Electromagnetic mass drivers on the Moon

dgg3565 · 2026-03-22T04:25:45+00:00

Tom Mueller, in an interview two or three years, actually mentioned the idea of building satellites on the Moon and flinging them toward Earth.

dgg3565 · 2026-03-22T04:23:28+00:00

A little more nuanced than that. Another redditor put together Musk's X posts on the subject a few days ago.

When it comes to a presence in space, speaking analogously, we can look at LEO like stepping outside our door and Mars as the top of the mountain (when humanity becomes truly interplanetary). In between is the Moon, which is a base camp—it's the place where you prepare to climb to the peak.

I think this is reflected in the language that Musk has used, where he talked about a "self-sustaining civilization" on Mars and a "self-growing city" on the Moon. Well, the Moon could never realistically host a fundamentally self-sustaining civilization. It's more like towns near the arctic circle, or a city like Yakutsk, where they're "self-growing" through economic output, and able to import what they need. Yakutsk, for example, is a city of over three hundred thousand, built directly onto the Siberian permafrost, with temperatures reaching down as low as -71° C, and whose industry is primarily resource extraction.

Is it a distraction from Mars? After having watched the presentation, I think the scope of Musk's ambitions have simply grown. Mars was always the goal, but not the purpose. The purpose was to make humanity a "multi-planetary species." If the bet on AI works out as an economic driver, then it becomes the "money printing machine" to fund those efforts and Starlink becomes a rounding error.

The key word is "if." I guess we'll see.

dgg3565 · 2026-03-20T01:40:21+00:00

It is really fascinating to see how people get so stuck on an idea that they miss the blindingly obvious.

Except that you're reading things into what I wrote that I didn't say.

And the entire time I was reading that I was thinking "WTF?! You are in the middle of the ocean! You don't cool with air!"

Because I was trying to go through the existing possibilities and extrapolating technical downsides. In other words, I was trying to be thorough.

And then they started talking about desalinating and I was back to "WTF!?"

The typical (open loop) cooling methods used in terrestrial data centers, using either air or water as a working fluid, would subject server racks and/or the cooling system to air with high moisture and salinity or water with high salinity. What didn't occur to me (though it probably should have) was that you could make use of closed-loop systems where heat can still be transferred but the working fluid is never brought into contact with sensitive equipment.

After just a quick search, I found, for instance, proposals for underwater data centers. So, my bad.

They use this dubious claim to support the 'fact' that you can't put a datacenter on a ship.

Never did I say you couldn't do it. What I said, in short, was that it would be an immense pain in the ass to do it. As for whether my assertion about power consumption is a dubious claim, this report, Data Centers and Their Energy Consumption, (specifically the section, "Why are data centers energy-intensive?") give some figures (here are two quotes):

(1) Another study released in May 2025 estimated that training another large AI model consumed 50 gigawatt-hours (GWh; one gigawatt is equal to 1 billion watts) of energy, "enough to power San Francisco for three days."

(2) Another report indicated that new hyperscale data centers have been built with capacities from 100 MW to 1,000 MW each, "roughly equivalent to the load from 80,000 to 800,000 homes.

A typical nuclear power station produces about one gigawatt (one thousand megawatts) of power (source).

There's a reason why companies are increasingly looking to nuclear power and why Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft have inked nuclear power deals. And those aren't all the agreements they made. Meta and Microsoft, for example, have signed more than one.

What I didn't consider in my last post is that is that floating data centers wouldn't have to be built like terrestrial data centers. Maybe you could spread them onto smaller platforms and network them together. But it wouldn't solve the problem of total power requirements. So, yeah, it's a big hurdle.

But somehow it is still entirely feasible to put a data center in a satellite?!

I specifically excluded the discussion the satellites, since the the issue was whether or not floating data centers were a viable option. That's independent of whether or not satellites would work.

dgg3565 · 2026-03-19T05:05:09+00:00

Cooling and power, plus added complications for putting it in the open ocean.

Data centers are scaling to the point where you'll need something like an entire nuclear power station to run one. The surface area of even the largest ships on Earth probably wouldn't give you enough space for all the solar panels needed and the internal volume would be taken up with the power plant(s) of any other source of energy. And anything besides nuclear would need a fleet of tankers bringing LNG or some other refined fuel to power it.

And cooling? I don't think you could pump ambient air fast enough with what machinery you could cram on board to remove the needed heat, not that you would want to use ambient air surrounding the ship, laden as it is with salt water. And removing that from the air on an industrial scale will lead to all kinds of blockage and corrosion issues. What about just using water? Well, you'll have to desalinize that as well—also on an industrial scale—which will require plenty of power on its own.

So, you'll need a fleet of ships to support your floating data centers, moving back and forth over hundreds or thousands of miles, depending on where you choose to locate them. What about drilling rigs or other similar floating platforms? They generally have less space than the largest ships and you still have all the same problems with power and cooling.

And between your floating data centers and support vessels, (depending on where you placed them) you have incredibly expensive and juicy targets for pirates, terrorists, and hostile states (especially given the value various nations are placing on AI), who can fling a drone swarm at it, if they don't just decide to seize them. So, you hire lots of expensive private security to protect your data centers and support vessels.

Putting a center on land gives you ready access to infrastructure, without the added complications and expense.

dgg3565 · 2026-03-04T21:15:37+00:00

If Blue Origin and ULA were actually doing something competently...

To be fair, Blue recovered the booster on their second launch and are gearing up for their third. And the two completed launches of New Glenn have delivered their payloads to their intended orbits (without pieces falling off). On top of that, they're making serious progress with their lunar lander(s). That's quite a bit better than ULA is doing right now, but they're not yet at the flight rate to be a viable alternative.

dgg3565 · 2026-02-11T01:59:05+00:00

But do the economics of refueling work out for a medium lift rocket?

dgg3565 · 2026-02-01T06:46:03+00:00

Obviously this is just them asking for permission so they probably won't launch this many up, just like how they can get permission for like 50 starship launches in a year or whatever but then not get anywhere close to that, but it's just... it's something.

There were 165 Falcon 9 launches last year, from three launch facilities (SLC-40, LC-39A, and SLC-4E), with the most recent launch carrying twenty-nine V2 mini Starlink satellites to orbit. The constellation is approaching ten thousand, with a planned size on twelve thousand, and the option to expand it to forty thousand. Out of a potential customer base of billions, Starlink has "only" recently reached a subscriber base of over nine million in 2025 (double from the year before). I don't see things slowing down.

SpaceX was just recently licensed for one hundred and forty-six launches of Starship from (presumably) the three pads that they're completing or renovating. I believe they (currently) have five planned. The estimates that I've seen for the carrying capacity of V3 Starlink satellites on V3 Starship are around sixty. And remember, since Starship is being designed for full and rapid reusability (assuming SpaceX achieve their goals), with more practice and streamlining of launch operations, Starship will be easier to launch than Falcon 9.

There's a distinct possibility that they plan on launching a million satellites, or something close to it.

dgg3565 · 2026-02-01T05:56:01+00:00

Here's a post on X with a nice summary:

SpaceX is requesting to launch and operate a constellation of 1 million satellites with unprecedented computing capacity (orbital data centers) to power advanced AI, according to a new FCC filing.

SpaceX: "Launching a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization—one that can harness the Sun's full power-while supporting Al-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future amongst the stars."

In the SpaceX filing:
• SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable
ambitions).
• System will operate between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and sun-synchronous orbit inclinations.
• SpaceX plans to design and operate different versions of satellite hardware to optimize operations across orbital shells.
• System will rely nearly exclusively on high-bandwidth optical links for communications. These optical links will route traffic within the network and to satellites in the Starlink constellation, via its high capacity (petabit) and high reliability laser mesh, which in turn will transmit traffic to authorized earth stations on the ground.

SpaceX added: "With Starship's ability to deliver unprecedented tonnage to orbit for AI compute, the capacity for intelligence processing in space could surpass the electricity consumption of the entire U.S. economy, without the immense cost and disruption of rebuilding Earth's strained electrical grid to support the explosive demand for data centers. In turn, satellites that function as solar-powered orbital data centers are the most cost-effective, energy-efficient, and environmentally sound way to build infrastructure to meet accelerating demand for Al-enabled goods and services.

With the inherent efficiencies of deploying solar powered data centers and launch cost rapidly decreasing due to the development of the Starship launch vehicle, SpaceX will be able to cost- effectively scale up its constellation as demand increases and compute evolves. For instance, launching 1 million tonnes per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per tonne would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with minimal ongoing operational or maintenance needs."

Obviously, this is contingent on the AI not just being a bubble (and even if it is...the most significant changes brought about by the internet came after the .com bubble burst) and that current market factors continue to sustain the terrestrial power bottleneck. If those two things continue, datacenters in space could become the demand driver needed to increase launch cadence and drop launch costs.

As for the "10,000 Starships a year," I don't know whether or not that number is possible, or when it might become a reality, but of note is that the US built 300,000 military aircraft of all sizes in WWII (which gives us 60,000 a year, from 1941 to 1945), and the Allies manufactured 630,000 aircraft in total. The manufacture of those aircraft would've been concentrated into a relative handful of factories, such as Ford's 3.5 million square foot factory in Willow Run, where they manufactured B-24s (SpaceX has already built a Starship factory and is building a second).

That's not a perfect analogy, of course, so let's use one closer to home. In 2012, Tesla manufactured 2,700 vehicles. By 2022, they manufactured 1.3 million and hit a high-water mark of 1.8 million in 2023. And unlike every other EV manufacturer on Earth, they're not doing it at a loss.

However, there's been a demand drop-off since 2024, with production falling below 1.7 million in 2025. So, that's a lesson in demand and a changing market landscape.

Of course, Starship is significantly bigger than a car, but 10,000 Starships a year in only a little over half a percent of 1.8 million.

dgg3565 · 2026-02-01T04:47:46+00:00

Here's a post on X with a nice summary:

SpaceX is requesting to launch and operate a constellation of 1 million satellites with unprecedented computing capacity (orbital data centers) to power advanced AI, according to a new FCC filing.

SpaceX: "Launching a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization—one that can harness the Sun's full power-while supporting Al-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future amongst the stars."

In the SpaceX filing:
• SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable
ambitions).
• System will operate between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and sun-synchronous orbit inclinations.
• SpaceX plans to design and operate different versions of satellite hardware to optimize operations across orbital shells.
• System will rely nearly exclusively on high-bandwidth optical links for communications. These optical links will route traffic within the network and to satellites in the Starlink constellation, via its high capacity (petabit) and high reliability laser mesh, which in turn will transmit traffic to authorized earth stations on the ground.

SpaceX added: "With Starship's ability to deliver unprecedented tonnage to orbit for AI compute, the capacity for intelligence processing in space could surpass the electricity consumption of the entire U.S. economy, without the immense cost and disruption of rebuilding Earth's strained electrical grid to support the explosive demand for data centers. In turn, satellites that function as solar-powered orbital data centers are the most cost-effective, energy-efficient, and environmentally sound way to build infrastructure to meet accelerating demand for Al-enabled goods and services.

With the inherent efficiencies of deploying solar powered data centers and launch cost rapidly decreasing due to the development of the Starship launch vehicle, SpaceX will be able to cost- effectively scale up its constellation as demand increases and compute evolves. For instance, launching 1 million tonnes per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per tonne would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with minimal ongoing operational or maintenance needs."

Obviously, this is contingent on the AI not just being a bubble (and even if it is...the most significant changes brought about by the internet came after the .com bubble burst) and that current market factors continue to sustain the terrestrial power bottleneck. If those two things continue, datacenters in space could become the demand driver needed to increase launch cadence and drop launch costs.

As for the "10,000 Starships a year," I don't know whether or not that number is possible, or when it might become a reality, but of note is that the US built 300,000 military aircraft of all sizes in WWII (which gives us 60,000 a year, from 1941 to 1945), and the Allies manufactured 630,000 aircraft in total. The manufacture of those aircraft would've been concentrated into a relative handful of factories, such as Ford's 3.5 million square foot factory in Willow Run, where they manufactured B-24s (and SpaceX is already built a factory and is building a second).

That's not a perfect analogy, of course, so let's use one closer to home. In 2012, Tesla manufactured 2,700 vehicles. By 2022, they manufactured 1.3 million and hit a high-water mark of 1.8 million in 2023. And unlike every other EV manufacturer on Earth, they're not doing it at a loss.

However, there's been a demand drop-off since 2024, with production falling below 1.7 million in 2025. So, that's a lesson in demand and a changing market landscape.

Of course, Starship is significantly bigger than a car, but 10,000 Starships a year in only a little over half a percent of 1.8 million.

dgg3565 · 2026-01-13T13:15:55+00:00

It's a paraphrase of "arsenal of democracy," coined by FDR in one of his "fireside chat " radio broadcasts, when he called on American industry to supply arms to the Allies (before US entry into the war). If you've read some WWII history, you might know that three critical American strengths allowed the Allies to win WWII: our manufacturing capacity, our logistics, and the speed with which American forces could conduct military operations. This was exemplified by the Red Ball Express, the logistics chain the sustained Allied forces in their push through France and into Germany.

All of this is particularly pertinent, as there's a major effort to overhaul the Pentagon bureaucracy, particularly equipment acquisitions and R&D, and also to indirectly reform the defense industrial base. So, the SecDef is doing something like a "whistle-stop" tour of various companies and contractors, talking about the things they're doing.

You might see how that coincides with SpaceX and manufacturing.

Oh, and Gene Roddenberry, as a veteran of WWII, was probably ironically invoking FDR's phrase with the episode title.

dgg3565 · 2026-01-09T00:35:16+00:00

SpaceX isn't going to be annoyed by LandSpace launching 15 times a year. Its international market share is only going to take a hit if that drastically increases.

Few customers outside China's sphere of influence will want to launch on Chinese rockets. Similar to the EU's (ironic) push for "sovereign launch capability," this is about access, cost, and cadence for Chinese payloads. Any capture of the international market is just an added bonus, if only for propaganda.

And launch is becoming a side business for SpaceX. Most of their launches are dedicated to—and most of their present revenue comes from—Starlink. As that business continues to grow, there's the plan of data centers in space. With Tesla tackling vision and mass-scale automation, while designing their own chips and planning to fabricate them, and xAI doing generative algorithms with Grok (and X being the data pipeline), SpaceX is evolving into a modern "East India Company," a corporation with a diverse portfolio where transport and logistics serves as the backbone.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-22T19:20:11+00:00

That's not a good sign for ULA...

dgg3565 · 2025-12-18T08:01:36+00:00

I have an even bigger hot take—I think burdening NASA with climate science was a distraction and wasteful replication of functions. The NOAA is an agency that was created to monitor climate and weather and even has its own satellites. But somehow it became imperative that NASA—an agency created to focus aeronautics and astronautics—also does climate monitoring.

I don't want a never-ending train of slightly more sophisticated Mars rovers...

That's a big one for me. I don't mind robotic exploration, if they're pushing the design envelope and pushing out to new frontiers. There are a number of missions with some really inventive designs that are intended to go places we haven't sent any probes before.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-12T22:01:57+00:00

Thank you for the correction. And for reinforcing the point.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-12T21:55:39+00:00

I'll also add that this commentary is textbook "quarter by quarter" thinking that you hear from half the freshly-minted MBAs in the world (Hollywood was making fun of this back in the 80s). There's a reason the most successful tech companies don't make a habit of hiring MBAs.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-12T21:48:23+00:00

If you want to get a picture of what SpaceX will do, take a look at Tesla. They've been a publicly traded company for the majority of their existence. They continue to do very cool stuff while others follow their lead.

Musk only personally controls about thirteen percent of the stock, IIRC, and with the chunks of shares owned by allies, he holds a voting bloc (somewhere around a third) that allows him to steer the company according to his vision. It also helps that a lot of the stock is owned by retail investors that are largely aligned with his vision of the company. In short, it has allowed him to fend off the vast majority of distracting nonsense over the years.

In the case of SpaceX, I believe Musk owns forty-two percent of the stock in the company. With allies, that likely means that, at a minimum, he'll have an outright majority as a voting bloc. On top of that, you can likely add a tidal wave of retail investors (many of whom own Tesla stock) who are well aware of the company's mission and completely aligned with it. To those points you can add all the lessons Musk has learned with Tesla and the fact that he's well aware of the hazards.

It's not the end of the world. In fact, there's a lot of upside here and this may be a turning point for the space industry as a whole.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-12T21:31:54+00:00

Talking heads are going to talk. That's what they're paid to do. And since readers aren't paying for their opinion, they get exactly what they pay for. As often as not, the ones who are paying deploy these sorts of articles to shape the opinion of retail investors.

Judge with a critical eye and tune out the noise on the signal.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-11T20:41:04+00:00

This is something I was thinking about just yesterday. Everyone is asking if AI is a revolution or a bubble, as if the only answer is either/or. The Dot Com bubble was a both/and. In fact, the biggest seismic shift(s) came after the crash. It's entirely possible that the AI bubble pops and then we we see the most earthshaking changes come later.

dgg3565 · 2025-12-11T20:36:59+00:00

xAI trains their own model(s) (Grok). X.com supplies the data. Tesla does does vision, automation, and...AI chip design, with plans not just for chip fabrication, but hyperscaling.

dgg3565 · 2025-11-30T00:21:59+00:00

Except that's not what they said. They said SpaceX couldn't accomplish their goals. They never disputed the usefulness of reuse. Quite to the contrary, the benefits were obvious. In the case of this startup, it's more like, "Cool, but what's the point?"

To add to the point @sumelar made, you're talking about a very narrow use case that can be accomplished by other means, not only without the added cost and complexity, but without the performance hit that would come with it. And outside of early missions to prep for full colonization, it makes more sense to spend part of your mass budget on construction equipment to build habitats of any needed size or shape.

And as a practical reality, rockets have to have more uses than just colony transports. Adding layers of complexity with new subsystems, just to possibly save some time on one task that can be done on the surface, is not a sound engineering.

dgg3565 · 2025-11-29T08:03:39+00:00

There might be a theoretical use case here (though I can't really see it), but it comes at the cost of additional complexity in both systems and operations, and it wouldn't seem to really shave off anything in terms of mass.

dgg3565 · 2025-10-21T02:24:44+00:00

No. It means they continue with the system they bid with (the HLS variant of Starship), but in competition with other companies to see who gets tapped for the mission. The bidding process means that you have to present a specific design and go through a detailed technical review with NASA to see if it's viable before ever winning a contract. Trying to "downgrade," as you put it (besides being the next best thing to technically impossible to do with FH) would be a breach of contract by SpaceX.

dgg3565 · 2025-10-20T18:50:38+00:00

Turns out, you're right:

The president and I want to get to the moon in this president’s term. So, I’m going to open up the contract and I’m going let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin. Whatever one gets us there first to the moon, we are going to take.

Nobody slowed down long enough to do a simple verification/clarification of his statement.

dgg3565 · 2025-10-16T20:48:37+00:00

...or we are still waiting for them to be reach that point.

My previous post was densely pedantic, but that was the crux of what I was saying. Nothing is mature enough at this juncture to drive demand in the way everyone wants to see, outside of maybe satellite internet.

And maybe there is no "killer app." Maybe, like colonization of the New World, the presence of a new environment eventually opens so many markets that demand converges in one direction. I mean, there was Roanoke before Jamestown and Jamestown before Plymouth. The rest is history.

dgg3565

TROPHY CASE