alt Hacker NewsEveryone here ought to reconsider if they are truly an engineer for good.
If you are getting pulled into SpaceX noise... you are working for Elon and the share price. All of this tech is on display for one thing. Share price. Elon.
If you were really a wide thinking engineer... you'd realize what is best are datacenters on Earth, using solar/wind + battery.
Not only does it make way more financial sense than datacenters in space... Earth needs clean energy ASAP. That's where humanity's focus (including our top engineering companies) ought to be.
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Most people who read this site either:
a) own spcx/tsla directly.
b) own it indirectly (index fund).
c) are employed by someone who has a and/or b.
d) all of the above.
Most people would be for the share price going up.
If you're going to suggest we advance in one direction, taking some profoundly negative stance against another advancement, like this all isn't a part of the same economic system, is a bit disingenuous.
Please save your woke moralizing for Bluesky. People like what they like, engineers & non-engineers alike.
You can like Elon or hate him but reusable rockets are cool AF. I would watch them all day, with out giving 2 shits whether they were making Elon richer or poorer.
I could trust you that datacenters make more sense on earth than in space. Or we could just let the market decide if its a profitable endeavor. Is there some reason to think market forces won't just solve this question? I'm being serious - is there some dysfunction in this market or can we just let it play out and enjoy the show?
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of payloads and demand to put interesting stuff in space for SpaceX to have a profitable business. I don't think "datacenters in space" is a necessary condition for their success.
Which is good, because "data centers in space" has never made sense. Running a data center requires a ton of energy (because chips are functionally just heaters) and a way to recapture / dissipate that energy to keep the chips at an optimal operating temp. All the terrestrial arguments around data centers and water use are about cooling.
As far as I'm aware, space remains a vacuum. You can radiate some amount of heat off into a vacuum, but nowhere near enough to run modern hardware 24/7 at peak flops or whatever. Also, without an atmosphere, all the hardware you put up there needs to be radiation hardened. Also I know people whine about how few jobs data centers support during ongoing operations but the people who _are_ there are pretty much just swapping out failed drives and components because all these things have finite lifespans.
I've never heard someone explain what bottleneck exists on earth that is slowing data center development/deployment where the solution is "what if we put it in space, instead?" Is it some military defense thing about live target inference for rocket defense or something? I don't get it.