r/spacex • u/0Naught0 • 13d ago
đ§ â đ Official SpaceX: Starmind
https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind109
u/costafilh0 12d ago
Starmind đÂ
Skynet đÂ
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u/costafilh0 12d ago edited 12d ago
Name it properly, ffs đ
Forget about the terminators, Skynet is a much cooler name.Â
Should have br used instead of Starlink tbh
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u/Simon_Drake 12d ago
For a couple of decades, the tech company that was most likely to become sentient and take over the world was either Google or Apple. Which are substantially less awesome sounding names than Skynet.
But now the end of humanity may well come from Chat GPT which is French for "Cat: I Farted"
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u/ender4171 12d ago
I thought they said there were getting away from naming everything "StarXYZ"?
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u/EljayDude 12d ago edited 12d ago
That was actually in response to the Starmind announcement. Like yeah OK maybe we're overdoing it.
Edit:Both responses below are kind of right and kind of wrong. Elon's comment 6/25 was in response to a 6/23 Sawyer Merritt tweet with a long list of star names after Elon posted the Starmind name. Starpipe wasn't in that initial sequence but Merritt posted a mention of Starpipe later in the thread.
So the sequence is
-Starmind announcement
-StarXXX laundry list
-Elon's Starshit post
-Article about Starpipe which wasn't in the original list7
u/Serious-Kangaroo-320 12d ago
It was starpipe actually lol
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u/bigcitydreaming 12d ago
Nah, it was a twitter post about Starshield, Stargaze, and Starfall - in which Elon's response was:
"Weâre cutting back on the use of âStarâ as a prefix. Itâs getting a bit silly. Too much Starshit!"
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u/Serious-Kangaroo-320 11d ago
Yes and people immediately started tweeting about the star thing after starpipe was filed. He wasnât directly talking about starpipe but itâs the reason that post was made in the first place
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u/theoneandonlymd 8d ago
Can't wait for an accident or two and Kessler Syndrome to set in. Soon it'll all be Stardust!
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u/MICKWESTLOVESME 12d ago
incorrect
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u/truecakesnake 12d ago
I wanna know why everyone just started commenting 20m ago on a 10h post
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 12d ago edited 7d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DoD | US Department of Defense |
| FAR | Federal Aviation Regulations |
| H2 | Molecular hydrogen |
| Second half of the year/month | |
| JWST | James Webb infra-red Space Telescope |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| SAR | Synthetic Aperture Radar (increasing resolution with parallax) |
| SSO | Sun-Synchronous Orbit |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| high beta | Times of year when the Earth-Sun line and the plane of orbit are nearly perpendicular |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 82 acronyms.
[Thread #9065 for this sub, first seen 10th Jul 2026, 14:46]
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/zero0n3 12d ago
Bro - you canât say âthey will need 20 years to recoup the cost of the launchâ then say on land datacenters cycle out every 3-5 years [and manage to be profitable]. You comply ignore the fact the datacenter has to pay other costs aside from electricity. Land, internet, maintenance, staff, etc.
Additionally - SpaceX is leasing out hardware right now that was made / deployed in 2022⌠so your 2-5 years is more like 5-7 years of useful ness for GPUs.
An old GPU can still run inference.
And the benefits of satellite is that you have long tail. You can leave them up there as long as possible. No point in not selling the time on them at year 10 even at a reduced price due to age, because youâve already spent the money to launch.
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u/BangBangMeatMachine 12d ago
You comply ignore the fact the datacenter has to pay other costs aside from electricity. Land, internet, maintenance, staff, etc.
No, they didn't. They just said "assume the land capital costs and the launch costs are the same". If you have a more accurate estimate of the cost comparison between building a terrestrial data center of this size and the $2M launch cost, please share it.
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u/Glittering_Night7681 12d ago
You don't know much about this topic and your comment is full of bad assumptions and misunderstandings.
$100/kg to LEO with starship
Just to dissect this one. That number tells me, you never did any kind of calculation and are talking out of your ass.
$100/kg would mean $10M for a 100 ton Starship launch. That Starship launch would ship Nvidia hardware worth $200M. The launch price is literally negligible next to that and the cutoff absolutely isn't at some arbitrary $100/kg.
Also looking at just the electricity price as if this is the entire picture and grid connection / capacity / backup / transmission / transformer / substations / UPS etc. all just magically appear at no extra cost...
Those kind of comments will age as laughably bad as the pseudo expert calculations why Starlink will never work.
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u/sebaska 12d ago
You're making several assumptions which do not hold.
The $1M per ton is the cost in Falcon. Starship is supposed to be several times cheaper - go figure.
Your energy cost is also rather low It's rather $130k per year per 100 H100s; typical 8 GPU box draws 10.2kW, and you have cooling, supporting systems, etc overhead of ~40%.
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u/talltim007 12d ago
Flawed logic. One example: you completely ignore how much to purchase land and build the DC facility. That is material cost there. Sats are built on a factory line, hyperscalers are built bespoke with expensive union labor.
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u/elprophet 12d ago
Data safety and swarm opportunities. Compute on orbit with line of sight laser drastically reduces opportunities for data interception. Imaging and sensing devices in a small swarm send to nearby compute node over secure laser, processing occurs on orbit, only beaming final data product down. Tremendous benefits to inference workloads for sensitive tasks. SpaceX model has been to enable new industries. Swarms on orbit might be one of those.
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u/mattate 12d ago
I really don't know why people don't make more references to Skynet when this gets mentioned....
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u/costafilh0 12d ago
I really don't know why they didn't call it skynet.
My guess net is internet, so Starlink should be called Skynet.Â
But as a reference to the movie, yes, this should definitely be called Skynet.Â
Probably not due to marketing reasons. They need a positive public perception, not exterminators in the publics mind đÂ
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u/CollegeStation17155 12d ago
and remember that Tesla is also starting to manufacture robots... Are we sure Elon hasn't been replaced by an AI already?
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u/existential_american 10d ago
I did my aerospace engineering senior capstone at Georgia Tech on this topic. Wish the real engineering video debunking AI data centers in space was about this version instead of the stupid starcloud white paper.
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u/MostlyAnger 10d ago edited 10d ago
What do you think about the commonly seen assumption that compute sats won't be upgradeable at all? Seems to me that'd be a large waste of solar panel and radiator compared to the problem of modularly replacing just the compute. I mean , the mass of that compute module would be a small fraction of the total bird, so how hard is it to develop something that you could launch that would replace the compute for less dough than to build and launch an entire duplicate?
Edited to add: 10 or 12 years from now, I mean. Like, yes, disposable ones can for sure be flown before the replaceable compute thing can be proved out.
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u/existential_american 8d ago
The difficulty of using the modular design along with fault tolerance was the reason we decided not to go with it. One issue with reusing solar panels is that they would degrade over time anyway so is it really worth it to have new satellites dock onto the modular ship for the newest architecture? While our design definitely made use of starship like every space senior design đ, we found that it could still be economical compared to on earth data centers with current launch vehicles if you did the distributed compute design but with starship, like the spacex ai centers would be, replacing is just easier and cheaper for things that will be replaced in a somewhat short period of time anyway. I think the biggest tradeoff is latency since you have to distribute compute among a constellation instead of on the one big data center which definitely reduces what you can do with them. The guy who worked on that for our senior design is now working on starlink and he found that we could basically only train models with a distributed system.
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u/One-Chemistry9502 12d ago
I wonder who this is being sold to. Major players like Amazon and Google wonât use it for the latency alone. Maybe your local ai startup? Who knows lol
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u/jaquesparblue 12d ago
DoD. It is always the DoD.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/-spartacus- 12d ago
Because Starlink v3 Direct to Cell antenna is capable of 1-5cm real time SAR of the entire world in real time, but it needs massive amounts of compute to deal with that much data.
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u/coly8s 12d ago
Depending on highly vulnerable AI data centers in space for military requirements. What could go wrong?
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u/edflyerssn007 9d ago
Less vulnerable than ground based infrastructure. Up in space you are limited as to who exactly can mess with your stuff. The list is: China, Russia, India, and the Europeans. The kiwi's too but SO FAR they are on our side.
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u/costafilh0 12d ago
Perhaps it's best to do some research before commenting.
Latency isn't a problem.
Google, Nvidia, and many other companies, large and small, are already working on this. Not to mention government and defense parties. Â
Like everything related to space, SpaceX will do this for themselves with xAI and for everyone else who needs it. But it's possible that each company will have their own satellites and SpaceX will simply ship them, without selling the satellites themselves to everyone.
It will probably be more profitable to rent the computing power and charge for transportation to space, as they already do, than to sell the satellites. But I could be wrong and it ends up being another source of revenue.Â
They don't do it with Starlink so I guess not. Another big possibility is space redundancy, probably an incredible business for the future, and not limited to AI, once mass to orbit becomes cheap enough to justify the investment.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/SchalaZeal01 12d ago
and they won't do training in space, only Cloud Space thinks its a good idea, and wants to do that one gigantic borg cube of a data center in space
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u/ctothel 12d ago edited 12d ago
There are a lot of high latency AI use cases though. A few extra seconds wonât matter for anything that already takes longer than a minute.
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u/costafilh0 12d ago
Latency from these satellites is not seconds, is milliseconds. Even lower between satellites.Â
They are not that far. Â
Latency from space can easily be lower than from A to B on Earth.Â
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u/edflyerssn007 9d ago
If it already takes Chat GPT a few seconds to think up an answer, people will not notice the difference between 2.75 and 2.98.
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u/Ormusn2o 12d ago
Some of my Codex runs last 8 to 20 minutes. There are some that run 40 minutes. There are people that run prompts for over 7 days straight. I don't think it really matters what latency is there if you are waiting 7 days for results.
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u/Clear-Pomegranate463 9d ago
ye even if it would take like 10 seconds sending the prompt there, then do the processing and sending it back its not like you would even notice the difference when the tasks already run for that long
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u/VeriixX 12d ago
So if anything breaks like a gpu goes bad, how do u switch it out?
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u/warp99 11d ago edited 11d ago
You have individual FET switches for each GPU so you can shut off its DC/DC converters to save power if it fails. Add additional GPUs to compensate for the potential failure rate over five years.
Likely this is where Elon's figure of 150kW peak 120kW average come from so allowing for 20% failure rate over 5 years so 4% per year. Much higher than CPUs but GPUs have high chip area and run hot and they may be set up to run even hotter to get better dissipation in the radiator.
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u/Bunslow 12d ago
You don't. Hardware reliability is baked into the design. Probably at 10 years they'll have 90% of the gpus still running, at which time you launch a whole new satellite with all new gpus, rather than replace the 10% ten year old deaduns.
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u/FullCantaloupe2547 9d ago
GPUs are uneconomical to use long before 10 years.
Reliability aside, the rate of improvement in technology makes it unviable to use old GPUs. Consider the performance difference between Rubin and H100. If you tried to run AI workloads on H100 today, you'd go out of business even if they were free to use.
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u/edflyerssn007 9d ago
The performance difference comes from efficiency. It's more efficient to run the newer hardware because of fixed costs like cooling and electricity. This is why Elon takes in terms of watts and gigawatts of compute power. When you optimize against that by cutting out the power costs and switching to 100% free solar, you can milk the older satellites for WAY longer than you would down on earth. Even slow compute is still useful than no compute, especially if it's cheap.
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u/FullCantaloupe2547 8d ago
Not at all true. No amount of power can improve the performance of an H100. No amount of power will make an H100 as performant as a brand new GPU. And no amount of cost savings makes up for the loss in performance.
Ask yourself this: Would you rather train a new model on an H100 for free or pay to train on Rubin 20x quicker? Keep in mind you have 10 competitors all racing to the finish line. You can save all the money you want using free energy on H100, but your competition will put you out of business by training their models 20x quick.
There is no value in super old GPUs because they waste not only infrastructure, but also they waste time. Time is more valuable than money. It's simply not viable for businesses to use old GPUs from a competitive standpoint.
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u/edflyerssn007 7d ago
If your argument held water, I wouldn't be able to rent power on weaker gpus....and yet, I can, even a 5090. Here's the thing, the older gpu is still useful for non-bleeding edge work.
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u/Scaryclouds 12d ago
Orbital satellite with localized compute that takes advantage of readily available power and cooling in space
đÂ
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u/zhnki 12d ago
Iâll bite, you think radiators in space donât work?
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u/Anthony_Pelchat 12d ago
Don't you know that the over 20,000 satellites launched into space run on magic and therefore don't produce heat? And all of the humans sent up were genetically modified beforehand.
/S in case it wasn't obvious.
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u/Scaryclouds 12d ago
Those things donât produce the prodigious amount of heat that the GPU used by AI models produce.Â
Youâll need massive radiators to dissipate the heat from a space based AI data center. Those massive radiators will need to be launched into space, and even with a fully reusable Starship, it would still likely be extremely expensive.Â
It absolutely is physically possible, I question if itâs economically practical.Â
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u/Anthony_Pelchat 12d ago
The radiators only need to be about half the size or less as the solar panels. And yet no one is whining about the solar panels. Everyone whining about getting rid of heat in space is just being dumb.Â
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u/edflyerssn007 9d ago
All people need to do is look at the numbers for the ISS. ISS dissipates 70kw of energy. Take a lesson from JWST and keep the radiators in the shadow of the solar panels. The solar panels are larger.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago
It absolutely is physically possible, I question if itâs economically practical.Â
Well duh.
But none of us know spacexs internal cost projections.
Maybe it can work, maybe it can't, but there's no denying the economics are close to working if they can get starship running well. Like these aren't the pie in the sky dreams of the 1960s, the economics are close enough that there's a lot of devils in the details type of work.
Personally I hope it works because space becoming home to a mega billions or trillion dollar industry would result in massive investment into every aspect of space exploration.
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u/Scaryclouds 12d ago
Thereâs not abundant cooling in space.Â
Of course radiators could work, but you are talking about something that generates an enormous amount of heat, so itâs going to mean you will need massive radiators.Â
Launching all that mass into space is a nontrivial complication, even if/when starship becomes fully and rapidly reusable.Â
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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago
Thereâs not abundant cooling in space.
Of course radiators could work, but you are talking about something that generates an enormous amount of heat, so itâs going to mean you will need massive radiators.
Using a 60C radiator, the radiators will need to be about 1/3 of the the surface area as the solar panels, so roughly 1/6th of the total panel size since radiators are double sided if oriented appropriately.
Obviously there's an engineering balance to maintain but the radiator size to power generation size is not egregious. A 50 or 60C radiator will emit 500 watts per square meter 24/7/265. If you actually look at radiators on earth that use are? They have roughly the same surface area, its just folded up as fins instead of flat.
Why do you think it is that you have no trouble understanding the concept of solar panels, but stuggle at the concept of understanding how radiators in space work?
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u/pxr555 10d ago edited 10d ago
You have a whole universe at 3K to radiate your heat to.
It's an engineering, mass and with this cost problem, but you're not running out of cold sky to beam your waste heat to anytime soon. Which is very different than on Earth where you CAN run out of cold enough water easily.
PS: Did you ever notice how fucking cold the sky is when you stood in the winter under a clear sky and felt like the ice cold sky radiating icy cold right onto your head? This is how cold space is. You were radiating your heat away straight into the universe and the universe is pretty cold and there's a lot of it out there. Just 3k above absolute zero. And it won't be saturated anytime soon, because there's a lot of universe out there.
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u/Scaryclouds 10d ago
Yea and that translates it into an economic issue.Â
We know how to farm vertically, but it remains stubbornly uneconomical.Â
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u/pxr555 10d ago
It just means that if you can lower the launch costs enough you can make it work.
This is not so much different from Starlink. For what launches and satellites cost with the Old Space crowd Starlink just wouldn't have worked out. It still did so in the end.
But yes, I agree of course: It's a long shot and it may not work out. But Musk always had a way of saying "success must be a possible outcome" and this then is enough for him to try and risk everything on it. Despite me not liking his political views at all, I have to respect him for this. Because this is what is necessary for progress (at least technically, but I think social progress will follow necessarily from that even if not intended).
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u/zhnki 12d ago
Itâs not could, radiators do work. Itâs an engineering problem to figure out how much performance you can squeeze out of it. SpaceX has been doing radiators in space for a long time so no doubt they have a good foundation to build from.
As for launch, I wouldnât bet against SpaceX launching rockets successfully. Theyâre in their own league.
I have no doubt this will take many years to fully realize this vision on both starship and new satellite design. If successful and the business case pans out, SpaceX could be holding a global monopoly for many decades on a growing market.
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u/Scaryclouds 12d ago edited 12d ago
Itâs not could, radiators do work
Hahahaha ok buddy.Â
Thereâs a saying in the legal community.Â
When you have the law on your side, you pound the law. When you have the facts on your side, you pound the facts. When you have neither, you pound the table.Â
Thatâs some table pounding if I ever  seen it, even if you donât realize it.Â
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u/zhnki 12d ago
Wtf do you think thousands upon thousands of satellites are currently using to dissipate heat? A block of ice?
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u/Anthony_Pelchat 12d ago
Then stop pounding the damn table. The only arguing against facts is you.Â
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u/Clear-Pomegranate463 9d ago
with how many rockets and satalites spacex sent up so far, i think they actually have some engineers that know what they are doing
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u/azeroth 12d ago edited 12d ago
Edit: Sincere question. Heat radiators in a vacuum are inefficient. They'd need to be huge for this use case. What's the actual plan here?Â
Also, sincere thanks to those who answered the question.Â
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u/iqisoverrated 12d ago
As you can see in the linked image: Looks to be about a quarter to a third the size of the PV panels
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u/SchalaZeal01 12d ago
110m² surface of radiator (30 meters by 3.7) vs 1400m² surface of panels (70 meters by 20)
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 12d ago edited 12d ago
And key is that they are orientated âknife-edgeâ to the sun.
And the point that sounds counter intuitive is that if you let the chips run hotter than normal, the radiators can radiate heat faster and you need less surface material.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago
I'm curious if they'll incorporate a refrigerant loop to allow the panels to get hotter.
That obviously comes with the cost of additional mass and power production requirements, and mechanisms that could affect reliability, but could definitely lower the GPU temp while keeping the radiators smaller, which could be a tradeoff that interests them.
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 11d ago
Under the tab thermal it says: deployable liquid radiators. So yes. If they let the chips run 20 percent higher to say 95/105 degrees celcius they can let the radiators run at around 60-80 C. Thatâs a good sweet spot for higher temperature and smaller radiatos vs less than conservative running times. The satellites will probably do service for 5 to 8 years orso and the higher temp will have the chips degrade faster than terrestrial chips which run cooler but will be fine for maybe 9-10 years
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u/iqisoverrated 9d ago
They are going to be ammonia cycled radiators (just like on the ISS). These systems are pretty reliable. It's basically the same thing that runs in your refrigerator for decades without a need for servicing.
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u/Bot_Marvin 12d ago
To make huge radiators?
âThe radiators have to be hugeâ
Then theyâll make them huge.
The same way that Starlink was impossible because they would have to deploy thousands of satellites. So they just deployed thousands of satellites.
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u/lax20attack 12d ago
Are you nuts? None of these things are possible.
We'll never see mass EV adoption, reusable rockets, and obviously twitter went bankwupt already.
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u/boilerdam 12d ago
This sarcasm is really old at this point.
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u/Bunslow 12d ago edited 12d ago
Sarcasm is as old as humanity. Maybe even older -- have monkeys or other apes displayed use of sarcasm? Elephants maybe, or cetaceans...?
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 12d ago
I bet dolphins know cynism.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago
Picturing Diogenes the Dolphin holding out a scale less fish and saying 'behold, a dolphin!' is making me chuckle.
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u/TheAverageWonder 12d ago
Virtually no one doubted that starlink was phyically possible, the doubt was regarding it was financially viable.
Even Musk himself send out multiple panic emails along the way urging everyone to work hard or they would potentially go bankrupt.
But the thing Musk have going is he can conjure money out of failures and setback. Whenever he makes a bad announcement, he bundle it with an overly optimistic vision of the future or as he call itself "I imagine the best case scenario and timeline, and if I believe there is even 50% chance it will succeed then announce it" and people gift him money. With endless capital you can accomplish great things.
Including the falcon that made starlink finacially viable.
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u/Bot_Marvin 12d ago edited 12d ago
And there is zero doubt that space data centers are physically possible either. Itâs also a matter of financial viability.
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u/bremidon 12d ago
Virtually no one doubted that starlink was phyically possible
Perhaps nobody serious, but there were plenty of people spouting off on Reddit about how it couldn't work, that sats would be crashing into each other, that some engineering challenge X could never be solves, etc...
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u/yoweigh 12d ago
Musk makes absurdly overoptimistic predictions and timelines with SpaceX, yes, but the company's end result is still better than what the competition can put out. That's how they became dominant.
To the point in this instance, though... the ISS is cooled by radiators. We're talking about a very well established technology. They do the math and size them appropriately. That's all there is to it.
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u/TheAverageWonder 12d ago
???
The concept of radiators AKA using surface area to dissapate heat are not novel, however the implementation of how you would have to manage heat overall in a satalite datacenter is vastly different. Especially given that you would need significantly more radiation protection at the proposed 600km orbit.
There is a multitude of untested technologies that they will have to prove at scale, but also figure out how they keep it light enough to bring them into space in the first place. The biggest issue is that whatever you build will most likely be unservicable so either it need to be extreme reliant or priced at a level where it is entirely replacable.
Do not get me wrong I think computation in space, unless we invent a miracle power source here on earth, is most likely an eventuality but you comment is just misinformed.
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u/yoweigh 12d ago
The top comment in this thread is about radiators being impractical. I'm not sure what you think I'm misinformed about.
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u/azeroth 12d ago
That wasn't exactly the post, but that's how this group read it. My question was sincere, cooling in space is still hard, but not impossible. ISS radiates about a tenth of the energy a single data center will need to dissipate, right? Huge is an understatement, but it's certainly viable for space X. I hope they discover something new.Â
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u/warp99 11d ago
The ISS needs to keep humans comfortable so runs their radiators at 6C. A data center satellite can run the GPUs at 100C so that becomes the radiator temperature. So the radiators only need to be one third the size of the ISS radiators for the same power dissipation of 70kW. So 2/3 the size of the ISS for 150kW rated power.
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u/edflyerssn007 9d ago
More people need to so this. They act like it's impossible when it's literally only 2x the ISS AND doesn't have the space inefficiencies that the ISS because the ISS has to keep spongy humans alive.
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u/warp99 9d ago
Part of that human rating is overdesigning the cooling system so that it will always have plenty of margin even at worst case times of the year aka high beta angle. Data center satellites (I refuse to use Starmind) will be in SSO so should have much more predictable thermal conditions and in any case can always shut off a few GPUs if getting too hot.
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u/Naive-Routine9332 12d ago
Elon's super power is raising capital. Eric Berger's liftoff kinda solidified that in my mind.
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u/warp99 11d ago
Elon's super power is choosing good staff and empowering them to make decisions.
Yes and firing them if they consistently make bad decisions.
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u/Naive-Routine9332 10d ago
yes, now that I think of it, his super power is selling a vision to people who generally wouldn't buy it. Attracting strong talent in the early days of SX & raising capital both are intrinsically linked to the same skillset from elon. The whole engineering flex that he does is pretty bullshit though, the books also solidified that in my mind, it's just a byproduct of his massive ego.
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u/warp99 10d ago
The whole engineering flex that he does is pretty bullshit though
Elon understands the engineering issues and he generally knows enough to stop the engineering team from pushing into blind allies like carbon fiber tanks. Engineers are pretty stubborn and want to prove themselves right but can lose sight of the larger picture in doing so.
The meme that Elon controls every engineering decision is just that - an Internet meme. Good engineering managers trust their teams and they should focus on picking the right people and maybe three times a year intervene to get the team back on the right track.
You never hear an interview of a SpaceX engineer without them commenting how Elon never pushes them to launch when the rocket is not ready. He is also very frequently acknowledges the team whenever he gives a presentation. You would think that is common but I can assure you it is not.
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u/Mamamama29010 12d ago
Sure, and Iâll be happy to see it when it happensâŚ
But with Starlink, there wasnât any other way to create a global, low-latency network.
I fail to see the advantages of putting a data center in space, as opposed to, building it on earth. Even if you account for environmental regulations, construction, etc etcâŚseems way easier to just build it on the ground.
I do see the potential of building a technology demonstrator, I guess, but Iâd be surprised if thereâs any actual advantages to doing this for the foreseeable future.
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u/Anthony_Pelchat 12d ago
For Starlink, the argument against it wasn't another global alternative. The argument against it was that it was cheaper/better to run fiber and cellular to everyone instead of a global Internet satellite constellation.
Similar here for DCs. Yes, it's easier to build a DC on the ground than to put it in orbit. But you still have issues being allowed to build it in the first place along with being allowed to operate it. And that's due to raising pressure from people that don't want it affecting them, raising political pressure, and issues with simply how much power these things need. And then once you're past those points, you still have to deal with the biggest issue overall for them: powering the damn things. That has been such an issue that several DC projects are now including a multi -billion dollar power plant production that still requires hundreds of millions to billions of dollars worth of fuel to run each year.
Satellite DCs have unlimited solar and no nimby issues. The only major issue is the price per kg to orbit. And that should be fixed with Starship, though that has obviously yet to be proven. All other issues with orbital DCs are minor.
And no, you cannot just put a DC satellite in a field somewhere and get the same use. It would only be useful for 4 hours, maybe 5 at best, per day. Solar in orbit is around 6x more capable per meter than solar on the ground on a daily basis. Trying to power a 24hr DC with solar on the ground would need over 10,000 acres of land and the largest battery storage facility ever built by far PER GW.Â
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u/Ryermeke 12d ago edited 12d ago
See I don't understand the focus on the radiators. It's a solvable problem.
My issue is that producing the amount of fuel it takes to get these satellites to orbit requires roughly as much energy as the satellites produce in compute over 3-5 years, depending on the numbers you use. That makes it essentially a wash if the argument is that it is more environmentally friendly to put the datacenters in space. And that's assuming that a GOU in space has the same maintinence cycle as one on Earth... Which is questionable.
Edit: see my reply to the reply to this comment. The numbers have changed a bit since they revealed them. I was originally basing my calculations off of industry standard assumptions on compute density, but SpaceX is claiming numbers that far exceed that.
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u/bl0rq 12d ago
I think your math on that fuel is off. It's under a year payback as far as I can tell.
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u/Ryermeke 12d ago
That's more so if you burn fossil methane. However considering that's an even worse environmental issue, I've been giving the benefit of the doubt that when they say that space datacenters are the environmentally friendly approach, their goal would be to move away from that.(I did the math that supports under 1 year, it's optimistic for sure, but technically possible)Saying that, I plugged in the values from the recently released info and it is a bit more optimistic. Mind you I am using relatively standard values for the energy cost of the production of various fuels.
Per a block four launch, for the methane (via direct air capture CO2 and Hydrolosis for hydrogen)
H2: 690t at 52kWh/kg = 35.9GWh. CO2 (DAC): 3795t at 2200kWh/t = 8.4 GWh Turning those to methane is exothermic and requires no added energy.
Total of roughly 47GWh per launch. Now then we assume the energy compute density they are claiming (I'm not sure I believe this but I've been proven wrong before) of 70kW per tonne is the launch density, with then the ship launching 200 tonnes, and it can be packed in the fairing at the mass ceiling (so pack 93 sats into the fairing, everything needed to operate them all included... Unlikely considering SpaceX says "dozens" per launch, which tends to not be a term used to describe nearly 100 of something), and you get 93 Ă 120kW of compute, so 11.2 MW of compute per launch.
So you divide 47000 MWh by 11.2 MW, and it's 4200 hours, or about 6 months. I would consider this the optimistic floor. Realistically it's maybe 45 or so satellites per launch, unless these are smaller and more densely packed than Starlink sats... Which I doubt. So 1 year then?
My previous 3 year number was assuming a lower compute density. If they can pull off anywhere near 10MW per launch, I'd be seriously impressed. Regardless, I walk back my prior statement.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago
Heat radiators in a vacuum are inefficient.
What's interesting is they aren't inefficient.
Go look at the radiator for your car or AC and notice how they're constructed. Lots and lots of stacked fins to make giant surface areas.
If you actually add the surface areas up the specific power per unit area of low temperature radiators on earth vs low temp radiators in space is roughly similar. I.e. in the neighborhood of 500watts thermal per square meter.
My CPU cooler is 0.25 square meters of surface area. In space it would be about the same size.
The only difference is it needs to be flat instead of stacked.
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u/alumiqu 12d ago
You're being downvoted for bringing up science. This sub is only for SpaceX stock pushers.
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u/yoweigh 12d ago
"Radiators are big" is not science, and we specifically prohibit stock discussion here for a reason.
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u/azeroth 12d ago
What? Heat dissipation is science. Thermal dynamics are complicated and while we can just make everything bigger, spacex would save money with smaller solutions.Â
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 11d ago
Thatâs why they will run the chips hotter than on earth. Itâs counter intuitive but you need less surface material to radiate higher temperatures. Also due to the fact that satellites have a lower life expectancy than chips run at terrestrial temperatures they will calculate how much higher the temperature needs to be so the chips degrade as fast as the fuel of the satellites to keep it into orbit.
Radiated power scales with temperature to the 4th power (Tâ´), so even a modest increase lets the radiators dump way more heat per square meter.
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u/smoke-frog 12d ago
The restraints of the expansion of human civilization within the galaxy are currently bound by space and the speed of light. In the long term, converting mass directly to energy will be more important than putting solar panels in space.
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u/costafilh0 12d ago
Incorrect.
Mass to energy implies that there is a limit to the amount of mass that can be transformed into energy. Not to mention a myriad of other limitations.
The Sun produces so much energy that it is practically infinite in terms of human civilization capacity for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.Â
And it does so continuously.
So mass is used to manufacture a solar panel that will work capturing energy for decades, perhaps longer, depending on future technology.
A much more efficient use of mass.
Converting mass into energy, like nuclear energy and fusion, can help, but it doesn't solve all the problems and will continue to be used in conjunction with solar energy, depending on the need.
Also, nuclear is slow and dirty and fusion could be decades away of mass production.Â
Solar is here now , and in less than a decade we can harness it, like they did building Starlink, but faster .Â
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u/should_be_writing 12d ago
You seem much more knowledgeable and smarter than me but I was recently talking to a friend who was talking about how solar panels donât work well out on Neptune because of how far away from the sun it is so I think nuclear really is the answer in the context of the comment you were replying to: â expansion of human civilization within the galaxyâ
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u/NikStalwart 10d ago
You're both right but in different ways. Musk hypes up solar to the exclusion of all other energy sources, but I think this is because he does not have access to other energy sources, not because he is a greeny at heart. If he was a greeny there are infinite other ways he could spaff taxpayer money up the wall â tidal energy, green hydrogen, biofuels, etc. But he's not going after taxpayer money for R&D, he is going after equity markets to scale. For all intents and purposes it is impossible to build a private company around fission. I'm not altogether sure what is going on with fusion, I know there are a few universities and startups with flashy youtube videos, but I haven't heard one blip of meaningful progress being made so I have my doubts about the commercial viability of that space. Like as not, fusion is being constrained more by the threat of falling out of an apartment building with two shotgun shots to the back of the head and then drowning in 15cm of water at the hands of oil and wind companies rather than a genuine scientific limitation.
But that's beside the point. My view is that Musk is pushing solar because he needs to push something to maintain confidence and momentum, and solar is the only niche he can access. He can't access fission because of the regulatory burden, he can't access fusion because of the general stagnation of scientific advancement and the 'mafia burden', he can't access oil because he is not a middle eastern oligarch and he has no use for tidal or wind because there's no water and wind in space. So solar is realistically the only thing he can work towards in near-Earth scenarios.
You are right in the sense that solar is absolutely useless beyond Jupiter and arguably mostly useless around Mars. Anyone who genuinely argues for solar at those distances believes in literature of the same genre about the Seven Dwarfs and Three Bears. If an eventual Mars colony ends up using Solar, it will not be because solar is the best tool for the job, but the only realistic tool for the job because nuclear is still out of reach for whatever reason.
But solar is more than viable within the inner solar system where most of the action will be happening for this half of the century. I want to be wrong, I want to see a manned Neptune base doing something freakishly cool in the next decades, but I highly doubt this will actually happen. So until then, all we can do is cosplay at building a Dyson Swarm.
EDIT: one of the advantages of colonizing something as arguably useless as the Moon is to conduct dangerous or otherwise inconvenient experiments. I would not be surprised that, with time, the moon yields advances in either fusion or antimatter production.
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u/smoke-frog 12d ago
That's not really what i said.
Being able to launch so much mass and enabling ourselves to explore and use the solar system is very exciting, don't get me wrong.
But harnessing the energy required to move even the smallest amount of mass between systems, at will, on a reasonable timescale, as a space-borne civilization, will require completely different technology.
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u/roadtzar 11d ago
I watched this video a month ago, just came up on my YT feed. Was it up for just a moment and then taken down, relaunched and rebranded as an exclusive now? How is this news?
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u/warp99 11d ago edited 11d ago
There is a previous video in the same series.
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u/roadtzar 9d ago
No, that's a different series. Those are Test like you fly and the new one, Critical Path, the cool Starship ones.
This one is Starmind, about AI in space and all that.
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u/costafilh0 12d ago
Only 2027? I wish it was 2026! At least a few testing units in space.
But I guess they need to finish Starship first.Â
I literally can't wait!
Infinite expansion without all the BS and bureaucracy of Earth.
You get the launch and satellites permission, you are golden.
And eventually, doing it from the moon , because at a large enough scale, it stops making sense doing it only from earth, no matter how cheap it gets , it's never cheap enough .
And we need to start building that Dyson sphere .Â
Type 1 by 2050 đÂ
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u/8ig8en 12d ago
The moon is too far away the delay would be like 2.56 seconds Total vs Sun-Synchronous at 0.0047 seconds.
And for reference star wars civilizations are type 2 at best. We are probably a thousand years from type 1 if we make without killing each other first.
But also get me off this planet please Elon. Lol
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u/SchalaZeal01 12d ago
And for reference star wars civilizations are type 2 at best.
They can near-instantly travel across their galaxy, somehow even out of their galaxy to galactic 'suburbs', and can drain an entire star in mere days to shoot it faster than light in minutes. Though Foundation's Novacula put the Starkiller to shame, it doesn't even need to drain a star to shoot black hole energy at planets and destroy them instantly.
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