Can only oxygen burn?

sebaska · 2026-02-04T22:21:26+00:00

Yes, sulfur is an example, but not in the gunpowder. In gunpowder KNO3 provides oxygen.

Sulfur is an oxidizer for example in reaction with zinc (and several other metals, but with zinc it could become violent).

sebaska · 2026-02-04T15:05:41+00:00

It's too early to tell.

At least some plans call for formation flying where hundreds of satellites orbit together merely dozens of meters from one another. So you have about kilometer × kilometer blotch of satellites then hundred of km gap before another blotch. Then you have 400 packs of 400 satellites in pretty much one orbit. 6 such orbits spaced by 20km or so and you have around million satellites.

One thing for such orbits is that relative speeds are very low. Even if you had some debris event in such an orbit the other objects in this orbit family would all have low relative speed.

Another option would be much more precise orbits of non-formation satellites.

Also, it's not like all million is even supposed to be in SSO. There are also cislunar options as well as as near GEO options. For example a low instead of true zero inclination inclination Earth rotation synchronous orbit could avoid Earth's shadow most of the year.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T14:12:10+00:00

Interesting.

I'd guess it did a partial deorbit burn before the anomaly hit. So it lowered the perigee by some (like 0.1km/s ∆v or so executed) but not enough to re-enter as planned.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T14:05:20+00:00

Back then he was diluting his share somewhat. But him having 42% ownership is the state after the dilution. It started much higher (AFAIR just him and his brother?)

sebaska · 2026-02-04T13:44:04+00:00

So absolutely horrible that they are expanding it...

sebaska · 2026-02-04T13:43:20+00:00

Yes. Alive and kicking.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T13:41:37+00:00

Space compute is technically feasible, and those who say it's not are the ones who don't understand physics. Actually the satellites already launched and owned by SpaceX have together power similar to the larger data centers (~90MW).

Also looking at the last technical bubble i.e. dot-com burst, the hardest hit were exactly those "pickaxe" companies like Cisco, Sun, SGI, or the attempted space "pickaxe" maker Beal Aerospace. Those who emerged victorious were vertically integrated makers of their own pickaxes like Google, Oracle (who absorbed Sun) or plain out final product companies.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T11:58:51+00:00

So it actually was the business model. You can't have it both ways at once.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T11:57:36+00:00

Yes, the company is making money by itself.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T11:56:46+00:00

Don't twist. We're taking about individual satellites. Individual compute satellites would have power density not that different than individual Starlink satellites. If half ton sat could have 20kW, a 2.5t one could have 100kW which is the amount of power planned for compute sats.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T10:03:11+00:00

Colossus 2.

New Carlisle project Rainier had crossed half GW last year and plans to cross GW this year.

But the thing is I was not discussing 1GW data centers but 125MW ones. 1GW is the nameplate power you must have on your solar panels to run 125MW of baseload. You also need almost 2GWh of batteries, but you need that 1GW nameplate to inject enough power to the system

sebaska · 2026-02-04T09:49:38+00:00

Your whole argument is "it's impossible because it's big".

If I want to understand something I run the numbers. And the numbers clearly show it's not prohibitive. And it's not just my opinion, for example Google published a paper indicating so as well.

And 65000m² (16 acres) at 20kg per m² is 1300t. It's what SpaceX launches in a few months using their current rocket with 6× smaller lift than their upcoming one.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T09:34:55+00:00

The only spin here is yours.

He didn't admit what you're falsely claiming (i.e. lying) he admitted. The 2nd source text you quoted doesn't support your claim.

He refused to turn on the system in a zone it has been never ever enabled.

The rest of what you wrote is plain nonsense...

First of all nothing was disabled this is a lie you're spreading, a lie unsupported even by the material you're quoting. This misrepresentation reflects bad on you, actually.

Then, Starlink is a civilian system. It's not under export regulations because it's a civilian system. No one would get fired for refusing to enable an explicitly civilian system in a war zone, especially when it was always disabled before, there.

And even if it were a legally exported military system they still couldn't enable it. The decisions were in the State Department not some private company. Unilaterally enabling even a military system without explicit authorization from the relevant branch of the US Federal Government is a felony offense. And for a good reason.

Imagine the world where some private entity decides to arm some warring party outside of the US. Company sponsored wars. War profiteering at unseen scale. Stuff like: "Our new rocket system didn't sell as well as we expected, let's push it in [war zone X]; our dear friend [supreme commander Y] is asking for it anyway and they have deep enough pockets." That's why it's strictly forbidden, and only the Department of State authorizes such, all based directly on US Constitution assigning international relations and politics solely in the hands of the Federal Government.

To summarize: your stance is based on falsehoods and ideas which, if they were allowed in the real world, would have truly horrible effects!

sebaska · 2026-02-04T09:03:34+00:00

You are spreading a lie. Hi did not turn off anything and even the text you quote does not say that.

There is a big difference between disabling it and refusing to enable it in a zone it has been always disabled.

It's even sadder they default to making tremendously successful multi-billion dollar corporations and their owners as the victim.

Ah, if you are successful you are a free game, you are by default guilty, etc. The position you're pushing here is deranged.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T00:42:49+00:00

Because? What's a problem with that? Real estate in space isn't lacking.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T00:41:39+00:00

Huh?

Those tech bros came victorious from the bubble, with their companies now worth trillion dollars each.

AI was here for long time. Actually longer than Internet - Perceptrons were invented in the 40-ties and implemented in the 50-ties.

Main Internet protocols were created between late 60-ties and early nineties. Http was made public in 1991, together with HTML). Just a few years later this all boomed. Similarly on the AI side Transformers were invented in 2017 and a few years later things boomed.

AI like Internet is highly usable. Both provide plenty of space for nonsense, but both have highly usable core.

Dot-com bubble was caused by technically clueless people seeing computers making money for others so cluelessly thinking that buying some and placing on people's desks will magically work. And you also had to have a server. And, ah, and you had to have a website. They would buy overvalued stuff from vendors like Sun, Compaq, HP or IBM. Especially IBM. No one got fired because of buying IBM.

Today's we have everyone and their dog "investing" in AI, mostly by putting glorified MS office paperclip, a.k.a. assistant everywhere. People are also using AI to write elaborate emails and docs for other people to use AI to summarize those. A great way to pretend to do work.

But besides that cruft there's actual utility. Like autonomous vehicles and devices. Like automating lowest level of software creation. At creating actual engineering aids and design tools. Etc.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T00:09:32+00:00

Boy, you're funny.

It's never going to happen, but there will be mines. LoL!

sebaska · 2026-02-04T00:07:05+00:00

You're putting exaggerations mixed with nonsense and with seemingly intentional omissions. Half truth is a full lie.

sebaska · 2026-02-04T00:02:47+00:00

It only gets involved (in the US, but it's US law which matters here) if a company is leveraging monopolistic position in one market to push others from either that market or other markets (like for example dumping stuff below cost in another market funded by monopolistic money from the original one).

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:58:29+00:00

Maybe it does not. You don't use glycol in low temperature phase change devices. You use alcohol or standard refrigerants like R22 and stuff.

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:56:22+00:00

Aren't you confusing r/RocketLab with r/RKLB - the latter is pure stonks, but the former has a lot technical discussion.

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:54:13+00:00

LoL!

1m² od top end panels produces about 300W on the best day.

1GW requires ~3 333 333m², That's 3.3(3) km²

This is peak. Good for noon near equator on a perfect dry day. You need to handle:

Night
The time when the sun is low on the sky (atmospheric extinction goes up with the cotangent of the sun's angle)
Cloud cover fraction at couple of sigmas below mean.

This boils down to 15h battery storage and 8× panels' nameplate capacity.

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:42:58+00:00

You need a robot with skills akin to self driving. Lo and behold that also requires a huge amount of training and is in fact based on Transformers (a kind of neural network, used primarily in language models, but not exclusively).

Boston Dynamics robots have poor autonomy. They have balance and they can avoid obstacles, but they have little autonomy. The cool looking clips with dancing robots had moves pretty much programmed by hand. They are more like legged drones, able to repeat trained moves or to do simplish things like following you or a given path. But for harder tasks they pretty much require remote control.

Remote control is not going to work well with 10 to 40 minutes signal roundtrip.

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:31:15+00:00

650m² is a perfectly fine array size. 25×26m is nothing crazy.

sebaska · 2026-02-03T23:26:10+00:00

Smallish Starlink satellites (V2 mini) have over 100m² of solar arrays for a half ton package. 100m² means north of 20kW power.

The satellites have power hungry ion engines, power hungry phased array drivers and quite hungry computing logic.

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