SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/spacex-data-centre-one-million-satellites-9.7117772

by billybuckwheat • 2 months ago

60 141 2 months ago

cbc.ca

codingdave2• 2 months ago

... data centres that won’t have an environmental impact here on Earth.

Really? I wonder how they are going to get them up there without rocket launches?

Ekaros• 2 months ago

And getting them down. Or allowing them to come down on their own... I doubt that is entirely environmental impact free.

JPLeRouzic• 2 months ago

I wonder about the impact on our health of all the metals that will be present in the atmosphere after several months. For example, it is well known that lead in gasoline has increased crime.

aruggirello2• 2 months ago

LEO satellites come down on their own in a few months/years. 100 tons of metal burning in the atmosphere seems a lot, but it's barely the total mass of meteorites falling in 24-48 hours, actually.

foxglacier4• 2 months ago

Why are so many people just desperate to imagine environmental, economic, or social harm from any new technology or ambitious projects? Are you all just too old to enjoy the thought of an amazing future that's better than today? Or are you too brainwashed by the negativity in the media and think disasters are the only things that can happen? Or are you just bitter about life and can't have any hope? Or do you just feel smug being a nay-sayer to anything ambitious?

ReptileMan2• 2 months ago

100 tons is quite a lot of gpus. If they manage to solve such "minor" problems as powering and cooling them they could run for a decade or so without consuming or polluting. The methane burned to get mass into orbit is trivial - a 500MW powerplant burns that much in under a day.

codingdave2• 2 months ago

Yeah, that response trivializes the massive burn that power plants perform each day.

When I worked in a midstream gas company, I recall a meeting when we were explaining the business to some new IT folk, and talking about the plants that process 100K barrels. One new guy in particular literally dropped his jaw and said, "you process 100K barrels of gas a year??" The room looked at him like he was insane and the woman running the meeting politely replied: "No, per day."

So acting as if "it burns less than a power plant" somehow means it is trivial is just a really odd take.

Besides, the methane burn is one piece of the puzzle. There is more to environmental impact than just methane.

vkou3• 2 months ago

The problem isn't GPUs the problem is cooling them.

Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.

toasty2282• 2 months ago

100 tons is quite a lot of gpus

Is it? 100 tons of gb300 rack is ~0.04% of the expected 30GW of new data centers they want to build by 2030... 100 tons of gb300 gives you a measly 10MW data center, it's not even considered a medium sized data center at that point.

Not counting the hundreds of square meters of solar panels and cooling panels you'd need for each rack, you can easily multiply the total weight by 2-5x

They won't run a decade or two either, the failure rate at 3 years is ~50%.

And of course all of that ends up burning down and is completely un recyclable. It just doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how you look at it really.

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

Should be banned. These companies are destroying a piece of the environment that belongs to all of us - the night sky.

Bender• 2 months ago

Along that line people should look into BUG ratings [1] for outdoor lighting, especially city operated lights. [1]

[1] https://www.landscapeforms.com/ideas/bug-rating-system-101

polski-g• 2 months ago

If you people were in charge in the 1800s, you'd ban the industrial revolution and we'd still need slaves for everything.

sedawkgrep2• 2 months ago

You don’t think there might be a better solution than having a dozen or more companies all launching thousands of satellites which all perform the same function?

shafyy• 2 months ago

Jesus dude

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

Right, because not wanting the night skies polluted for someone else’s profits, with no fair compensation to me, is somehow the same as banning the Industrial Revolution? What exactly are we not able to do with terrestrial internet?

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Banning Starlink is inadequate and won't change anything. China is building its own larger version with 25,000+ satellites. Russia is building its own network. The EU is building its own network.

amelius2• 2 months ago

Let's ban ads too, while we're at it.

Keyframe• 2 months ago

Where do we sign?

androiddrew• 2 months ago

Let me fix your title:

SpaceX wants investors to think that they will be able to launch millions of satellites.

torginus• 2 months ago

Yeah I remember reading that what killed the space industry in the 90s-2000s other than the collapse of the USSR and cessation of great power competition was the massive move to digital communications, particularly satellite TV - which mean that a smaller number of satellites could serve the expected demand.

timschmidt8• 2 months ago

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

toasty2282• 2 months ago

They launched a grand total of ~10k starlink satellite, there is a long road between 10k and a million.

Musk would be "the most credible" at claiming he'll have 1000 trillion dollar by 2050, it doesn't mean it's credible at all.

ben_w13• 2 months ago

While true, this is insufficient to make the new claim credible. If the proposed satellites only weighed 100kg and remain on orbit for 3 years, to keep a million up requires:

  (150 metric tons/100kg) = 1500 satellites per Starship launch
  1e6/1500 = 666 launches per MTBF (3 years)
  666/(3 years) = 222 Starship launches/year

This is significantly higher than even the current cadence of Falcons.

If the proposed satellites are to be 1 ton, the required launch cadence would be ten times higher.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Starlink has been so successful, it is facing a lot of competition in the next few years. Every major power wants their own, national starlink network.

China's state-backed starlink competitor GuoWang is putting 13,000 satellites in orbit by 2030. They've already started launching satellites.

China's Qianfan plans 15,000 satellites by 2030.

AST SpaceMobile is building their own network.

Amazon Leo plans for 3,000 satellites in orbit, and is already launching satellites.

The EU is building IRIS², explicitly as a Starlink alternative.

Russia, after realizing how critical starlink is on the battlefield, is building its own Rassvet network. They've already launched satellites.

Zigurd6• 2 months ago

Circa 2032: "Remember when everybody was going to launch constellations of thousands of satellites?" "Yeah, just like the data centers, only about 10% of that got built."

dzhiurgis5• 2 months ago

Sovereign ones are definitely going to happen. Direct to cell 5G (aka global IMSI catcher) and SAR decoy is just too good to pass up.

tuesdaynight• 2 months ago

I'm a layman in this field, and I always thought that satellites were supposed to take a very small space in orbit... until I saw a GIF made from Artemis 2 ship. Satellites were big enough that could see the queue of them orbiting Earth in the GIF. Maybe they were the bigger ones and I'm confusing them with Starlink?

dwaltrip• 2 months ago

Small things can reflect large numbers of photons :)

The Artemis gif you are referring to only shows the satellites because the earth is eclipsing the the sun and they did a long exposure.

Those satellites showing up in the gif are briefly catching the sun at the perfect angle.

LightBug1• 2 months ago

Oh ffs ... how is the homebrew laser defense industry coming along?

Spec Priority: ability to attach said laser defense instrument to home telescope ... and enable user to blast those madafakkas out of the sky.

amelius2• 2 months ago

How long until they turn a constellation into a giant LED billboard, showing commercials for Tesla?

28304283409234• 2 months ago

Isn't that a scene in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy?

dwd• 2 months ago

Red Dwarf.

A little more destructive pushing suns into supernova to write "Coke is Life" across the sky.

doublerabbit• 2 months ago

ASAP.

https://futurism.com/russian-scientists-huge-advertisements-...

ridgeguy• 2 months ago

Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it - the thought, at least.

Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon

variety8675• 2 months ago

Most people likely don’t think about how often they use satellite communications. But that Instagram post you made? You used a satellite.

This article seems to confuse Starlink with ordinary cellular communications

ivanjermakov• 2 months ago

They also might confuse Starlink with GPS satellites which are completely different things.

roelschroeven• 2 months ago

Also some, or even many, people think that intercontintental communications use satellites rather than cables.

dzhiurgis5• 2 months ago

Facebook Messenger already works with Starlink - https://one.nz/faq/one-nz-satellite-frequently-asked-questio... so Instagram is probably not far off.

Edit: wow even apple music is included in this.

verzali3• 2 months ago

But this covers only a tiny fraction of people who use those apps. Most people don't send anything via satellite when using messenger.

johnea3• 2 months ago

There is an upside: this may be the shortest route to eliminating any future launches:

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

Sorry Buck Rogers fan bois, should have left this fantasy in the 1950s...

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Mentioning Kessler syndrome, especially in the case of Starlink LEO satellites, is the classic midwit signal.

tzs2• 2 months ago

What makes you think they are talking about Starlink satellites? The 1 million satellites in the article are data center satellites.

johnea3• 2 months ago

So, IEEE is midwit?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-space-debris

...space junk orbiting between 400 and 1,000 kilometers—where most low Earth satellites operate—is already unstable. And between 520 and 1,000 km, the researchers found, debris concentrations are at or near levels that might sustain runaway growth.

With regard to starlink:

Starlink satellites orbit between 540 and 570 km altitude in multiple orbital shells

I'm sure it'll be fine once there are a million 8-/

I would have to say, elon fanbois are the most classic midwits...

wrs• 2 months ago

The people who want to put data centers in orbit must be either much smarter than me, or much dumber than me, because I just don't get how that makes any technical or economic sense.

Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")

ben_w13• 2 months ago

From what I've seen (Google paper, IIRC), it only makes sense economically if Musk's stretch goals for price/kg to orbit for Starship become true.

Technically it's fine, just take something like Starlink and use most of the power for compute rather than for comms.

But financially, it depends on price to orbit being extremely low; not just lower than Falcon, but as low as Musk's best public claims about what may be coming at some point.

PunchyHamster• 2 months ago

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"

dzhiurgis5• 2 months ago

787 is vastly more expensive than Starship, but Starship uses 7x more fuel to get to orbit than a typical 787 flight. _IF_ Starship can achieve same re-usability as 787, then cost to orbit will be like $7.5/kg.

clumsysmurf• 2 months ago

Perhaps the reasons are not technical. Perhaps it has more to do with jurisdiction, not being physically dependent (or susceptible) to any physical state.

fasterik• 2 months ago

It probably makes economic sense for a company on the scale of Google/Alphabet to spend something like $100M per year on the technology. There's relatively little downside (that amount is a rounding error compared to annual spending), the research involved might yield discoveries that benefit other projects, and the investment pays off if launch costs go down by 10x and/or the situation for terrestrial datacenters in terms of grid access, water, permitting, local opposition, etc. gets significantly worse.

maxglute• 2 months ago

There's economic case (or rather economics is not factor) for space force edge computing, but who knows how big demand that is. But it is 100% going to happen, and market can be fooled into conflating military economics with civilian economics.

spikels• 2 months ago

The list of people saying they're going to put compute in space is getting long. Unlikely they're all dumb or faking it. It is clearly technically feasible but how the economics will develop is still unknown.

   Starcloud
   Axiom Space
   SpaceX (Starlink orbital data center constellation)
   Google (Project Suncatcher)
   Lonestar Data Holdings
   Blue Origin (TeraWave/Project Sunrise)
   Aetherflux (Galactic Brain)
   Kepler Communications
   Sophia Space
   Madari Space
   Adaspace / ADA Space / Guoxing Aerospace (China)
   Orbital (LA-based AI inference constellation)
   Atomic-6
   Planet Labs (with Google)
   Crusoe (partnership with Starcloud)
   Edge Aerospace
   Rotonium
   Lux Aeterna
   Star Catcher
   Loft Orbital
   Cowboy Space
   OrbitsEdge
   Galaxia (Canada)
   China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)
   Beijing Orbital Twilight / Orbital Chenguang
   Astro-Future Institute
   Space Compass (NTT + SKY Perfect JSAT JV, with JAXA support)
   NASA + HPE (Spaceborne Computer)
   European Union / ESA / ASCEND (Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, ArianeGroup, HPE, Orange)
   UNOOSA (with Madari Space)
   Canada’s Department of National Defence (with Galaxia)

gus_massa• 2 months ago

Dumb and faking it and trying to sell the project to even dumber people.

6d6b73• 2 months ago

Spacex will cause Kessler syndrom and bring the world economy down.

Zigurd6• 2 months ago

Meh. It's more like how else are you gonna set 10X the money on fire that Zuckerberg did with the metaverse?

bryanlarsen2• 2 months ago

As long as those satellites are in a self-clearing orbit (below about 300 miles of altitude), Kessler is not a concern.

conception2• 2 months ago

I like that “not being able to use space for 25 years or more” is not a concern.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

March 8th story OP?

Some previous discussion:

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598415

Part of this announcement:

xAI joins SpaceX

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

cameldrv• 2 months ago

This seems like a recipe for Kessler syndrome.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 months ago

SpaceX wants to self-deal artificial demand for launches.

Zigurd6• 2 months ago

Well smarty-pants have you got any better ideas for selling the worst IPO the 21st-century?

GMoromisato4• 2 months ago

I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism.

Let's assume two premises:

1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).

If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

But if you buy the two premises above, then what matters is whether orbital or terrestrial datacenters are better for the environment. And it turns out that, given the current energy generation mix, the CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters far outstrip the CO2 from launch.

A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.

So, if you care about the environment, and you believe/fear that AI will demand a lot of compute, then you should hope that orbital datacenter work out. If you really care, you might even help to develop them.

amanaplanacanal• 2 months ago

I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial. And assuming that the current mix of electric generation isn't going to become cleaner over time is an interesting take.

GMoromisato4• 2 months ago

Current mix of electric generation is not going to get 37 times cleaner in 10 years. That's the ratio we're talking about right now.

But I do agree that the economic math is not a slam dunk. A lot of things have to go perfectly right for it to make sense economically.

But that's the irony: Orbital datacenters are much cleaner than terrestrial ones, and if we don't deploy them, it will only be because corporations care more about profit than the environment. You would think environmentalists would be the ones pushing for orbital datacenters.

x-complexity2• 2 months ago

I don't see how orbital datacenters will ever be able to compete with terrestrial.

An orbital DC makes fiscal sense when the cost to launch one to space is lower than the cost to build one on Earth.

Key point: The cost of building on Earth will inevitably trend upwards as more restrictions & costs are (~80% rightfully) placed onto Earth-bound datacenters.

whatisthiseven• 2 months ago

The first premise is reasonable. The second premise is so outlandish as to require dozens of other assumptions, optimistic outcomes for launch, and pessimistic views on the cost of earthbound systems.

I care about the environment and I think we can keep earthbound systems, and also reduce their impact. Making assumptions about the feasibility of launch and the economic absurdity of orbital compute, but not affording the same assumptions for what could be done for earthbound systems, is confusing?

And no, orbital compute is absolutely not far lower than earthbound in co2 cost. Because it doesn't exist at any scale. All orbital compute is solely dedicated to switching where it is best served. If you were to spitball numbers, are we even willing to assume orbital matches earthbound in compute total, dollar cost, uptime, or any beneficial metric?

The only metric I see is just slinging silicon into space.

GMoromisato4• 2 months ago

I get skepticism that orbital datacenters will make sense economically. It would not surprise me if they never happen.

But if they made economic sense, then they would be much more environmentally friendly. On CO2 emissions, we're talking about a factor of 37. That's not a small amount. Even a factor of 10 would be a major issue multiplied by terawatts of power. Sure, maybe Earth-bound energy gets cleaner, but it's not going to get 10 times cleaner before 2036.

hommelix• 2 months ago

There is already some trash flying around in space from decommissioned satellites. Reentering the atmosphere needs some energy to initiate the process and that was/is not always planned for. The combustion during reentry is producing CO2. This CO2 emission will scale up when the number of satellites is scaled up.

The alternative of collecting debris in space is discussed by some space agencies. I really don't think it is a good behavior from SpaceX to put more trash in space and let public money take care of the cleanup later.

GMoromisato4• 2 months ago

Satellites below 500 km do not need energy to reenter. Their orbits will naturally decay from friction with the upper atmosphere.

CO2 emissions from reentering satellites is far lower than CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters. If you need 1,000 tons of satellite for a 100 MW of compute, you're not going to get more than 1,000 tons of CO2. In fact, you'll get much less since metal doesn't release CO2 when it melts.

1,000 tons of CO2 is negligible compared to 40,000 tons at launch and invisible compared to 1.5 million tons for a terrestrial datacenter.

rasz• 2 months ago

orbital datacenters are the new vertical farming

beAbU2• 2 months ago

2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms)

That is one wild, batshit insane assumption. So much so that I did not bother to read the rest of your post.

verzali3• 2 months ago

https://open.substack.com/pub/thequantumcat/p/data-centres-i...

wasabi991011• 2 months ago

A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2.

How did you come to 10 launches / 1000 tons as what it takes to launch a 100MW data centre in space?

ben_w13• 2 months ago

Let's assume two premises:
1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).
If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.

I'm glad you said the final quoted paragraph; while it has always been difficult to tell which websites are accurate vs. slop, and moreso today with fully automated slop, I see claims the current rate is doubling between 15 and 3 months. Even at the slowest of these, 15 months, this gets 2^(120/15) = 256x growth in 10 years, which would raise it significantly above current total global electrical demand: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...

A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.

Not so: given that existing power capacity is already a constraining factor for new ground-based data centres, the alternative to be considered is not the CO2 emissions of existing average USA energy sources, but the CO2 emissions of new energy sources. This may be many things, but given that renewables are now the cheapest new energy, if politics stops renewables in the US it just means the data centres (especially at this kind of scale) aren't going to be in the US, but it doesn't say that they'll be in space specifically.

tcp_handshaker• 2 months ago

>I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism.

The opposition is from people who have a brain and like to use it. And dont engage on Musk next cheap trick to sustain his chimerical stock valuations. A 100 MW datacenter in vacuum takes from you "put a man on the Moon" to "lets host Kubernetes on the Sun" :-))

Just to start, a 100 MW datacenter is a 100 MW toaster. On Earth, the waste heat would go into into air or water. In orbit, it can only leave by radiation. So you need a massive radiator area, plus pumps, coolant loops, structure, pointing, redundancy, and micrometeorite protection...

Then you need radiation hardened GPUs, DRAM, SSDs, optics, and power electronics and those are not going to magically become space rated because the pitch deck has a Mars picture on it. Also on earth datacenters these parts constantly fail. There was even some recent study of about 20% of GPUs failing within 3 years, and humans constantly have to replace them. In orbit, you would have space mission to swap the bad PSU...

If you make the calculations, at normal electronics temperatures, rejecting the amount of heat needs a radiator field on the order of 500 m x 500 m under ideal assumptions... Then you neede power, and that has the same scale problem. Meaning you need an enormous solar farm, but wait...what about the scenario of a eclipse? For 30 minutes without sunlight you need about 50 MWh of storage.

Musk is a moron, and this video of him explaining it as simply radiative is proof number 256 you can be an idiot, and a billionaire. And shame on Jensen Huang for not calling him out: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc?t=140

bastawhiz3• 2 months ago

Who is paying for all this? Starlink revenue? I don't think so. To 100x what they've done over the last ten years and also fund it with money they're not being paid by others is implausible. They've got money, but they don't have THAT much money. They'd need to significantly juice up the whole rest of their business to not just be substantially more profitable, but also launch far more payloads. Does that much demand (for SpaceX) to get stuff into space even exist?

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

Satellites for surveillance purposes. Budget is infinite.

bastawhiz3• 2 months ago

More than they're launching now? It's not like a surveillance payload costs dramatically more to launch than a non-surveillance payload. Even the US doesn't have that many satellites to launch.

ben_w13• 2 months ago

Budget is infinite.

A fantastic way to break your economy. Even the extra half trillion/year Trump wants to spend on the military is increasing investor concern about buying US treasury bills.

hackernudes2• 2 months ago

isn't the IPO a way to get tons of money?

ben_w13• 2 months ago

I've seen it suggested that the IPO they're targeting (plus the similarly-timed ones from OpenAI and Anthropic) may be so high as to break the financial system. Investors need to have a trillion dollars available to invest if the stuff being added to the market is going to be worth a trillion dollars.

(Phrased that way because while I hear they're targeting 1.5T valuation that doesn't mean they'll be selling 1.5T of shares).

bastawhiz3• 2 months ago

Not a million satellites of money

thefounder• 2 months ago

So there must be a big story for the IPO….Remember that Tesla is still not selling actual/real self driving cars. I would say stock wise it would worth it to gable b/c Tesla did so well but SpaceX is being IPO-ed as it would have already have datacenters in space and ride hailing to Mars

saddat• 2 months ago

Relevant : https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

At what point does the LEO space become too crowded? Is there some optimal density beyond which things are problematic?

SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

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