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Illegal Immigrant and drug abuser Elon Musk is now talking about merging SpaceX and xAI to have
DATA!
CENTERS!
IN!
SPACE!
He must be drinking from tRump's sippy cup as he's talking about a million satellites that are AI data centers. What could possibly go wrong?
Let me count the ways:
POWER - AI data centers need power, lots of it. Until we get mini nuclear power plants that will fit inside a Falcon 9 rocket he'll need solar power. Lots of it. That means HUGE solar panels. The panels alone would dwarf the satellite. It's just not practical.
HEAT - There's no air in space to radiate away heat. Getting rid of all that heat from data centers on the ground is a big problem already. Out in space where you can't connect a hose to the local water supply to cool your screaming hot processors? Difficult. Expensive. Hard.
SCALE - Data centers are large because you want to pack as many processors as close together as possible to reduce latency. Even connected by LASERS! latency between satellites (or the ground) is going to be enormous compared to having another cluster in the rack a few feet away.
UP KEEP - A memory module dies in your data center in Rack 72, Unit C? Send a geek waddling down the hall and they'll power down the rack, swap out the bad RAM and that Unit is making kiddie p0rn again in minutes. Up in SPACE? Your satellite become nonoperational. Wasted money. Space junk, which leads us to
SPACE JUNK - One wrong component gets fried and you got space junk. One virus or Windows Update brinks your satellite and you get space junk. No reboots 800 miles up. Your hardware become obsolete? Space junk. We already have so much junk orbiting the earth it's getting harder to find a clean area to place a satellite let alone a million of them. Each collision spews more space junk until all the orbits become too polluted to use. Can you say,Kessler syndrome? I knew you could. Which leads us to
POLLUTION FROM SPACE! The standard way to dispose of old satellites is send them into the Earth's atmosphere and let them burn up. Well, that may be okay once in a while, like just one or two people burning their backyard leaves... but when the whole neighborhood does it we're talking air pollution. I have no idea what vaporized aluminum (the key satellite component by weight) will do to the upper atmosphere but it probably isn't good. It may not be a problem now - so let's avoid that problem.
Another grand idea from the person who promised you Hyperloop, point to point rocket trips, the Cyber Truck and unlimited kiddie p0rn as free speech.
Go home, Elon.
DATA!
CENTERS!
IN!
SPACE!
He must be drinking from tRump's sippy cup as he's talking about a million satellites that are AI data centers. What could possibly go wrong?
Let me count the ways:
POWER - AI data centers need power, lots of it. Until we get mini nuclear power plants that will fit inside a Falcon 9 rocket he'll need solar power. Lots of it. That means HUGE solar panels. The panels alone would dwarf the satellite. It's just not practical.
HEAT - There's no air in space to radiate away heat. Getting rid of all that heat from data centers on the ground is a big problem already. Out in space where you can't connect a hose to the local water supply to cool your screaming hot processors? Difficult. Expensive. Hard.
SCALE - Data centers are large because you want to pack as many processors as close together as possible to reduce latency. Even connected by LASERS! latency between satellites (or the ground) is going to be enormous compared to having another cluster in the rack a few feet away.
UP KEEP - A memory module dies in your data center in Rack 72, Unit C? Send a geek waddling down the hall and they'll power down the rack, swap out the bad RAM and that Unit is making kiddie p0rn again in minutes. Up in SPACE? Your satellite become nonoperational. Wasted money. Space junk, which leads us to
SPACE JUNK - One wrong component gets fried and you got space junk. One virus or Windows Update brinks your satellite and you get space junk. No reboots 800 miles up. Your hardware become obsolete? Space junk. We already have so much junk orbiting the earth it's getting harder to find a clean area to place a satellite let alone a million of them. Each collision spews more space junk until all the orbits become too polluted to use. Can you say,Kessler syndrome? I knew you could. Which leads us to
POLLUTION FROM SPACE! The standard way to dispose of old satellites is send them into the Earth's atmosphere and let them burn up. Well, that may be okay once in a while, like just one or two people burning their backyard leaves... but when the whole neighborhood does it we're talking air pollution. I have no idea what vaporized aluminum (the key satellite component by weight) will do to the upper atmosphere but it probably isn't good. It may not be a problem now - so let's avoid that problem.
Another grand idea from the person who promised you Hyperloop, point to point rocket trips, the Cyber Truck and unlimited kiddie p0rn as free speech.
Go home, Elon.
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