Well, everyone, you can now submit a comment to let the FCC know what you think about SpaceX asking for 1 million satellites for "AI datacenters" whatever the fuck that means.
-
I appreciate any Americans that submit a complaint, but who exactly gave an American regulatory body authority over the whole of low Earth orbit and beyond?
Colonial theft.
@EricLawton @sundogplanets @PhoenixSerenity
or is it because they have authority over SpaceX as an American company - and the US already believes it can tell American companies what the can do in other countries.
-
@sundogplanets let me marh this badly...
At a launch a second they could have that sucker up in months. At a launch every hour it'd take more than a century. At a launch a day millenia. Assuming of course one satellite per launch. That's just the getting to orbit bit. Fabbing the satellites might well take longer. After of course the lead time to ensure hallucinating chatbots are not on the worse granola.
@jamesb192 Yeah, I ran some very rough numbers earlier and I think with 30 satellites per launch and one launch per day it would take almost a century, which is in line with your figures.
Of course that was under an assumption that no failures or other reasons for replacement on-orbit would be needed for the period. Which is… unrealistic.
Problem is, I suppose, that in the current climate, we can't just assume "it's madness and makes no sense, and therefore won't happen".
-
@sundogplanets How would a data center event work in outer space? Heat would build up. Unless I'm missing something and the idea is to have something super worse than regular DCs down here?
@kiri https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/12/11/the-dumbest-thing-ive-seen-this-week
And as an interested non-expert, I personally get the feeling that Matt is being more generous than the facts *should* allow, but at least he's showing his math and coming up with a conclusion of "dumb" and "stupid idea".
-
I read an article about this, and there was a discussion section, and someone there was making this very argument that space is cold so cooling won't be required, which I thought at the time made total sense. But then someone else brought up the fact the ISS actually has trouble cooling itself, because while yes space is cold, there is so little matter around, it remains very difficult to dissipate heat. So now I'm not so sure.
@bit A thermos bottle works by having a near-vacuum between whatever you want to keep warm or cold and the surrounding air. This works well because vacuum is a very good insulator.
Space provides a better vacuum than anything we can easily create on Earth.
Getting rid of heat in space is friggin' *hard*.
As for "space is cold", temperature is a property of matter, and space is notably lacking in matter, so it's arguable whether space even *has* a temperature per se.
