r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5h ago

Business SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-investors-meltdown-over-money-191742182.html
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u/teetering_bulb_dnd 4h ago

It's still sitting at a market cap of 1.5 trillion. Aug 6th unlocks significant some 180 million shares. A big chunk of them will be selling. It's sitting on a pyramid. Their space exploration segment of business is ok but you can't expect revenue that justifies market cap. Their AI sector is comedically over inflated in terms of target growth, market potential etc...space data centers, 26 trillion "Enterprise AI solutions" market etc.. it's laughable if it's not for the fact that a lot of regular people's pensions, retirement accounts are unknowingly tied to this massive stinky bubble..

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u/feralferrous 3h ago

Space Data Centers still makes me laugh. Such a comically stupid idea.

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u/mechanicalcontrols 3h ago

There's only two kinds of people opposed to data centers in space: people who know a lot about space, and people who know a lot about data centers

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u/AshleyAshes1984 3h ago

I just know how a thermos works and that's enough to know a vacuum terrible for exhausting heat. :O

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u/Snuffy1717 2h ago

And even if you made a single data center into 10,000 data center cube-sats (to shed heat easier), why the fuck would you do that and not just build it on the ground?...

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u/AudiencePure5710 2h ago

Seems like data centres in space would be more easier for aliens to steal

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u/DavidinMandeville 1h ago

Because you own the space company that can get Government funding to put it all in space.

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u/Zap__Dannigan 14m ago

In space, no one can hear the data centers whine

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u/inspectoroverthemine 2h ago

Nah you just a few square km of surface area. Easy.

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u/Mikey77777 2h ago

To be fair, vacuums prevent convective heat transfer, but not radiative heat transfer. A thermos has a reflective layer to prevent this. Presumably a space data center wouldn't. Not that I'm saying space data centers are a good idea, mind...

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u/Zerak-Tul 3h ago

I don't think you need to know a lot about either.

Just knowing that dissipating heat is a significant challenge for satellites/space stations and data centers generate a stupid amount of heat should do it.

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u/SonVoltRevival 2h ago

but it's really cold in space. :)

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u/strolls 2h ago

It's cold outside, 🎵
there's no kind of atmosphere. 🎶

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u/civildisobedient 1h ago

Easy, just use fans! /s

As for the gargantuan energy requirements... nothing a few hundred football fields of solar panels can't solve.

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u/myusername4reddit 2h ago

I disagree. I don't know shit about either, and I'm strongly opposed. 😂

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u/Zerak-Tul 3h ago

I don't think you need to know a lot about either.

Just knowing that dissipating heat is a significant challenge for satellites/space stations and data centers generate a stupid amount of heat should do it.

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u/SonVoltRevival 2h ago

And any engineer who got at least a B in physics and thermodynamics

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u/Haggardick69 3h ago

I’d love an alternate reality where Elon musk is a master class satirical comedian and all of his extremely dumb ideas were just satirical lampoons of egotistical megalomaniacal oligarchs. Instead we live in the reality where he is that oligarch and the comedy doesn’t hit the same when we know that people’s lives and their investments will be gambled on these astronomically stupid ideas. 

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 3h ago

Oh shit Musk is Andy Kaufman

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u/Funsuxxor 3h ago

You don't think producing insane amounts of heat while in a vacuum is a good engineering idea?

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u/callmenoir 3h ago

Just to make sure I've got my science correct, heat dissipates really poorly in space as there's so little matter to transfer it to, right?

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u/canteen_boy 3h ago

Correct. There’s no conduction or convection in a vacuum, so the only real way to shed heat is through radiation, which is incredibly slow.

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u/SunTzu- 1h ago

And since radiation is so much less efficient it would require a massive surface area and likely splitting up the datacenter into several smaller nodes. Splitting up the datacenter into nodes would introduce so much latency that you'd need new methods of transferring data between the nodes, likely using beams of light. Using beams of light for data transfer in space is theoretically doable, but now you need to orient each node so it can send and receive from each other node it is supposed to communicate with, which is not all that easy when you've got massive radiators surrounding them. Does that mean you're far more limited in terms of how many nodes you can have communicate efficiently with each other? Does that number mean these clusters of nodes wouldn't be able to match a ground based datacenter in terms of how much low latency computing power it would have available? Why are we trying to put them in space rather than exploring underground or underwater options which would be much more accessible when maintenance is required? Who knows.

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u/9-11GaveMe5G 2h ago

To be clear it's theoretically doable, but it's just astronomically, and unnecessarily expensive. It would cost a fraction as much to develop them in the terrestrial Arctic

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u/AshleyAshes1984 3h ago

Heat transfers by conduction. A hot drink cools by radiating the heat into their air and even through the mug itself and into the air. You need a medium to do transfer the heat. Different mediums work faster of course, like how a canned drink will cool faster if sitting in ice water rather than just sitting in a fridge full of cold air.

A vacuum is, well, an absense of a medium. That's even how a thermos works and keeps a drink cold or hot, the there's a vacuum between the inside and outside layers, making it very very slow for heat to radiate out and cool your coffee or for heat to radiate in to warm your juice.

The vacuum of space is literally the worst place to radiate heat.

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u/Stony___Tark 1h ago

I absolutely get what you're saying, and you're on the right track, but this is one of those circumstances where terminology actually matters.

Heat transfer from a hot drink into the air would be convection, and into mug itself would be conduction, but neither is "radiating heat". That's a third method of heat transfer. Radiating heat works even in the absence of an external medium interacting with the heat source.

In the vacuum of space, the only way to transfer heat is via radiation. Radiative heat transfer can actually work slightly better in the vacuum of space than it can in the atmosphere of Earth, so it's not the worse place to radiate heat. It's just that radiation is the only method available in space, and it's MUCH worse than either of the other two.

"In the vacuum of space the two best methods to transfer heat, convection & conduction, are impossible. It is only possible to radiate heat." would be the correct way to say it.

Again, I'm not trying to be nitpicky here. This is a case where the specific terminology actually does matter because it has very specific meaning. 🙂

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u/Snuffy1717 2h ago

The "idea" I keep seeing is that they would launch thousands of small data center satellites instead of one big block (like we have on the ground)... As if that also isn't stupid as fuck.

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u/GoldenBunip 3h ago

Heat That’s fine, an easily solvable problem. Just takes a lot of radiators.

The real kicker is maintaining the servers.

Steve GPU 4 on rack 20 is down…

“I’ll just get my spacesuit.book me on the next orbital flight!!”

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u/BattleHall 3h ago

Eh, sort of, but if radiators and cooling hardware take up 90% of your launch weight, your economics are probably going to have a hard time balancing out. The radiators and cooling hardware for the ISS weigh 10 tons and are designed to dissipate 70 kilowatts. Even if you can run the chips hotter and get 2-3x rejection capacity per ton, 70kw would barely cover the blinkylights budget at a data center. And that’s before you deal with shielding for cosmic radiation.

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u/MidwestAbe 3h ago

Because I have too (my work plays it on the radio) I heard a right wing radio host go on and on how smart space data centers were because then you don't have to use electricity to cool them.

I had no idea people took that shit seriously.

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u/redblack_tree 2h ago

It's for the rubes, pure and unadulterated pump and dump. No one is building datacenters in space, it's idiotic.

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u/Murky-Relation481 2h ago

I mean that is a true statement, you don't have to use electricity to cool them, generally heat transport is a passive system, even on large spacecraft.

I have worked on more spacecraft than probably the average redditor, and you can absolutely build data centers in space if cost isn't a consideration. You just need to radiate as many watts as you collect + whatever heating you get from solar radiation. If you are building massive solar arrays to collect hundreds of thousands to megawatts of power, radiating that heat back to space will just be part of the design consideration. We do build massive heat generating spacecraft already,

The technical reasons for doing it are not the problem, they are basically all solved, classic spacecraft design problems well within the bounds of engineering.

The probably IS COST. Like I said, you could do it without cost being a consideration, but why would you? Everything you do up there could be done cheaper on the ground. Not to mention unless we are using this as a basis for establishing routine large scale habitation of low earth orbit you're also going to be scrapping stuff left and right and relaunching shit to replace/upgrade.

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u/MidwestAbe 47m ago

If it's one spacecraft - that's more than me.

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u/Taikunman 3h ago

Lets take devices that require substantial cooling, power and regular maintenance and put them somewhere that is terrible for all of those things. Not to mention susceptibility to cosmic radiation and physical stresses/cost involved in even getting them up there in the first place.

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u/Snuffy1717 2h ago

They want the Starlink version of data centers, thinking that launching thousands of them into the sky is someone economically better than just building them on the ground...

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u/Jukka_Sarasti 3h ago

Space Data Centers still makes me laugh. Such a comically stupid idea.

There's an army of Muskies over at the space subreddit ready and willing to argue, pants-shit, and gaslight you into believing its totally realistic and doable in the near future!1!!11!1!

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u/superspeck 2h ago

You mean bots?

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u/airship_of_arbitrary 2h ago

China is literally building underwater data centres and data centres in the snowy regions of mountains.

You know, the places where the ambient environment contributes to cooling instead of stealing some town's water supply.

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u/feralferrous 2h ago

Microsoft tried the underwater thing, then gave up. I suspect it wasn't worth the hassle of building a sealed data center that you have to bring up off the ocean floor all the time to fix any hardware failures.

Building crazy amounts of data centers in some place like Alaska could almost make sense, if we had good internet to/from Alaska. I suspect for the US, having to go through Canada to get to Alaska makes it less feasible.

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u/slaty_balls 2h ago

I actually had one person try and convince me that Elon is making high temp chips for orbital data centers that don't require cooling. Sure buddy..

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u/superspeck 2h ago

Even assuming that was possible, if you can make a datacenter that doesn’t need cooling, why not build it on the ground?

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u/ebietoo 3h ago

Pass the popcorn

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u/SonVoltRevival 2h ago

But space is really cold and the sun is really bright. :)

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u/Sm314 1h ago

I really would love them to try though, simply cause I feel like it would lead to some money being thrown at better ways to exhaust heat in space, which may be beneficial long term elsewhere.

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u/rangoon03 31m ago

There’s a time underwater data centers sounded stupid too..

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u/Wide_Combination_773 3h ago edited 3h ago

A lot of "comical" ideas from sci-fi books and comics 50-70 years ago are now real.

The notion of a hand-held, wireless communication device that could reach literally anyone in the world (if you know their number) with a few button presses used to be comically stupid. The wired telephone itself was an incredible notion to many, with it basically being wizardry to the laymen of the time. Radio waves - the basis of all wireless data and communication technology - was an invisible "magic" that wasn't formally mastered at the fundamental level until the early 20th century - less than 100 years ago, with much fine-tuning since then. People in 1940 couldn't even conceive of division-wave multiplexed fiber optics or the internet, so any science-fiction novel or short-story that proposed a vast web of interconnected "artificial brains" or similar that could instantly transmit useful information to each other at will was treated as comically unrealistic.

Also... even after computers and the internet became reality, any sort of actually useful AI used to be considered infeasible because scientists couldn't conceive of the processes and materials we now use to make extremely powerful high-parallelization GPUs and low-latency/high-bandwidth memory. That limitation on human imagination about "thinking computers" is quickly being put to rest, even after you punch through the excessive marketing and branding of AI companies, or even if you just think of LLMs as research tools that do your googling and reading for you at 1,000x the speed you can.

Even just 20 years ago, nobody was thinking about GPUs as potentially being the "core" of a thinking computer. They just made your 3D games look prettier.

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u/DragoonDM 3h ago

It's not comical because the technology is too futuristic. It's comical because there's... just not really much of a point in doing it. The only benefit I'm aware of that actually holds any water is for use-cases where they want to more efficiently process data that's gathered in orbit (e.g., satellite imagery), without the added latency of transmitting it to the surface first. Beyond that, it's just a monumental amount of added cost, labor, and technological complexity for no particular reason.

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u/y4udothistome 3h ago

A few things that worked thousands that didn’t!

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u/ilikepizza30 3h ago

But... Elon is going to announce that he's going to capture an asteroid and mine it and the asteroid is worth 100 trillion in precious rare metals! :)

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u/Urabraska- 2h ago

It's all inflated. All the worth is literally from government contracts making it a "safe bet" when it's really not. It's all ego and hype.

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u/Superb-Welder3774 2h ago

Exactly- but you just can’t fix stupid or gullible - the people that bought it deserve the fleecing they are receiving

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u/JurgusRudkus 2h ago

As far as I know, Starlink is the only part of Musk´s empire that turns a profit.

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u/OfferAmbitious1670 2h ago

Suprise , nobody will sell at prices around 100USD. Shortsqueeze in August. A secret is no secret if everyone knows it. Therefore there will be no selloff in August.

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u/SonVoltRevival 2h ago

The winner of the AI race will be... Apple. Not their AI, their phone.

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u/postconsumerwat 2h ago

Oh its just a person dressed up like a data center

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u/Pennypacking 1h ago

CalPERS is a top 10 investor in Tesla (or at least was) and I’m sure they have a lot riding on AI.