alt Hacker News[flagged]
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> Yes, Elon is very sane.
tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession.
He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot.
We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand.
My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program.
Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space
He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
-George Bernard Shaw
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
Grifter gonna grift
Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce.
Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.
but yeah, the tech is a long way away.
*Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.
We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.
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This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.