provide additional centrifugal force to keep up the stationary part. Makes space elevators much easier, because you only need 100-200 km rather than 36,000 km.

[zulux]

Any idea how they're handling the space data center heat problems? Energy harvesting in space is easy, while getting rid of heat is quite hard.

[piloto_ciego]

Scott Manley had a really good video on it that more or less confirmed my "bar napkin approximations" when people first started talking about this stuff. I think it's this one?

https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI?si=opcoaBEqKmw4LCrF

Anyway, I think sun synchronous orbit (basically slightly off from polar) and pointing the solar panels toward the sun and the radiator away... It's not as far fetched as people would have you believe.

[jordanb]

Did we watch the same video? My takeaway from Manley is that it is something that can pencil out as a physics problem with a very carefully selected orbit

But as an engineering problem it's quite another thing. For example he talks about how far you have to pump the ammonia, and then you either need a very large amount of ammonia, or you have to pump a smaller amount of ammonia very fast through kilometers of plumbing.

Of course there are highly theoretical ideas like making an atmosphere of coolant around the satellite or something but he left that stuff on the sci fi category.

[gamblor956]

That's like saying that controlled fusion is a napkin problem.

The issue has always been the engineering. Programmers tend to be extremely bad at estimating he complexity of real world problems.

[JumpCrisscross]

Yup. It’s weirdly closer than I would have thought before sitting down with pen and paper.

[maxboone]

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/02/spacex-has-the-best-ra...

[zulux]

Fair point, and thanks. Certainly true that Starlink satellites are already successfully dealing with the problem and use a lot of energy.

I think the trouble with my thinking was that I was locked into the Shuttle/STS numbers of waste heat transfer.

[fragmede]

China managed to land a reusable rocket just recently.

[fhdkweig]

The point of the article isn't whether they are a good company or not. It is whether their stock price is justified. Even if they are the best in their field, they can't just name their stock price. At the end of the day, it has to be rooted somewhere in fundamental numbers.

[danpalmer]

It doesn't have to be rooted in fundamental numbers. It should be, it would make more sense if it was, but the market is the only thing that matters. See also: Tesla, a failing car company with a strong history of empty promises, and a currently empty promise of solving labour, and they're worth more than all the other car companies combined.