He will do absolutely anything to not spend money on making the world he lives in a better place for all. So build a data center in space, just add a little apartment for yourself. Imagine looking down on the whole world! What power!
An utterly unworkable, absurdly costly idea. I’m sure the same investor-lemmings who buy heavily into IPOs which have no viable business model will fall for this too.
Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don’t have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.
Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?
As much as I dislike Musk, he probably could tell you in detail. His company is not the only one looking into compute in space, either.
Yeah, other CEOs also fail basic physics.
Almost like Musk had to buy his physics diploma, eh?
there’s no convection cooling in space, because vacuum is a very good thermal insulator. compute in space does not scale because of that alone. you would need massive (F/M)IR radiator arrays to get rid of the thermal energy.
Nah, it’s a grift. The Melon’s pitch straight up includes factually wrong physics claims. It is not easier, nor cheaper, to have data centers in space.
Actual scientists have done the math. Even disregarding maintenance for data corruption from radiation, and assuming the best near future tech. It would take 10 times an ISS equivalent structure to power and cool down a single server rack.
Musk promised he wants to get 1 Tera Watt of LLM processing power in orbit. That’s 10,000 times an ISS of solar panels and IR radiators for cooling. The enterprise is completely unrealistic.
The whole thing is just a con to get governments to funnel more money into his companies without having to deliver any actual results.
Just confirming what I’ve suspected: the point of the space datacenter thing is to keep the tools of oppression out of reach of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Data center in space: untouchable
Strictly necessary ground radio station to get any usable amount of data to and from said data center: still flammable
A data center in international waters is immensely more practical in most regards, if legal jurisdiction is your complaint.
Great idea. And for each data center ship you can have a desalination ship for the cooling water. And both will burn bunker fuel, of course.
Would the water need to be desalinated if it’s only going to be cooling the equipment?
If you want the cooling system to survive, yes.
Ocean water is atrociously corrosive, prone to clogging tubes and short circuits much more easily than distilled water.
Interesting
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought. As much as I would appreciate him investing the kind of money that would be required to orbit a viable data center into things humanity actually needs, I would also be perfectly happy witnessing him blow hundreds of billions on a fruitless project. Dumb shit doesn’t even understand basic physics and thermodynamics. It just demonstrates how he is an “ideas man” while actual smart people carry him on their shoulders. Wish he would just fuck off to mars already.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought.
He’s a con artist.
Exactly. Once the data center in space idea inevitably flames out, he’ll come up with some new bullshit “vision” that the rubes will lap up just as eagerly.
While he’s not smart enough to understand what a tough problem cooling servers in space would be, at least some of the engineers working on it might invent some interesting technology while failing to build a datacenter in space. Which is more than I can say about his other expenses like failing to buy elections, or failing to only have sons.
or failing to only have sons
Soo, he thougt his genes are “stronger” or something like it? This would be another failing to understand how things work.
If I remember correctly he had all his kids via IVF and selected for XY only.
Keeping one rack of GPU running needs basically all the uninhabited parts of the international space station. That’s roughly 100 kilowatt. That’s 10.000 ISS sized installations, man’s most expensive object ever made, for a gigawatt datacenter. I just hope he’s forced to bankroll this personally
It’s stupid on so many levels… yeah first and foremost basically everything about space is terrible for data centers.
What are the 3 things a data center needs.
Power, cooling, good internet connection. Obviously power is complicated as heck, yeah solar is a bit more direct, but also hits total blackouts when it winds up in the shadow of things… and shielding etc… from all the radiation is a pain and a half, solar pannels will need to be drastically bigger and heavier than their earth counterparts, which is expensive as hell to send up there.
but the harder part… cooling. People think of space as cold, but that’s innacurate… there’s no air to be cold… things stay at the temperature they are… if you have something constantly pumping out heat… it’s insanely difficult to get the heat to radiate out.
It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.
But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.
Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.
The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.
Just read a comment about exactly this a few days ago. Anyone working on space components know that a very hat problem to work on is how to keep things cool because, well - having the fucking sun shine on things most of the time directly without the ozone layer and air to dissipate heat in and way does make things go hot.
Also, you forgot a very important thing a data center needs: people that work there. That is one of the reasons we currently build data centers so close to urban sprawls in Arizona instead of somewhere in the middle of Alaska or in polar regions. There must be personnel working onsite all the time.
Also it will need repairs. And probably more often than not due to the radiation.
And micro meteorites pelting it
For a man who keeps talking about colonizing Mars, Musk seems remarkably surprised that you can’t permanently colonize a state’s politics. Spending hundreds of millions on campaigns didn’t come with a warranty, and moving SpaceX again won’t change how voting works.
I doubt voting would be allowed on Mars if Musk gets his way.
oh no it would be allowed. but it would be designed similar to spaceX’s share policy. Voting is allowed as long as he personally either is indifferent or wants the change, but the second he doesn’t want the change his single vote will override the majority.
