SpaceX's plan: Put all the data centers in space, then profit

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The world's most valuable companies are almost impossible to avoid. One makes your iPhone. One delivers packages to your door. One built the Windows operating system running in workplaces worldwide, while another makes chips powering countless computers and devices. There's the firm behind a scrappy search engine you may have heard of: Google.

And then, there's SpaceX - Elon Musk's money-losing rocket start-up that has soared into the orbit of all of those tech juggernauts with a fleet of fantastical plans instead of ubiquitous products. With a more than $2.4 trillion valuation as of Thursday, SpaceX is the world's sixth-most-valuable company.

Its market value is based on promises of putting data centers in space and establishing a colony of a million people on Mars, a premise so far-fetched that three experts reached by The Washington Post to break down the factors driving SpaceX's valuation declined to ascribe any impact to it, despite the fact that Musk's compensation is tied to SpaceX achieving that goal.

"[If] anyone else said it, they would probably have him institutionalized," said Greg Martin, managing director of private markets at the firm Rainmaker Securities, though he noted Musk has delivered on ambitious promises in the past.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/spacexs-plan-put-all-the-data-centers-in-space-then-profit-185429840.html

Why don't we just send Musk to Mars ASAP?

[dalton99a]

1. SpaceX, the biggest welfare queen ever

[RockRaven]

2. "data centers in space" are the words of an absolutely shameless liar aimed at

willfully ignorant credulous morons and the media who gleefully enable and propagate such deceptions.

[haele]

4. Vacuums insulate.

It may be cold in space, but in a vacuum, there's no way for heat to dissipate, so hot things stay hot within their range.
I mean, you might be able to operate a data center out by opposite Earth.in orbit once you're able to figure out how to use space vacuum temperature into a cooling system, but that rather defeats the Low Earth Orbit requirement to have near instant access to the data being produced.
You also lose the orbital clearing a planet or moon creates with its gravity

[hatrack]

16. Precisely - what's the plan? Launch cargo rockets full of icewater, or liquid nitrogen, or other coolants?

Among the many idiocies contained within SpaceX, this is very near the top.

Data centers in space. Why?

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Heat doesn't dissipate in space, you need LARGE aluminum fins

And the data can't roll around fast enough to make it work, even if it's chopped up into 30 times more data centers.

This will never happen. It's a pipe dream worthy of an opium den.

[AZJonnie]

5. At their heart, one major benefit of data centers lies in their proximity to the end users

Primarily connected to said consumers via massive hard-wired, physical connections for the majority of the route. More importantly, the power to run them also comes from massive, hard-wired physical connections that "data centers" in low earth orbit would not and could not have.

Thus, putting "data centers in space" is beyond stupid, at least if they're going to be operated for the same purposes as the ones currently being forced into terrestrial communities. IOW, if their WERE such things, they'd have very different purposes than the ones conjured by the term "data center" in the minds of regular people.

They might be used to RELAY data, but that's nothing new, it's pretty much what satellites do.

And creating a Mars colony housing 1M human beings is somehow, amazingly, even more fucking stupid.

[Justice matters.]

17. Yep. Imagine having to feed 1M people daily on a desert like

planet Mars...

We live in a con-men's drug-addled world now, in full decline that puts all living creature above deep-ocean waters at risk of getting extinct in a very short lapse of time.

[Maeve]

6. Why do I hear this as "Steal the underpants, then profit"??

[Matthew28]

7. I think space is the perfect place for it

Seriously, if it offers the cooling needed without messing with our fresh water, solar powers it instead of sucking from our grid and doesn't mess with our environment it is a win.

Space should be developed and a.i is something literally the entire world is using daily.

I'd only suggest that these datacenters should be put outwards of a thousand miles from earth orbit. Maybe even outwards of luna orbit would be even better. Space is huge...Developing it is something we should be dong.

[LastDemocratInSC]

10. Musk has mentioned a million data centers in orbit.

Perhaps he does not know about the likelihood of a Kessler event that would deny access to Earth orbit for a long, long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

[edhopper]

11. Read the up post

heat doesn't dissipate in a vacuum.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. Well, it does, but only by radiation

The advantage of big solar panels collecting the energy is that they give you a big shadow where you can put the radiators to radiate out the heat. See, for instance, the cooling radiators that circulate ammonia on the ISS:



But this is more weight to send up, so it may make it uneconomic. I personally think the fundamental problem will be that you can't repair or replace any part, without an astronaut (which the ISS has, of course). So once one thing fails - or the hardware becomes out of date - the whole thing is redundant. With a data centre on Earth, you just replace or upgrade parts when you want.

[edhopper]

15. All true

but it makes the cost, already ridiculously untenable, even higher. Chips need to be replaced every 18 - 24 months.

Musk is not a visionary, he is a flim flam man.

[-misanthroptimist]

8. Well...

...Musk made the Cybertruck happen, didn't he? And that's been...wait...never mind.

[questionseverything]

9. Equal and opposite reaction

This would be inserting a huge action, we don’t understand so can’t begin to know how to or where to insert

It could easily start an end time scenario for the humans on our little blue dot

And what for?

So the ptb can electronically know everything in everyone ‘s lives? And store it indefinitely?

[edhopper]

12. To remember

Musk never came up with a real innovation, he bought companies that already were innovative. All his hare brained schemes have failed.
The one new thing that he accomplished was the Cyber truck, a complete failure.

[highplainsdem]

13. Even a serious attempt to do it would destroy SpaceX financially:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221273906