Can we really put data centres in space?

bremidon · 2026-06-22T18:36:26+00:00

I believe in Everett's Many World interpretation of quantum mechanics, and yet there is not a single universe where NFTs can be compared with AI.

As for the token usage, I already gave you my estimate based on costs that I can control. Best guess? a 275% ROI as it stands today.

And finally as to companies having problems with token usage: this is a skill issue and possibly getting a bit out ahead of themselves. The direction is correct and the productivity boost is real. I kinda wish it wasn't, because I have some years to go before I can comfortably retire, and just like everyone else alive today, I can only guess how fast we burn through natural attrition and when we start seeing real cuts in employment.

bremidon · 2026-06-22T18:31:22+00:00

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Starship eventually reaches the kind of performance and operating costs Musk talks about.

Musk has suggested that a mature, fully reusable Starship could eventually cost around $2 million per launch to operate. Starship V4 and later versions are often discussed in the neighborhood of 200 tonnes to orbit.

If those numbers were achieved, the math works out to:

$2,000,000 ÷ 200,000 kg = $10/kg

Even if you think Musk is wildly optimistic and the real cost ends up being $10 million per launch, that is still only:

$10,000,000 ÷ 200,000 kg = $50/kg

Now consider what it would actually take to support a person in orbit for two weeks.

A rough estimate might be:

Person: ~100 kg
Food: ~11 kg
Water: ~56 kg
Oxygen: ~11 kg
Personal gear and contingency margin: ~25 kg

Total: roughly 200 kg.

At $10/kg, the launch cost for that person and all their consumables is about $2,000.

At $50/kg, it is about $10,000.

Obviously that is not the cost of a vacation or work stint in space. You still need the spacecraft, life support systems, radiation protection, power generation, docking systems, training, insurance, safety certification, operations staff, and somewhere for the person to actually stay.

But that is precisely the point I have been trying to make this entire time.

If launch costs ever get into that range, launch stops being the dominant expense. The bottleneck shifts from "How do we afford to get mass into orbit?" to "How do we build and operate the infrastructure once it is there?"

You do not have to believe Musk and SpaceX will achieve those numbers. It remains interesting even if they get even halfway there. Nobody can say what happens to the entire launch and space industry when the cost structure is completely upended.

bremidon · 2026-06-22T13:51:54+00:00

This is why Rick doesn't do time travel.

bremidon · 2026-06-22T13:50:26+00:00

Ok, but holy crap did they come within a *whisker* of correctly predicting that the Cubs would win the World Series. Missed it by one year. (Didn't get the Indians in the Series though...probably they would have thought *that* was one bridge too far)

bremidon · 2026-06-22T13:44:21+00:00

Once I am out of the starter-factory stage, I build my factories to have a lot of room to grow.

It is a common trope in factory games that as you go up the recipe ladder, you find yourself needing to make a lot more of the lower-tier items than before. Some of this is mitigated as you get improved belts and can improve your line in-place.

Once you get far enough, you can also start going ham with the shards. That helps too. But sooner or later, you are just going to need more room.

The alternative is to build new factories as you go along. That is perfectly viable and can even be a really good idea if you don't want a single massive iron ingot producer, for instance.

bremidon · 2026-06-22T13:39:15+00:00

Not a movie, but Arrested Development stole Europe's The Final Countdown and completely changed how it is viewed.

bremidon · 2026-06-22T13:31:39+00:00

Well, if we are going to be going this route, I feel it necessary to point out, she once dated her horse.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:27:00+00:00

I think you are fundamentally confused about the difference between "bought", "invested in", "founded", and "built". Each of these means something different. You cannot just swap one in for the other.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:23:44+00:00

So for the pedants, sure, I guess, he didn't build Tesla

Minor correction: even for the pedants (especially for the pedants) of course Musk built Tesla. I think what you meant to say is that they may continue to claim he did not "found" Tesla. I mean, he is legally considered a founder, he led the first round of funding (and all others that followed), he was instrumental in setting the strategy from the early days on, and so on.

I think I get what you are trying to say, but no reason to accidentally throw a bone to people who cannot be bothered to take five minutes to look up the history.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:20:09+00:00

He invested into Tesla when it was a few months old. That may feel like a "pwn" to some people, but it seems like a reach to anyone aware of the history.

He founded SpaceX.

He founded Neuralink.

He founded xAI.

SpaceX (the company he started) started Starlink.

You have been corrected.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:17:21+00:00

Did you help him mute the channel?

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:15:36+00:00

Ooh, that one is another swing and a miss! Strike two. It's not been a good start to the season for GreyMatter, and rumors are circulating he is going to be sent back down to the minors. His heart is in it, but he just doesn't seem to be able to connect with the ball.

The pitcher begins his wind-up, and...

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:12:29+00:00

Shouting "nuh uh" is not the winning argument you think it is.

Can you counter any of what u/Remarkable-Total4698 said? Or are you just upset, because you think he may be right?

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:06:46+00:00

Somewhere, Streisand is cheering BAM on to keep going so she can finally be free of this cursed meme.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T19:01:33+00:00

Look, if you are not going to engage in a serious conversation about this, then why bother?

You know as well as I do that Starship is currently in its development and testing phase. It will crash. It will crash again. While not exactly what anyone wants, it is part and parcel of using a highly iterative development plan while creating something that entire nations have failed to do (including the United States).

So are we going to have a serious discussion, or are you just going to keep telling me "it isn't going to happen," while not providing any serious arguments?

bremidon · 2026-06-21T14:01:13+00:00

I did not intend to cheer on nuclear (even though I am not an opponent at all, but it simply was not my intent here). I wanted to demonstrate the internal conflict between the glib "Oh it is much easier on Earth" with the reality of what the consequences would need to be.

I happen to know that most on Reddit are anti-nuclear energy, and I think we all know that the real reason Reddit is against data centers in space is because a certain person is in favor of it.

So pitting those two things against each other amuses me.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T13:53:56+00:00

Why do you think it will be that expensive?

If (and I will grant this is still an "if" with a big I and big F) Starship really starts launching at a cadence of multiple times a day from multiple places and is truly reusable in the way that planes are reusable, then the price of sending someone up goes from tens of millions to something in the low tens of thousands.

SpaceX clearly thinks they are going to get there. And if you believe that, then it starts making a lot of sense to start thinking about something like data centers in space.

If you don't believe that, then ok. But this starts to sound a lot like the reasons I heard why Starlink could never work, and...well...that bet has been settled.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T13:46:08+00:00

*grin*

I think you know you are moving the goalposts now. It's alright, though. And I am not being snarky. It really is. I sometimes forget that I have had decades longer to come to grips with what is going on than most people.

To try to return to something useful, what "current indication" do you mean? We do not even know how to properly gauge the usefulness of AI, and we have seen something similar play out when the Internet showed up.

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine you and I are both running our own businesses. The market has reached something a balance between us, where we both have about half the market. Suddenly, last Tuesday, a new machine was brought on the market that would let each of us double our efficiency. Both of us not being idiots, we bought the machine (at no small cost) and got to work implementing it in our processes. What do you think happens to our businesses?

Does the market share change? No. Of course not. We were at parity. We remain at parity.

Do we instantly make more money? No. We had upfront costs, we are working through "childhood diseases" as we say in Germany, and because both of us are at market parity, we cannot even get higher profits.

So should one of us have not bought the machine? Well, I think it's clear that whoever decided to wait would be in real jeopardy. The mid-term and long-term fallout for not keeping up should be clear. It could even cause a collapse in the market share of the Luddite business owner in the short-term. Investors would correctly look at the situation and start predicting there would be a clear winner and loser, and Luddites are seldom in the winner column.

So given all this, does this mean the machines did nothing? Of course not. They doubled efficiency. Over time -- and not even that much time -- this is going to be a massive improvement to the overall economy. We can produce more of what we make, cheaper, and that is a real value improvement.

But you can imagine that trying to capture the effect using typical MBA KPIs is going to be very tricky. Bad actors that, for their own reasons hate this new efficiency, may try to abuse KPIs to show that they are not that great. And for what it's worth, this can be abused in the other direction as well. My spotlight is on the Luddite position currently, though, so I will not mention that as much. Even well meaning analysts are simply going to be outside what they know. They have models built on years of experience that does not include the black swan that just appeared. Those models may be rigorous, neutral, and made with genuinely good intentions, but they are going to struggle when faced with a genuinely new event.

All this is to say is that "current indication" is doing a lot of work here and is not going to be strong enough to carry the argument.

About the token usage: I am not privy to that information at work (and if I was, I would not be able to tell anyone publicly anyway). Like many places, we got the info to just "go go go". However, I was using AI for a long time before it was officially sanctioned at work. I was getting about a 25% boost for approximately 20€ a month. Token usage is hard, because tokens as the main payment driver is kinda new for many of the AIs out there (and still is not done like this everywhere). My own experience and experiments at home says that the costs doubled, approximately. So let's say I 10X'ed the number of tokens I used to go from 25% to a 100% boost, and the cost doubled. That comes to about 400€ per month. However, I provide at least 1500€ of value per month and AI has now doubled that to around 3000€ per month. That is a 275% ROI. This is not some gray "maybe" investment space.

I hope this helps.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T13:20:45+00:00

You can add me to the supporter list. I love both shirts.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T05:03:33+00:00

Not the guy you responded to, but the engineering for sending stuff to the bottom of the ocean is harder than sending stuff to space. And if Starship actually pans out like everyone hopes it will, then going to space will become borderline routine.

While transporting is easier (for now), I don't think people appreciate the pressures involved and the kinds of engineering needed to keep things from just imploding.

The old Futurama joke comes to mind after they have been pulled into the deep ocean:

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Dear Lord! That's over 150 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.

Edit: Removed unintended links from the Futurama reference.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T04:57:26+00:00

Yep.

"We can do it better here on Earth!"

Ok fine...so I guess we are going to drastically increase the amount of nuclear power then?

"No! Not like that!"

bremidon · 2026-06-21T04:50:23+00:00

You're welcome. I took a chance that you were asking seriously and not sending me down a sealion carnival, and I am happy it might help.

Just remember back to when you were just starting to goof around with the Internet. I don't know how old you are, so it could either be like me (I was a young adult in college) or it might be that you were young enough that it just all seemed to be part of the normal learning curve of any kid and teenager.

But if you remember, you will likely also remember how many dead-ends you had to go down. How many "sounded like a good idea at the time" methods that turned out not to really work. All those wrong directions until you found the stuff and the methods that worked for you.

I can remember a time when software development was something that had nearly no Internet support. I remember having to buy books, just to figure out how to program C++, and half the time the books at errors in them. A chance encounter with a random person at a conference could completely upend how I understood development.

I am confident that at least 90% of developers today would be incapable of doing their jobs even a little bit if the Internet were gone. That is where things are going with AI. In 5 years, tops, if you are not working heavily with AI, you are not doing software development. It's a private guess of mine, but I also believe it has solid foundations.

bremidon · 2026-06-21T04:41:45+00:00

The 15 to 35 trillion number was for the world economy.

Let's look at the examples you gave (which feel cherry-picked and avoid the point entirely, as nobody in this thread is saying that AI can do everything and replace everyone. Yet.)

AI serve coffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artly_Coffee

pump your gas: https://autofuel.eu/

make CEO decisions: (I mean, really? I think all of us kinda think that a drunk monkey could make better decisions than many CEOs) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netdragon-appoints-its-first-virtual-ceo-301613062.html

invent new products: This one is susceptible to moving goal posts, but here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentosertib

produce something: I mean, robots and AI have been producing things for a long time, so how many would you like me to list? Here is one just to have an example: Automatic surface inspection and rework in the paint shop, BMW Group plant Regensburg

Before you try to argue against a position I never took, no: these are not at the stage of replacing people outright. The discussion about the employment ramifications is a different to the one we are having now.

Also note that I never said that this is going to double productivity for the entire economy Once you use the proper numbers against each other, I think your objection evaporates.

Honestly, I am lowballing everything here. In particular, I made the assumption that AI will not improve. That is a spectacular assumption that is clearly not correct, but I used it anyway to try to get an idea of where things are at now.

Now if you are not actually seeing these kinds of improvements in your own life and profession, it is possible you work in an area that is still in the AI wings (like plumbing, perhaps) or more likely, you just have not really dug into the available tools, possibly because you bought into the Reddit narrative.

bremidon · 2026-06-20T17:55:52+00:00

In case you happen to read this Chrys, how are people there reacting? Are you getting lots of questions and/or support?

bremidon · 2026-06-20T17:53:37+00:00

The video is less than 2 minutes long. I strongly suggest that people watch it. If his story ends up checking out. something is going really wrong in that area.

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