| ▲ | RIMR an hour ago | |||||||
Let's just put it this way: The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity. An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity. So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites. That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of RAM, SSDs, etc., a radiation-proof satellite housing to support all of that hardware, solar arrays, launch costs ($74M per Falcon launch), all for maintenance to be impossible and the hardware to become obsolete in a couple of years. It's a delusion unless we invent some way to go to space for free. | ||||||||
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
I don't really get the obsolete argument. The thing has two main parts. One, a bunch of solar panels, shielding and radiators. This the heavy / expensive to launch part, but should last for what, decades? Two, a bunch of GPUs. These become obsolete, but so what? They're not that heavy, so in a few years you send up another rocket and swap them out. | ||||||||
| ▲ | asadotzler 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Launches are not $74M. That's retail pricing. SpaceX's launch cost, the internal spend to put one Falcon 9 Starlink payload in orbit, with a return to launch site booster recovery, is about $15M. If you're going to make such assertions, do the legwork to make sure your numerical claims aren't off by 500%. | ||||||||
| ▲ | LorenDB an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
SpaceX would be launching these on Starship, which has a much lower targeted launch cost. | ||||||||
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