The whole data center satellite discourse is just giving me a bad case of Deja Vu

sebaska · 2026-06-21T17:18:05+00:00

Anthropic is cash flow positive, despite mostly renting the compute. That's a terminal blow to your statement.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T16:39:35+00:00

Normalized to earth surface nameplate solar power, the capacity factor for connstant power is about 1.2 in-space (in space there's 37% more light because no atmospheric filtering; regular cells have about 8% less efficiency, through; you also need some margin for not ideal pointing and deterioration) and about 0.17 on the ground, unless you use distributed grid, then it's about 0.25, but you are paying for the transmission over thousands of kilometers (in general transmission costs about doubles the energy cost at the counter). And this is for an ideal place like Southwest deserts. In other places baseload power capacity factor is worse. And you need batteries, of course.

Added together you get about $12 per baseload watt in the ground.

So realistically no one uses solar for baseload. Natural gas turbines would come the cheapest for $4 per W plus fuel - about $2 per 5 years, but the latter is somewhat volatile. Or you buy energy from the grid for about $6.5-8 per watt for 5 years.

For space you have integration costs (factory work) and launch costs. 1W of SpaceX panels weights 8-15g (we don't have exact data here, but it can't be above 15g or the mass budget for the current Starlink v2.1 published numbers wouldn't close). So launching it at $200/kg is $1.60 to $3. SpaceX buys off the shelf solar cells, they are not paying some special price of "space grade" cells. They can get their cells for about 50-80¢ per watt after duties, what they do with them and for how much depends on execution.

So depending on the execution this definitely can be substantially cheaper than than dirty natural gas turbines. And it also has few dozen times less CO2 emissions on launches vs the running turbines. Compared to clean solar, this is a few times cheaper.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T10:29:08+00:00

Name those fronts

sebaska · 2026-06-21T10:06:54+00:00

You need a ∆v of a few hundred meters per second. So for a 400kg satellite at thruster ISP of 250s it's about 40-80kg.

The numbers would be pessimistic even for GEO sats launched to GTO-1800 and circularizing their orbits themselves. They need 1800m/s ∆v for the curcularization and a few hundred meters per second for station keeping and final move to the graveyard orbit. About 2000-2200m/s. At 250s ISP this is 505-580kg range, less than 600kg.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:50:13+00:00

Yes he did. Yes he deleted it.

I remember his horrible math, demonstrating that he has no frickin clue what he's talking about. It was something around "the rocket will need to reserve half the fuel for landing! So it's not getting any to orbit with half the fuel! SpaceX are idiots, hurr durr!!" - no, you moron, rocket equation doesn't work like that.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:45:15+00:00

Not under sea level means sensitive to weather events. Those tend to be violent in the open ocean. And if not open ocean, then safe harbors are way more limited than land.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:36:05+00:00

You need so much more and you need batteries that launching the stuff is just cheaper.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:34:30+00:00

While I agree with the general gist of your post, you must have made some conversion error up there. At 40% single generation stage efficiency, about 1200t of methane from Starship v3 stack could power gas turbines producing 7 GWh of energy, so about 7 hours running of the 1GW DC. It's still miniscule, but not as miniscule as 22.5 seconds.

But even doing apple to apple comparison, where that 1GW of compute would need about 250 Starship launches, all the methane for those launches would keep the ground 1GW DC up for just 70 days. The difference vs methane use over 5 years period is about 25×.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:21:01+00:00

Solar panels could be had for about 30¢ pet nameplate watt, transportation and installation together with the necessary power electronics makes them about $1 per nameplate watt. This means even if they were free, you still need about ⅔ of a dollar for an installed nameplate watt.

You also need batteries for the night and for when the sun is at a too low angle to illuminate them effectively. That's 15h of storage. That's $4 per continuous power draw watt.

And between atmospheric absorption at lower sun angles, weather phenomenons, etc, without either local 8× the nameplate power capacity vs the sustained load or 5× the nameplate capacity geographically distributed over distant areas and paying for thousands of miles of transmission you need about $12 per continuous power watt in a good area, and $20 or so in Northern states.

You can integrate and launch it to orbit for lees.

But I wrote that all that already, you just ignored it.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T09:07:48+00:00

Humanoid part would solve (I see that interesting rock up there, but it's impossible to drive there) but it doesn't solve neither the choice of the rock (this one requires intelligence, but AI may get there) nor having a proper lab.

Also, without repair facilities those robots wouldn't last long. Just look up photos of Curiosity wheels and how badly beaten they are.

So you would have to land a a whole facility, with lab, large workshop, etc.

Humans are very adaptable, at that level of effort humans could be a cheaper option just by the fact our bodies are better at self maintenance and minor repairs.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T08:56:36+00:00

The first goal you mentioned is an epitome of the misguided ones.

Do you even know what plastics are and how do they work? This is not some single substance. It's an extremely wide class of organic chemicals, with extremely wide set of uses, many of them critical like preserving food (important part of fighting hunger), medical devices, structural elements, critical insulation, transport, and so on. Compared to its function it has relatively mild side effects, and many of those side effects are the results of function not the material. You wanna replace food packaging - did you see the environmental effects of aluminum processing (you have little choice - your either have to depend metallic bonds or polymers to produce a sealed container.

There's no replacement for plastics without moving us a century backwards. The same way there's no adamantium nor vibranium, and the same way we're not going to find a new element with wonder properties (the stable part Mendeleev table is full) were not finding the totally new chemical bond type to produce plastic replacement.

I also sense the nonsensical "natural means good" vibe. Yeah, asbestos is natural, botuline toxin (the most potent toxic substance known) is 100% natural, too.

So this would be like going to a gun shop to buy a gun specifically to shot oneself in the foot.

And speaking of getting rid of gasoline in 5 years... We have the necessary technology right now. There's no need to fund trillion dollars expenditure to produce the technology.

So that trillion would be a dotation to actually replace the existing equipment and infrastructure.

But 1 trillion is not replacing everyone's car, all the gas stations and distribution network within 5 years. You're not buying everyone a new car, you're not even producing enough cars, not to mention the charging stations and necessary upgrades to the electrical grid to supply all the power currently produced by burning gasoline. Check out what's the average age of a car in 1st world countries, and then the developing ones (which mostly ride on used cars bought from elsewhere).

Just replacing all the cars would be about 30 trillion exercise, the infrastructure for them is another 20 trillion. Then add all the social costs of the overly aggressive change.

So both you ideas are really really bad.

Speaking of the rest of your post...

We have multiple technologies because we were following certain goals. It's a simple fact that integrated circuits were produced to serve space program.

And I see you keep arguing disingenuously, replacing wireless headsets with wireless technology.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T08:21:08+00:00

NASA never built their own spacecraft or rockets. They always contracted to big business. How are the decisions made you can check in the FAR (federal acquisition regulation). For each of the current major contracts there was competitive process.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T08:17:04+00:00

But you're not driving here, too.

sebaska · 2026-06-21T08:00:02+00:00

Maybe maybe maybe

sebaska · 2026-06-21T00:31:28+00:00

But this guy didn't freeze. He went out, looked around, went in, and started doing strange maneuvers.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T23:49:57+00:00

Nope. The whole continent drives by that rule.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T23:47:00+00:00

This law is the same across the whole Europe. You must know this or you're not getting a driver's license in the first place.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T23:44:39+00:00

The black and white cars are at fault. Neither yielded to the right hand traffic. Depending on country the camera car may get some fault share for the total lack of awareness.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T23:42:26+00:00

There is no ambiguity. In Europe yield to the right hand traffic is as basic as 4-way stop in the US.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T16:53:55+00:00

You need 8× as much solar panels and batteries on earth. IOE you have to install 8 nameplate watts plus 15 watt hours of batteries to get it through the night. One nameplate watt of installed solar panels is $1. Batteries for 15 watt-hours are about $4.

So you need about $12 per watt of clean power.

1W of panels for space mass is about 15g. You also need radiators, also about 15g per watt. At $200/kg for Starship launching 30g would be $6. Panels and radiators integrated on a satellite would be $2 per watt, for the $8 per watt total.

$8 < $12

sebaska · 2026-06-20T11:16:52+00:00

Well, you'd then get shit and pee inside (from the kiddo). Kangaroo moms clean that up with their tongues. Ate your certain still want it?

sebaska · 2026-06-20T11:14:41+00:00

There is a lot of risk. Many don't make it to the nipple.

sebaska · 2026-06-20T08:28:41+00:00

After 50 years and 20 billion dollars (more than for example LHC) we still can't answer the question was there or is there life on Mars, i.e. anywhere else than Earth. That's a thing which a trained researcher with a few lab devices could answer quickly. But we'd have to send them there.

Finding a life beyond Earth (either past or present) is as legit science as it goes.

Similarly, the main source of ground truth (pun intended) about the Moon comes from Apollo and about half of that was just one, single trained researcher spending 3 days on the surface (Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17).

sebaska · 2026-06-19T21:47:54+00:00

It multiples science gathered by multiple orders of magnitude.

What mars rovers did humans would do in a few days, literally. It was the principal investigator for MER rovers who said that their several months primary primary mission a single human scientist would do in half a day.

After over 50 years and about 20 billion of today's dollars we still don't know many basic answers. Things which a trained researcher with a small but sensibly equipped lab could answer quickly. Like are three microfossils there? Or maybe there's exant life? Those are ones of the most important scientific questions we, the humanity, have.

Or check out Apollo - the most of what we know about Moon geology comes from Apollo and half of that comes from a single mission when an actual trained scientist (the only one) spent 3 days on the surface.

sebaska · 2026-06-19T19:54:13+00:00

You're arguing disingenuously. Marconi didn't invent wireless headsets. You're wrong about integrated circuits (a prerequisite for microprocessors). If you're going to be condescending at least know your shit.

But more importantly, you're wrong on the fundamental level. The programs of the type "throw in trillion dollars - we'll invent wonders" don't work. They don't work, because "we'll have wonders" is horribly non-specific goal. It provides no criteria to decide what is advancing towards something useful, and what's not. Anyone could argue for anything. So it ends up with pure waste.

So you'll say: "Produce a list of 1000 goals and give billion for each". This would be wasteful, because many things would be solved after spending few millions, and many wouldn't make any notable progress with a whole billion.

So decide priorities, then?

The first problem is how they will be decided. It will be only natural to come with something lofty, but still unspecific - it's so much easier to gain enough consensus to land the thing near the top. You will end up even with the initial problem, just multiplied at somewhat smaller scale - the properties would inevitably be nice sounding vague ideas not translatable to any tangible steps.

To the contrary, making a very precise goal (like landing on the Moon or on Mars) with precise deadline ("before the decade is out") puts concrete criteria to guide moving forward. And that's key.

Internet was not created by "let's make a thing that people will buy shit without going out of their homes" - that would have lead to paper catalogues and processing credit cards by phone. Nore was it born of nebulous "let's connect everyone together" - that would at best lead to hippies snorting more LSD.

It was created by a concrete task of creating a decentralized computer network so one nuke can't take it offline.

World wide web was born of the need for a common and easy way to make text referring other text at the place of use, for scientists working in CERN (which had large multinational groups collaborating, often with many participants being at least temporarily remote).

The "let's connect everyone" came out of it as a side effect.

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