Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).

Reliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters

Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)

That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS).

It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?

Just have to size radiators correctly. Not a physics problem. Just an economic one.

Main physics problem is actually that the math works better at higher GPU temps for efficiency reasons and that might have reliability trade off.

I agree that data centers in space is nuts.

But I think there's solutions to the waste heat issue

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineer...

Will it, though?

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

spacex is one thing but xai accomplished what? the most racist csam prone llm?

Haha, hard pass on the job. I prefer my oxygen at 1 atm.

I'm not a data center technician myself, but I have deep respect for those folks and the complexity they manage. It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day.

Might be why he's also investing in building their own fabs - if he can keep the silicon costs low then that flips a lot of the math here.

AI clusters are heavily interconnected, the blast radius for single component failure is much larger than running single nodes -- you would fragment it beyond recovery to be able to use it meaningfully.

I can't get in detail about real numbers but it's not doable with current hardware by a large margin.

Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.

Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.

By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.

You can make propellant on the Moon (aluminum based solid fuels), and the energy to get into orbit or into deep space is far, far less that from Earth’s surface.

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

In situ manufacturing. You just have to send enough to build the thing that builds the factory.

It would appeal to naive technofetishists, the same crowd of investors enamored by many of Elon's other impossible schemes.

The moon mfg makes significantly more sense than the hilarious plan to establish a permanent Mars base in the next 50 years, but that's not saying much.

> Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point?

From lunar regolith you would extract: oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, silicon, calcium, and magnesium.

From the poles you can get fuel (water ice -> water + hydrogen + oxygen).

The real constraint is not materials, but rather power generation, automation reliability, and initial capital investment.

So you have to shuttle machines, energy systems, and electronics.

The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure.

Satellites that would benefit most are: huge comms platforms, space-based power satellites, large radar arrays, deep-space telescopes, etc.

But there are no clouds in space and with the right orbit they are always facing the sun

The dominant factor is "balance of system" aka soft costs, which are well over 50%.[0]

Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.

When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_system

Right now it is.

However, the amount of available land is fixed and the demand for its use is growing. Solar isn't the only buyer in this real estate market.

and of course, the continuous opposite boost needed to prevent the heat vent from knocking them out of orbit.

Satellites can adjust attitude so that the panels are always normal to the incident rays for maximum energy capture. And no weather/dust.

You also don't usually use the same exact kind of panels as terrestrial solar farms. Since you are going to space, you spend the extra money to get the highest possible efficiency in terms of W/kg. Terrestrial usually optimizes for W/$ nameplate capacity LCOE, which also includes installation and other costs.

The atmosphere is in the way, and they get pretty dirty on earth. Also it doesn't rain or get cloudy in space

Solar modules you can buy for your house usually have quoted power ratings at "max STC" or Standard Testing Conditions, which are based on insolation on Earth's surface.

https://wiki.pvmet.org/index.php?title=Standard_Test_Conditi...

So, a "400W panel" is rated to produce 400W at standard testing conditions.

I'm not sure how relevant that is to the numbers being thrown around in this thread, but thought I'd provide context.

Atmospheric derating brings insolation from about 1.367KW/m2 to about 1.0.

And then there’s that pesky night time and those annoying seasons.

It’s still not even remotely reasonable, but it’s definitely much higher in space.

I grew up on a rural farm in California with a dial-up connection that significantly hampered my ability to participate in the internet as a teenager. I got Starlink installed at my parents' house about five years ago, and it's resulted in me being able to spend considerably more time at home.

Even with their cheapest home plan, we're getting like 100 Mbps down and maybe 20 to 50 up. So it's just not true at all that you would have connections that are a megabit or two per second.

That's pretty much a solved problem. We've had geostationary constellations for TV broadcast at hundreds of megabytes for decades now, and lasers for sat-to-sat comms seems to be making decent progress as well.

The intractable problem is heat dissipation. There is to little matter in space to absorb excess heat. You'd need thermal fins bigger than the solar cells. The satellite's mass would be dominated by the solar panels and heat fins such that maybe 1% of the mass would be usable compute. It would be 1000x easier to leave them on the moon and dissipate into the ground and 100000x easier to just keep making them on earth.

and, of course and inter-satellite comms and earth base station links to get the data up and down. Starlink is one thing at just above LEO a few hundred km and 20km apart, but spreading these around 10s of thousands of km and thosands of km apart is another thing

You missed the point.

We can make ten or hundred times the number of solar cells we make right now, we just don't have a reason to. The technology is fairly ancient unless you want to compete on efficiency, and the raw materials abundant.

What do you mean?

What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want. If we mine out a substantial fraction of the mass of the earth, we can go harvest asteroids or something.

But the factory ~~can~~must grow.

You know what they mean. Full self-driving was promised what, 10 years ago? Tesla Roadster? Sub-25K car? etc etc etc

I should say delivering promised products.

Anyway they just canned the S and X lines so that's done as well...

What kind of nonsense is that. SpaceX 2024 revenue barely broke $10B, if that. Launch was probably ~$4B and Starlink probably ~$5B. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and double those just for shits and giggles and that's still less than $20B and you're claiming >$100B? Horse shit. Nonsense.

What is tiring is people defending it. Everyone goes down with this ship...

Good point. Still a long, long way from data centers.

Okay, but a human being represents what, 200 W of power? The ISS has a crew of 3, so that's less than a beefy single user AI workstation at full tilt. If the question is whether it's practical to put 1-2 kW worth of computing power in orbit, the answer is obviously yes, but somehow I don't think that's what's meant by "datacenter in space".

The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years.

We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.

Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?

Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.

Why would you short the stock?

What does stock price have to do with anything?

That someone could put a data center in space for the price of 100 years of eliminating world hunger doesn’t mean shit.

As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches.

For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.

He said impossible, this was done recently, by spacex themselves.

No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.

Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.

Tesla to invest $2B in Elon Musk’s xAI https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-invested-2b-in-elon-...

Got that double digit age locked down I see, congrats!

Why would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment.

Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).

Tesla cars made in Shanghai are sold in Europe and other places. That is helping them be competitive and they haven't had much price pressure until recently. Just because the Chinese have their own internal competition and deflation which drove their prices down aggressively doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build there. Also the idea the Chinese couldn't figure it out without an American company coming there first to show them is pretty silly.

Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019

BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s

I've done plenty of work on my own Tesla. It's not hard to work on at all. Parts are not even very difficult. There are plenty of 3rd party shops (such as one I went to when I needed to replace my windshield.) I really wonder why people continue to think this. It's not 2016 any more.

Are you a car mechanic living in China?

Model S was the most successful EV. If you think cybercab is the vehicle of the future, look at the timeline of the only robo taxi in commerce in the US.

Everything has to go right with that, or cybercab will be irrelevant before it works. Same deal. Same bullshitter.

> In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.

Not just that, the cost of each rocket launch is drastically cheaper than all of its competitors costs.

Incredible shilling, bravo

Oh c'mon now. Damn model 3 and model S I have driven were considerably lower quality interiors than an ass end Citroen or Fiat. The Model S, a 2023 model the doors didn't even fit properly. And that was all Europe.

As for FSD, nope. Unless you redefine the word reliable.

Edit: I owned a 2018 Model S as well. Literally the worst fucking car I have ever owned or driven.

Musk has a pattern here - he used Tesla the same way, diverting resources to xAI and treating it as a funding vehicle for other ventures. Once he started doing that, Tesla's financials got murky and harder to trust. Now he's doing it with SpaceX right before the IPO. For investors, that's not 'too big to fail' protection - it's a red flag that the company finances are entangled with his personal empire instead of focused on the core business.

So proof of profitability is that they can shoot their own satellites into orbit?

> The private sector is far better when it comes to money.

I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.

I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.

... as we can tell by whatever the everloving fuck is going on with this press release.

We have absolutely no way of gauging this until after SpaceX goes public.

Because Twitter/X is distorting our politics (with ann unbalanced scheme of censorship / amplification / suppression) and destroying the country by mainstreaming far right supremacist politics. Twitter/X does not deserve a single dollar of taxpayer money. If SpaceX is now part of that machine, it doesn’t deserve a single dollar either. I would rather pay more for alternatives and encourage their growth. I also look at any money given to this company as the equivalent of GOP campaign funding, so I feel it should be treated as illegal under the law.

There is no way Elon could raise the 1.4 trillion to take Tesla private

As far as I understand they did not make a profit in 2025. They posted positive adjusted EBITDA, which is not the same.

How do you "know" this? They're private and don't need to report anything.

You also have to be careful about who said it and what they meant by "profit," because there is gross profit, EBIT, EBITDA, and others.

I find HN and the tech circles to be one of the main community pillars holding up X. None of my social friends use it anymore, but links absolutely abound here, and it seems like the standard line is to pretend Elon, Grok, all the one button revenge and child porn etc don’t exist. I truly can’t fathom the amount of not thinking about it it would take to keep using the platform.

I am with you 100%.

It was easy to support SpaceX, despite the racist/sexist/authoritarian views of its owner, because he kept that nonsense out of the conversation.

X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.

Now that these are the same company, there's no separation. SpaceX is part of Musk's political mission now. No matter how cool the tech, I cannot morally support this company, and I hope, for the sake of society, it fails.

This announcement, right after the reveal that Elon Musk reached out to Jeffrey Epstein and tried to book a trip to Little St. James so that he could party with "girls", really doesn't bode well.

It's a shame you can't vote these people out, because I loved places like Twitter, and businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, but Elon Musk is a fascist who uses his power and influence to attack some of the most important pillars of our society.

The point of the Starship program is to drop the cost of a kg going to space significantly - this isn't meant to be launched with rockets that aren't fully reusable.

Wouldn't they?

Yes but if the solar panel area scales linearly with radiator area, the problem doesn't get worse?

I'm not the best person to make that case as I can only speculate (land cost, permitting, latency, etc). /Shrug

In all the conversations I've seen play out on hacker news about compute in space, what comes up every time is "it's unviable because cooling is so inefficient".

Which got me thinking, what if cooling needs dropped by orders of magnitude? Then I learned about photonic chips and spintronics.

> space is called “space” for a reason.

That equation have surface area ? What if new material found to be extremely large surface area to weight ratio to dissipate lots of heat ?

you put the radiators and the rest of the satellite within the shade of the solar panels, you can still make the area arbitrarily large

EDIT: people continue downvoting and replying with irrelevant retorts, so I'll add in some calculations

Let's assume

1. cheap 18% efficient solar panels (though much better can be achieved with multijunction and quantum-cutting phosphors)

2. simplistic 1360 W/m^2 sunlight orthogonal to the sun

3. an abstract input Area Ain of solar panels (pretend its a square area: Ain = L ^ 2)

4. The amount of heat generated on the solar panels (100%-18%) * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2, the electrical energy being 18% * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2. The electrical energy will ultimately be converted to computational results and heat by the satellite compute. So the radiative cooling (only option in space) must dissipate 100% of the incoming solar energy: the 1360 W / m^2 * Ain.

5. Lets make a pyramid with the square solar panel as a base, with the apex pointing away from the sun, we make sure the surface has high emissivity (roughly 1) in thermal infrared. Observe that such a pyramid has all sides in the shade of the sun. But it is low earth orbit so lets assume warm earth is occupying one hemisphere and we have to put thermal IR reflectors on the 2 pyramid sides facing earth, so the other 2 pyramid sides face actual cold space.

6. The area for a square based symmetric pyramid: we have

6.a. The area of the base Ain = L * L.

6.b. The area of the 4 sides 2 * L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 )

6.c. The area of just 2 sides having output Area Aout = L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 )

7. The 2 radiative sides not seeing the sun and not seeing the earth together have the area in 6.c and must dissipate L ^ 2 * 1360 W / m ^ 2 .

8. Hello Stefan-Boltzmann Law: for emissivity 1 we have the radiant exitance M = sigma * T ^ 4 (units W / m ^ 2 )

9. The total power exited through the 2 thermal radiating sides of the pyramid is then Aout * M

10. Select a desired temperature and solve for h / L (to stay dimensionless and get the ratio of the pyramid height to its base side length), lets run the satellite at 300 K = ~26 deg C just as an example.

11. If you solve this for h / L we get: h / L = sqrt( ( 1360 W / m ^ 2 / (sigma * T ^ 4 ) ) ^ 2 - 1/4 )

12. Numerically for 300K target temperature we get: h/L = sqrt((1360 / (5.67 * 10^-8 * 300 ^ 4)) ^ 2 - 1/4) = 2.91870351609271066729

13. So the pyramid height of "horribly poor cooling capability in space" would be a shocking 3 times the side length of the square solar panel array.

As a child I was obsessed with computer technology, and this will resonate with many of you: computer science is the poor man's science, as soon as a computer becomes available in the household, some children autodidactically educate themselves in programming etc. This is HN, a lot of programmers who followed the poor man's science path out of necessity. I had the opportunity to choose something else, I chose physics. No amount of programming and acquiring titles of software "engineer" will be a good substitute for physicists and engineers that actually had courses on the physical sciences, and the mathematics to follow the important historical deductions... It's very hard to explain this to the people who followed the path I had almost taken. And they downvote me because they didn't have the opportunity, courage or stamina to take the path I took, and so they blindly copy paste each others doomscrolled arguments.

Look I'm not an elon fanboy... but when I read people arguing that cooling considerations excludes this future, while I know you can set the temperature arbitrarily low but not below background temperature of the universe 4 K, then I simply explain that obviously the area can be made arbitrarily large, so the temperature can be chosen by the system designer. But hey the HN crowd prefers the layers of libraries and abstractions and made themselves an emulation of an emulation of an emulation of a pre-agreed reality as documented in datasheets and manuals, and is ultimately so removed from reality based communities like physics and physics engineering, that the "democracy" programmers opinions dominate...

So go ahead and give me some more downvotes ;)

If you like mnemonics for important constants: here's one for the Stefan Boltzman constant: 5.67 * 10^-8 W / m^2 / K ^ 4

thats 4 consecutive digits 5,6,7,8 ; comma or point after the first significant digit and the exponent 8 has a minus sign.

the radiators would be lighter compared to the solar panels, and slightly smaller surface area so you can line them back to back