Just based on weight, looks like a Block 4 starship should be able to bring up ~150 30 panel pallets of 550W panels, about 2 MW. They're trying to get a starship launch down to $2M with full reuse. GPU DCs are frequently in the neighborhood of 500GW, so maybe 250 launches for just the power generation, or $500M? And then there's radiators, so let's say $1B for launch of power and heat dissipation. For comparison, 500MW of H100 machines retails for >$10B, and the launch cost for those shouldn't be too bad compared to the power, since they're more value dense. And then there's land and ongoing power and cooling spending for the terrestrial version, which you don't have for the space version. So actually, doesn't seem terrible economically? This is obviously very back-of-the-envelope, and predicated on the optimistic scenario for starship launch cost.
You cannot just block out the mass of stuff and declare it'll cost exactly the launch cost, nor can you take the cost of current datacenter servers and go "they'll definitely cost the same to put in space".
A regular set of servers will straight up be destroyed if put on a rocket and launched into space: the motherboards and PCBs aren't mounted or rated to survive the vibration. The connectors and wiring isn't rated for that vibration. Sure, some probably make it, but you will lose machines from just launching them alone. Any electrolytic capacitors in there? If your system exposes them to vacuum or even just low pressure, then those likely die too. Solar panels? We can launch them obviously, there's a reason people send up expensive solar panels: because you're doing a lot of work making sure they'll physically survive the launch.
So of course, now you have to build a space-rated server frame, PCBs and GPUs. You ain't going to buying bulk H100's from Nvidia. And you have to package and mount it to get it both survive the launch and physically fit into the payload bay. Then you have to add a deployment system for it, sensors etc. And then you have to add an assembly system, because if it doesn't fit in one launch (you're proposing 250+ launches for power alone) then all of these systems need to be assembled in orbit. How are they going to be assembled? How are they going to be maneuvered? Even if you could rendezvous accurately with the construction orbit, we're talking months of drift from every little thing knocking stuff around, putting it into a spin, etc.
So either each of these is now a fully contained satellite, complete with manoeuvering system and power, or you're also needing to develop a robotic assembly system - with power and manoeuevering in order to manage and assemble all this.
And let's not forget mission control: every single one of these steps is incurring a bunch of labor costs to have people manage it. And not cheap labor costs: you're going from "guys who roll racks in and plug stuff in and can be trained up easily" to "space mission control operators".
Is this doable? Probably. Is this going to be in anyway cheaper then Earth? Not in the slightest, and it's not going to be close.
Heh relax, it’s back of the envelope to try and see if it’s anywhere in the ballpark, and if they get launch to be cheap enough, it seems like it might be. You don’t assemble one massive thing in space, it’s a bunch of disposable individual sats with laser interconnects, like Starlink.
Exactly, this is about attaching the AI hype bubble to all of his dealings before he offloads with an IPO (that still leaves him with 75% of the stock).
I can't get my head around it sometimes. I know most end up doing duties that a PIC-chip could do but the fact you can get a WiFi enabled microcontroller few a few bucks blows my mind.
The IO co-processing on the Pico is so powerful, I hope they expand on this.
It's also not really clear that using some of the more powerful chips for simple things is really a "waste" in any reasonable sense of the word. The packaging of a PIC/CH32 is probably the majority of its cost and environmental "footprint".
An RP2040 is not much more physical material.
An ESP8266/ESP32 is rather bit more material, but still not egregious.
The big waste is battery power, which for many hobby things is not that important. For comparison, RP2040 quiescent current is like 400μA, FRAM MSP430 is approximately 0.1μA in interruptible sleep.
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