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- Hacker News
- One more week
> Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19)
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
by dmix - isn’t Monday the 18th?by laweijfmvo
- Prediction: SpaceX will launch a handful of GPU-equipped satellites. Maybe they’ll even include some token GPUs on each Starlink satellite so they can throw out some bullshit stats about the vast size of their AI supercluster in space, etc.
They’ll be vague about capacity for a few years, and they’ll be building and acquiring data centers on earth “just while we wait for <breakthrough> that will unlock overnight massive scaling of the space data centers”. The timeline will always be “in the next year”, but no real workloads will run on the space GPUs for a decade. Then, finally, maybe, it’ll happen. Or maybe not, just like FSD. Always around the corner, never quite here.
And it’ll work for meme stock purposes, just like his other companies.
by senordevnyc - > just like FSD
Obviously it’s very late, but Tesla now have vehicles in multiple YS cities taxing people with nobody in the front seats.
It’s coming.
by testing22321 - "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space"
Soooo, how much did he put on that outcome on polymarket?
by Paradigma11 - Why would he do that? A successful IPO is the goal. His shares will go sky high. That is where his money is.by Gys
- If you mean whether he’s putting his money where his mouth is, he is doing that by risking the future of the company that is his biggest asset on it. It may not be exactly 3 years. But is will very likely happen.by geertj
- V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cases by the end of April.by 7e
- Tesla Semi is in productionby johnsimer
- Incredible to get insight into the new things they're trying. Back in the day of the old Space Race this kind of thing was impossible and now an enthusiast can just follow along as incredible feats of engineering are performed. Great stuff!
I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints.
Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI.
Someone once tweeted something like:
> Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.
by arjie - If a decision is smart due to having access to non-public information, that is more a question of ignorance than intelligence.
I can think of all sorts of successful decisions that would definitely be stupid for a normal person to try, due to lack of connections, access to money, high risk, etc.
And maybe to expose my own lack of intelligence, I've always thought eg Robinhood was incredibly dumb. I never in a million years would have thought of the idea of creating an investing app, since there are already many of them, from far more reliable and trustworthy sources. And yet Robinhood has made its founders billions.
- The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!by a34729t
- Close ups of the tail fins and the hull exterior have little hex tiles covering the entire tail fin assembly. There's also different sizes of tile. Exciting to see if that will be enough structural reinforcement.by hparadiz
- Yeah, the tile complexity is worrying. I hope they're able to simplify that or fully streamline the manufacturing and attachment. From the outside, the tiles seem like a Shuttle re-run, and refurbishment of those was one of the long poles in reuse.
- The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing.
I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.
by Fordec - It's okay, Mars doesn't have much atmosphere. We can figure out how to bring them home later.by fwipsy
- I think you’re overstating the problem. All of the tests flown so far were deliberately crippled just to see how much they could get away with. They installed fewer tiles than were really needed, leaving gaps in large surfaces and even leaving the hinge areas of the flaps unprotected. The resulting damage was spectacular and terrible for reusability, but the ships still functioned. That actually bodes well for human spaceflight! Losing a tile crippled the Space Shuttle, but the Starship looks to be much more robust.by db48x
- From my understanding, they have been intentionally sabotaging the heat shield to test the limits of the ship. They are putting the shield through the ringer to find the extreme boundaries to design around.
If they needed land a payload, they could stuff a dragon capsule in the starship, but the point is building something new.
by mekdoonggi - Starship V2 heat shield was good enough to allow the ship to perform a landing on the ocean in one piece, in a precise spot. But a safe landing is not enough, the ship needs to be in a good enough condition to be flown again, with low refurbishment costs. We still don't know what condition Starship is in after landing (they need to actually land it on land first). I wouldn't say the heat shield is failing, it didn't cause any failure of the ship, it protected it successfully to the sea level.
But the heat shield is just not mentioned in this article. They actually made significant changes to it in the new version. They added added new seals between the tiles, improved attachment points, and redesigned the shielding in specific areas.
A big problem with their work on the heat shield is that they lost the ship before reentry multiple times for various reasons. They were making changes to the heat shield on previous versions, but couldn't test them as they were repeatedly losing the ship before the heat shield was actually used.
Also, from their description of the planned launch of Starship V3:
> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.
> For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12
So they're still working on the heat shield. Things like space data centers may be economical only if Starship is fully reusable, otherwise the idea is dead on arrival.
by oskarkk - Why was this flagged?
Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point:
Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion.
snicker
And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptive market, everyone else will join.
Or lets say they are joining already anyway.
by AntiUSAbah - For reference: Starlink is <$20bn yearly revenue (a bit over $1k/customer).
Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me.
Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).
by myrmidon - Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...by beambot
- I'm not sure they're all that simpler, the basic plumbing probably hasn't changed much, it's just that modern fabrication tech means you can hide all the complexity insideby Taniwha
- Simple is harder than complex.by api
- And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.by eagerpace
- I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.by BoxedEmpathy
- Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence.
Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.
by schainks - We don't even have permanent settlements on Antarctica. Don't hold your breath.by elevaet
- There's a whole book positing that a permanent settlement on Mars is unlikely to work, and I have not seen their arguments debunked.by damnitbuilds
- Depends on how you define "permanent" but the closed ecological systems (CES) problem is nowhere near solved.
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.
by lopsotronic