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Speaker 2: Hey, welcome back to dot net rocks. This is episode
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven. I'm Carl Franklin, that Richard Countbell.
Speaker 2: We decided to do.
Speaker 3: A midyear geek out because Richard, yeah, you've got this
Speaker 3: subject so hot right now, I've been I wrote this
Speaker 3: as a talk a few weeks back, and I did
Speaker 3: it three times in like eight days because everybody wanted it,
Speaker 3: so I figured it's probably good one to record.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I have a couple of geek outs now that I've
Speaker 4: made talks that aren't actually podcasts yet.
Speaker 2: That's really cool.
Speaker 4: I've also got the undersea Infrastructure is a talk that
Speaker 4: I've never made into a podcast, but we can, okay
Speaker 4: one of these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, all right, so but that's not this one. No,
Speaker 2: this is space data centers. Yeh, space based So let's
Speaker 2: talk about what happened in the year two thousand and seven.
Speaker 4: All right, where do you want them again?
Speaker 2: So well, in you know, world events, the Virginia Tech
Speaker 2: massacre was horrible. Yeah, that was the deadliest school shooting
Speaker 2: in US history at the time.
Speaker 4: Yes, so far people did so far.
Speaker 2: The emerging global financial crisis, it was going to start
Speaker 2: the Great recession next year two thousand and eight.
Speaker 4: Yep, this is when the guys in the big short
Speaker 4: were starting to get into action realized that's what I
Speaker 4: over leveraged everything was.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's right. And if you weren't around back then,
Speaker 2: then you're two to your child show.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 2: President George W. Bush deployed over twenty thousand additional troops
Speaker 2: to Iraq in the Great Iraq War Troops surge. The
Speaker 2: surge is what he called it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December twenty seventh while company
Speaker 2: while campaigning in Pakistan, which added to the political turmoil
Speaker 2: and you know, drew world wide attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I was in Pakistan the year before. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: when Musharoff was in charge. Mouf Chef was charged in too.
Speaker 4: But they were trying to get to regular elections, which
Speaker 4: they'd never done.
Speaker 2: I thought you and Forte were crazy for going there,
Speaker 2: But you were a great mission.
Speaker 4: He had a great time. It was an educational mission.
Speaker 4: That was a really good thing you did.
Speaker 2: Climate change was on everybody's mind. In two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: there was an inter Governmental Panel on climate change and
Speaker 2: al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, reflecting growing concern
Speaker 2: over global warming. Hamas took control of Gaza after clashes
Speaker 2: with Fatah and.
Speaker 4: That well, they won their They won their election and
Speaker 4: then never had another one. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Chinese products safety was in crisis. Massive recalls of toys,
Speaker 2: pet food, toothpaste, and other products raised global concerns about
Speaker 2: manufacturing standards. I guess that got better. I don't know
Speaker 2: has it.
Speaker 4: It's not in the news anymore anyway, but yeah, one
Speaker 4: would hope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, Well, Walmart seems to be doing very nicely.
Speaker 2: Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House
Speaker 2: in the United States, first woman to serve as speaker.
Speaker 2: After Democrats regained control, Southern California burned to the ground again.
Speaker 2: Massive wild for wildfires forced nearly a million people to evacuate,
Speaker 2: and it became one of the largest evacuation efforts in
Speaker 2: California history. Oil prices surge toward one hundred dollars per barrel. Ah,
Speaker 2: that's nothing.
Speaker 4: This way, you just wait.
Speaker 2: So a couple other things we could just honorably mention
Speaker 2: the Crandall Canyon mind collapse, the disappearance of Madeline McCann,
Speaker 2: the beginning of the two thousand and eight US presidential
Speaker 2: race featuring Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.
Speaker 4: And in the UK.
Speaker 2: Record flug record flooding.
Speaker 4: Not good.
Speaker 2: No, so yeah, there you go.
Speaker 4: It was.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a good year.
Speaker 4: It was tough year.
Speaker 2: Tough year. But you know, I kind of only focused
Speaker 2: on the negative things because those were the most newsworthy anyway.
Speaker 2: But what do you got for space and tech?
Speaker 4: So starting with space in February, the New Horizons spacecraft.
Speaker 4: It is the one headed for Pluto. Yeah, does a
Speaker 4: flyby of Jupiter to pick up some more speed. It
Speaker 4: only launched in two thousand and six, so that was
Speaker 4: a record time to get to Jupiter. They were booking
Speaker 4: it all already. It was the fastest launch and the
Speaker 4: first time ever we launched a spacecraft directly out of
Speaker 4: Earth orbit like, it never ordered the Earth, It just
Speaker 4: went up and kept going. And so yeah, it got
Speaker 4: to Jupiter in record times, slung shot around and then
Speaker 4: basically gets shut down into a dormant mode for seven years.
Speaker 4: And twenty fourteen, they'll light it back up as it's
Speaker 4: starting to get close to Pluto. Just a hint. It
Speaker 4: got to Jupiter in a year, but it'll take another
Speaker 4: seven years to get to Pluto. It's just a long,
Speaker 4: a long way. I said it before. Those photos of
Speaker 4: Pluto were just amazing. Yeah, unbelievable and unexpected. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: nobody knew. Nobody knew what it was, what it looked like.
Speaker 4: So it was really a great mission that it surprised everybody.
Speaker 4: In March, the second flight of a SpaceX Falcon one.
Speaker 4: This is at Omolek, which is a Quandullan Islands funded
Speaker 4: by the United States Department of Defense. Well, let me
Speaker 4: tell you how this thing went. So apparently they got
Speaker 4: the first stage fuel mix wrong, so the engine wasn't
Speaker 4: burning as efficiently as possible, and that meant they had
Speaker 4: they were deeper in the atmosphere at second stage separation.
Speaker 4: That additional drag plus the fuel slash means that the
Speaker 4: first stage actually bumps into the second stage, possibly causing
Speaker 4: it to destabilize a bit and causing more slosh in
Speaker 4: the second stage. So it does fire up, but shuts
Speaker 4: down early, doesn't reach ARP. But the good news is
Speaker 4: since the previous mission had failed as well, this time
Speaker 4: it had no real payload, just a weight essentially, and
Speaker 4: Elon called it a ninety five percent success. Okay, it's
Speaker 4: also the last time they fly on what they call
Speaker 4: a Merlin one in a engine, which is the oblatively cooltile.
Speaker 4: They'll move the next flight, they'll use the version they
Speaker 4: call the one C, which is regeneratively cool. The modern
Speaker 4: engine that is not on the Falcon nine will be
Speaker 4: the one E. So that's their second flight, both of
Speaker 4: both of which have failed. But just you know that's reasonable.
Speaker 4: In June the return of more Shuttle missions. So' only
Speaker 4: gonna do three Shuttle missions in two thousand and seven
Speaker 4: because of the new rules coming out of the Columbia disaster.
Speaker 4: So the June Atlantis mission brings in the stree and
Speaker 4: S four trust of the International Space Station. They're all
Speaker 4: space station flights now, and this is the second set
Speaker 4: of This is the third set of solar panels and
Speaker 4: the S three S four. So they remember when they
Speaker 4: first put together the station, they had one set that
Speaker 4: was kind of in the middle, up standing up high
Speaker 4: on the Z trust. Yeah, and then they then they
Speaker 4: started putting in the wings and so now the port
Speaker 4: wing and the starbough wing are in. This was the
Speaker 4: starboard wing. Then in August, just a couple months later,
Speaker 4: they fly the S five trush, which is a connector
Speaker 4: to put on a second set. Not the most important
Speaker 4: thing for the space station. But what was interesting about
Speaker 4: the Endeavor mission in August was Barbara Morgan. Barbara Morgan,
Speaker 4: remember this is two thousand and seven, was the backup
Speaker 4: to teach your Krista mccauliffe. Oh yeah, who lost their
Speaker 4: life in the Challenger disaster in nineteen eighty six and
Speaker 4: solo literally twenty one years later, her backup gets to
Speaker 4: fly as the first educator astronaut. Wow, I remember she
Speaker 4: stayed in all that time and got to actually do
Speaker 4: one of the first last Space Lab missions and have
Speaker 4: that experience. Awesome. Also, in August, Voyager two cross the
Speaker 4: terminator shock, just like Voyager one done back in two
Speaker 4: thousand and fourth, is the point at which the solar
Speaker 4: radiation from the Sun is being pushed back by the
Speaker 4: interstellar waves and so our furthest objects out Forture one two.
Speaker 4: It's September. The Dawn spacecraft one of the first multi
Speaker 4: destinations spacecraft editor and it's going to the Internet. It's
Speaker 4: going to the asteroid belt. It's going to visit vest
Speaker 4: the asteroid Vesta in twenty eleven, one of the largest,
Speaker 4: probably a dwarf planet. And then in twenty twelve it'll
Speaker 4: go to Serre's one of the very very largest, the largest,
Speaker 4: and it will see it will eventually run out of
Speaker 4: fuel in twenty eighteen and they will leave it orbiting Serres.
Speaker 4: So there's some hope that sometime in the future we'll
Speaker 4: get back there and find the old down spacecraft still
Speaker 4: pinn spin around it there. In October lasts of the
Speaker 4: Shuttle flights for the year. This is Discovery flying the
Speaker 4: Harmony module, also known as No. To two, and so
Speaker 4: that's a big connector module, smaller than the habitat or
Speaker 4: anything like or the Discovery the big laboratory, but it
Speaker 4: is a big connector module. So that's No. Two. This
Speaker 4: is also when they take those central solar panels, the
Speaker 4: P six panels that had been folded up since the
Speaker 4: wings had come in and actually moved out to the
Speaker 4: port end trust. Also in October the first commercial flight
Speaker 4: of the airbus A three eighty, a Singapore Airlines flight
Speaker 4: from Singapore to Sydney, and last of the space flights.
Speaker 4: In November, China's Chang E one orbiter goes to the Moon.
Speaker 4: It launched in October. It makes to the Moon in November.
Speaker 4: It will spend a couple of years orbiting the Moon
Speaker 4: doing a detailed map of the lunar surface. They will
Speaker 4: deliberately impact it into the Moon in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 4: and then Changy two will launch in two twenty ten,
Speaker 4: beginning China's march towards the Moon, which still continues to
Speaker 4: this day. All right, on the computing side, clearly, the
Speaker 4: most important thing in computing to happen this year was
Speaker 4: the first episode of run Ass Radio in April. Yes,
Speaker 4: that's not self serving at all, Oh my goodness, no, no,
Speaker 4: I think probably a little more cloud than that would
Speaker 4: be the release of say, the iPhone in June two
Speaker 4: thousand and seven, a kind of a big deal. It's
Speaker 4: useful to note that at that time Steve job says,
Speaker 4: if you're going to program for the iPhone, you're going
Speaker 4: to do it in Safari, because he had already seen
Speaker 4: the writing on the wall for HTML five well before
Speaker 4: it was real, and didn't believe any that he was
Speaker 4: not going to give anybody direct access to the phone whatsoever.
Speaker 4: He's of course wrong, and by July, within a month
Speaker 4: the phone is jail broken and people are starting to
Speaker 4: put software on, and he's about to lose control of
Speaker 4: his phone. Also in phone News, by November, Google will
Speaker 4: release Android, so the smartphone wave is underway, big way.
Speaker 4: On the Microsoft side. In January, Microsoft Vista is released
Speaker 4: to the public. There was a release in November of
Speaker 4: two thousand and six that was the enterprise only edition,
Speaker 4: but the other editions release in January. At this point,
Speaker 4: people have already been criticizing Vista so heavily that sales
Speaker 4: are appallingly bad.
Speaker 2: Yep, and the jokes never end.
Speaker 4: I never end. Yeah. In September, the first version of
Speaker 4: silver Light. Remembering that the first version of the silver
Speaker 4: Light was really for Netflix, it was the media player
Speaker 4: side for Netflix, switching from the little red envelopes over
Speaker 4: to being online, and so it runs on the Mac
Speaker 4: and the PC both the Mac, Intel and power PC
Speaker 4: platforms works in Safari and Firefox as well as ie
Speaker 4: and all the codings done in JavaScript. Dot Net has
Speaker 4: not yet come to that land, although in November we
Speaker 4: get Studio two thousand and eight which has the dot
Speaker 4: Net framework three point five with link and stuff.
Speaker 2: Before we get away from silver Light, I just remember,
Speaker 2: I think Rory Blythe said it was a wrapper around
Speaker 2: a four h four error because it really didn't do anything.
Speaker 4: Well, it was very challenging to make all that media
Speaker 4: stuff work.
Speaker 2: And he's called it a glorified animated gift player or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 4: Well, it was if we could actually play. It was
Speaker 4: multi resolution video player, right, Yeah, you'd actually assess the
Speaker 4: bandwidth and step down to lower resolution if you could. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that was or step up.
Speaker 2: It was going faster in and of itself, I mean
Speaker 2: the way all streaming is done today. I mean that
Speaker 2: was pretty ahead of its time.
Speaker 4: In October, after the silver Light release, but before Studio
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight, Scott Guthrie brings his as we
Speaker 4: named it at the time, his Ninja Army YEP, which
Speaker 4: was Hanselman and Hack and Connor and so forth to
Speaker 4: the very first Alt dot Net conference in Austin, where
Speaker 4: they demoed first time in public MVC. Now, NBC had
Speaker 4: been in development for some time. It was actually internally
Speaker 4: like the second or third version that they played with.
Speaker 4: Gothrie decided, because he was going to All dot Net,
Speaker 4: who was very much about more testable web development, better
Speaker 4: quality of web development, all that sort of thing, he
Speaker 4: wanted to show this off. So though they apparently they
Speaker 4: did write the demo on the plane wow going down
Speaker 4: there to show this thing off, he did the keynote,
Speaker 4: and I do remember that story blew them away. I
Speaker 4: would argue the most famous thing from that entire conference
Speaker 4: is a photograph of a terribly young Scott Hanselman holding
Speaker 4: up a large post it note from the open Spaces
Speaker 4: section that says, why so mean? Yeah? I remember that because,
Speaker 4: you know, the all dot net folks, at least some
Speaker 4: of them, were very vociferous about this idea that open
Speaker 4: source should be an important part of Microsoft's plant. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I know, all point out NBC was open source. It
Speaker 4: was released via Coplex, and they.
Speaker 2: Didn't really like the whole you know, visual studio developer stereotype.
Speaker 4: Yeah, culture of Microsoft developer at the time was very
Speaker 4: much if it doesn't come from Microsoft, I'm not interested
Speaker 4: in it, and that was a right, and it does.
Speaker 2: If it doesn't have a guy, then then it's garbage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not going to bother with it. Right, I
Speaker 4: don't understand it. All dot net Willy at that time
Speaker 4: I called them if you recall the n Hybrid eight mafia, right,
Speaker 4: and they decided they should better call themselves something else.
Speaker 4: They call themselves all dot Net and the all dot
Speaker 4: Net website will go up in December. It only last
Speaker 4: a few years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know they made huge contributions to the
Speaker 2: dot net ecosystem.
Speaker 4: Well, we had that conversation, you know, not that long
Speaker 4: ago about the idea that what they were talking about
Speaker 4: they won, like open source became a corporal part of
Speaker 4: Microsoft's work and the Microsoft community just took a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4: A couple more things to wrap up. One was this
Speaker 4: is the year that Nvidia releases their Computer Unified Device
Speaker 4: Architecture or KUDA gpuplementation, which is still important today. And
Speaker 4: Attache released their first terabyte hardra Wow. Yeah, terribite, Oh terabyte,
Speaker 4: I know, and that's what I got. You'll never need
Speaker 4: that much Okay, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: Well, before we let Richard loose on you, let's talk
Speaker 2: about better know framework.
Speaker 4: Awesome. All right, man, what do you got?
Speaker 2: All right? For all you Tesla people out there, and
Speaker 2: also who might happen to like the Elixir language, which
Speaker 2: we are great fans of, there's Tesla mat, a powerful
Speaker 2: self hosted data logger for your Tesla. So as I said,
Speaker 2: it's written in Elixir, uses postgrass for a data store,
Speaker 2: visualization and data analysis with grafana. Never heard of that,
Speaker 2: but I'm sure it's graphics visualization open source.
Speaker 4: It's a visualization library like power be I. That kind
Speaker 4: of thing is much older.
Speaker 2: And vehicle data is published to a local MQTT broker. Nice,
Speaker 2: and you know it's trending right now. They have some
Speaker 2: sample screenshots of bundled dashboards like battery health, charge level, charges,
Speaker 2: charge details, charging stats, there's a lot of charging.
Speaker 4: Well, you know when you have an electric car, when
Speaker 4: you have a Tesla, Yeah, you do care about your charging,
Speaker 4: that's for sure.
Speaker 2: So database information, drive stats, drives, distance, energy consumed and
Speaker 2: all that drive details, efficiency locations, mileage overview, projected range states.
Speaker 2: See when your car was online or asleep statistic statistics, timeline,
Speaker 2: trip updates, Vampire drain, and visited a lifetime driving map.
Speaker 2: So if you're interested in the stats of your.
Speaker 4: Tesla, there are online services for this, but you have
Speaker 4: to send them your data effectively. So this is a
Speaker 4: way to do it totally yourself. That's cool.
Speaker 2: Self host it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I do not
Speaker 2: have a Tesla, but I know a lot of people
Speaker 2: that do, and they would probably be into this because
Speaker 2: they're all geeks like me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and owning yourself, so you're not saying anywhere else
Speaker 4: is compelling.
Speaker 2: Before we get started, and because we're doing space, this
Speaker 2: came up in my feed and I don't know if
Speaker 2: you know anything about it, but Voyager one is sending
Speaker 2: back impossible data from interstellar space. Do you know anything
Speaker 2: about this story?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 2: Well I posted a link to it from the NASA
Speaker 2: James Webb Space Telescope Facebook page and basically, I think
Speaker 2: what says is that it made some new discoveries and
Speaker 2: like they can't believe they're getting data on this thing.
Speaker 4: So well, it's a long way away. Last is far
Speaker 4: longer than expected, but you know the and it's beyond
Speaker 4: the reach of the Soul system for the first time ever.
Speaker 4: So that's an interesting possibility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so forty five years.
Speaker 4: Anyway, it might just might be also clickbait too, who knows.
Speaker 2: It could be still traveling beyond our solar system. However,
Speaker 2: the veteran spacecraft is suddenly sending back unusual data that
Speaker 2: is baffling its engineers.
Speaker 4: So anyway, I might also just be breaking down. It's
Speaker 4: really old.
Speaker 2: Could be, yeah, not all that impossible. So that's what
Speaker 2: I got. Who's talking to us today, Richard.
Speaker 4: Grabby comment of show nineteen eighty three, that's from the
Speaker 4: beginning of twenty twenty six. That's our energy geek out, Yeah,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, and I always get some nice comments
Speaker 4: on that. Somebody brought it up to me to see
Speaker 4: the data conference that he really counted on those shows,
Speaker 4: so to get him up to speed on what's been
Speaker 4: going on. This comment comes from Wade Brooks. This is
Speaker 4: high Richard Carl. I'm a long time listener in a
Speaker 4: happily retired software and database engineer. I recently read a
Speaker 4: sci fi story called Backyard Starship, where the satellite's orbitan
Speaker 4: never start to fall due to a cascade of collisions
Speaker 4: A big object it was hit. That's hundreds of smaller
Speaker 4: pieces into other satellites. How likely would a cascade effect
Speaker 4: like this be in our current age? And by the way,
Speaker 4: this story also talks about a specialized fleet of space
Speaker 4: ships cleaning up orbital satellites. I thought it was terribly
Speaker 4: appropriate comment for the show we're about to record. Indeed,
Speaker 4: so Wade, I will answer this in line as we
Speaker 4: get deeper into the conversation about building data centers in space.
Speaker 4: Because the thing you're thinking about is called Kessler syndrome,
Speaker 4: and I ended up in order to make this whole
Speaker 4: talk work, I had to study it extensively from a
Speaker 4: statistical and engineering point of view. So I will answer it.
Speaker 4: So thank you so much for your comment, and a
Speaker 4: copy of music co Buy is on its way to you.
Speaker 4: And if you'd like copy of music Gobe, I write
Speaker 4: a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot com
Speaker 4: or on the facebooks we publish every show there, and
Speaker 4: if you comment there and I read it on the show,
Speaker 4: we'll send you copy of music go by.
Speaker 2: And music to code By, of course, is a library
Speaker 2: of music that I wrote for people to write code
Speaker 2: to to keep you in a state of flow. The
Speaker 2: music is scientifically created to keep you in that state,
Speaker 2: not to you, not too distracting, and of course not
Speaker 2: too boring. So go to music toocodey dot net if
Speaker 2: you want to get that in MP three wave or
Speaker 2: flack format twenty two tracks. Right, Okay, the floor is yours,
Speaker 2: mister Campbell.
Speaker 4: All right, listen, there's been as of late a lot
Speaker 4: of hubbub around building data centers of space. This is
Speaker 4: basically what the SPACEXIPO wrapped itself around, and we'll talk
Speaker 4: about that a little later on. I want you to
Speaker 4: know we've talked about putting stuff into space like this
Speaker 4: for quite a long time. Although it really this current
Speaker 4: wave really starts at the end of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: which makes sense because we are coming to the edge
Speaker 4: of the AI hype cycle and people are starting to
Speaker 4: see that we can't scale as far as we need to.
Speaker 4: The lashback get data centers is real, and so meeting
Speaker 4: an alternative is an important part of that equation, and
Speaker 4: this data centers in space is an effective alternative. Its
Speaker 4: question is doesn't make any sense, and I was struggling
Speaker 4: to figure this out, so I just ended up running
Speaker 4: all of the numbers myself and referenced a lot of material.
Speaker 4: And while I was putting this together, SpaceX was alfterually
Speaker 4: publishing stuff that seemed to line up pretty close. I
Speaker 4: would point out there is already a GPU in space.
Speaker 4: So there's a startup, a y combinator startup called star
Speaker 4: Cloud that was on the Bandwagon four Falcon nine flight.
Speaker 4: This is in November of twenty twenty five, and so
Speaker 4: they had put up a microsatellite. It was about there
Speaker 4: was eighteen microsats on this thing. That's why they call
Speaker 4: it Bandwagon, right, It's this big, massive launch of microsatellites.
Speaker 4: And on board the star Cloud satellite was an H
Speaker 4: one hundred GPU. They were able to load a copy
Speaker 4: of NANOGPT on it and have a couple of conversations
Speaker 4: with it. This, of course, is a microsat or a NanoSat.
Speaker 4: It won't last very long. They typically don't last longer
Speaker 4: than a year before there.
Speaker 2: What is this particular GPU and how powerful is it
Speaker 2: compared to what I have on my desktop?
Speaker 4: Well, NH one hundred is an Nvidia GPU. It's one.
Speaker 4: It's not particularly like I said, it can run a
Speaker 4: nano GPT, it's small. This is nothing commercial, but it
Speaker 4: was in some ways, it's kind of a stunt to
Speaker 4: show that it's even possible. Admittedly that's GPUs still got
Speaker 4: a lot of compared to traditional space computing, which is
Speaker 4: typically radiation hard, and this thing's much higher performance than that,
Speaker 4: but not particularly radiation hard. And like I said, it
Speaker 4: only last a few months. They one of their reasons
Speaker 4: to do this was to profile the radiation and environment
Speaker 4: in lower th orbit. So it'll be interesting to see
Speaker 4: what they get back from that. I mean, this thing's
Speaker 4: still flying as of recording, but it won't last too
Speaker 4: much longer, so they want to see how it survives. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and star Cloud's gone on to say that they want
Speaker 4: to put up eighty eight thousand satellites as already data centers.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: They're a y Combinator startup, and little startups like that
Speaker 4: say crazy things all the time, So that's fine.
Speaker 2: So when you said data centers in space, I was thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, on the moon, No they or something like that.
Speaker 2: But you're really talking about satellites, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: You're talking in orbit. Star Clouds also put out a
Speaker 4: set of videos, and one of the videos they show
Speaker 4: this a five gigawatt data center in space. Now, that's
Speaker 4: a Remember that even in orbit around the Earth, even
Speaker 4: up in geostationary orbit, there's about thirteen hundred watts of
Speaker 4: solar power available per square meter, and our best solar
Speaker 4: panels can collect about thirty five percent of that the
Speaker 4: trijunction once the expensive ones you'd use on satellites. So
Speaker 4: in order to collect five gigawatts of power, you need
Speaker 4: a solar array roughly four kilometers square. That's really big.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's it's it's big. And I think that
Speaker 2: really only poses Am I wrong that it really only
Speaker 2: poses a challenge to get it up there because it
Speaker 2: can be folded and unfolded, right, Yeah, And.
Speaker 4: Presumably with stuff like Starship, reducing the prices gets a
Speaker 4: bit more practical. And if you watch this star Cloud video,
Speaker 4: they show some kind of shuttle vehicle bringing up modules
Speaker 4: of compute that sit in the middle of this titanically
Speaker 4: huge array. Wow. Yeah, it would be really hard to
Speaker 4: build this thing. I think the gravitational stresses would be
Speaker 4: really interesting. We'll get into building mega satellites later. It's
Speaker 4: probably not the way to go about this is certainly
Speaker 4: not what SpaceX is proposing. The orbit matters a lot
Speaker 4: and so to build something large like that, if we're
Speaker 4: ever going to do anything like that, you'd probably do
Speaker 4: geostationary orbit and geostation orbits about thirty six thousand kilometers up.
Speaker 4: And what makes that orbit special is that the orbital
Speaker 4: velocity at that altitude is the same as the rate
Speaker 4: of the rotation of the Earth, and so the illusion
Speaker 4: then is that the satellite is hovering over a point
Speaker 4: in the land. Right. Sure. Now, we put satellites up
Speaker 4: there routinely, typically, whether satellites broadcast and so forth, because
Speaker 4: at that distance the Earth is quite small, and the
Speaker 4: solar power runs all the time. There's no nighttime when
Speaker 4: you're that high up, and you can use three satellites
Speaker 4: at one hundred and twenty degrees evenly around that orbit
Speaker 4: to cover the whole Earth. So it's a great place
Speaker 4: where weather satellites are broadcast. The downsize is your thirty
Speaker 4: six thousand kilometers away, and so the ping times like
Speaker 4: six hundred milliseconds, which and so.
Speaker 2: You know, that's that's a lot for us earthbound people
Speaker 2: who are used to twenty millisecond ping times. But but
Speaker 2: you know, it went to space.
Speaker 4: Depends on the workload. Yeah, if you're just going to
Speaker 4: upload stuff and you don't care when it comes back down.
Speaker 4: As long as you tune the round trips properly, like,
Speaker 4: you can make that work. But you don't do conversations
Speaker 4: that way. That's painful. You certainly don't do iterating back
Speaker 4: and forth. It's not appropriate. Then there's an area we
Speaker 4: call the media multitude satellite, so it's sort of two
Speaker 4: thousand up to thirty six thousand kilometers. Now your latency's
Speaker 4: anywhere gonna be built between fifty and five hundred milliseconds,
Speaker 4: that's normal. The area where you put GPS satellites, glonde,
Speaker 4: neass cloud AO, those kinds of things. So satellite are
Speaker 4: rays again that are transmitting purely one way. Like GPS
Speaker 4: satellites are just constantly transmitting a signal of who they
Speaker 4: are and what time it is, and you as long
Speaker 4: as your receiver can see four of them, you can
Speaker 4: figure out exactly where you are, how fast you're going
Speaker 4: out Zude. All that KOD stuff that's NEO is great
Speaker 4: for that. If you care about latency, you want to
Speaker 4: be in low Earth orbit, right, So it's one hundred
Speaker 4: and sixty to maybe one thousand kilometers up. So your
Speaker 4: latency is going to somewhere between twenty and forty milliseconds.
Speaker 4: And this is the realm of starlink okay, and other
Speaker 4: communication satellites, those kinds of things where latency matters, and
Speaker 4: it's a more crowded space without a doubt. It also
Speaker 4: is close enough when you're down to one hundred and sixty,
Speaker 4: two hundred and three hundred, even four hundred klometers enough,
Speaker 4: it's not like the atmosphere just ends. It just gets
Speaker 4: more and more tenuous. And so what really finds Leo
Speaker 4: is are you still having your satellite slowed down by
Speaker 4: the atmosphere once you get higher than that. It doesn't happen.
Speaker 4: For the most part. Your orbits are pretty stable. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And it's not like the atmosphere is static either. It
Speaker 4: expands and shrinks depending on the amount of solar radiation
Speaker 4: it's hitting. So we happen at this moment to be
Speaker 4: a solar maximum where our star is particularly active and
Speaker 4: kicking off large corolla mass injections. And that that's why
Speaker 4: we get such awesome auroras right now. Yes, you know,
Speaker 4: usually and when the stunt, when the sun is calmer,
Speaker 4: you'd only see auroras up in the Arctic or in
Speaker 4: the Antarctic. But right now, because it's so active, it's
Speaker 4: throwing so much energy at the Earth that we get
Speaker 4: these awesome auroras all the way down, you know, into
Speaker 4: the US. And when that happens, the atmosphere actually expands,
Speaker 4: it gets bigger.
Speaker 2: I've had opportunities to see the aurora because it's been
Speaker 2: visible in Connecticut, and every time it's either too cloudy
Speaker 2: or it happens in the mill of the night when
Speaker 2: I'm in bed. But I was tired one night. I
Speaker 2: went to bed at like ten o'clock and I see
Speaker 2: all these posts from people in New London, like with
Speaker 2: city lights and stuff, with these huge auroras, and I'm like, dang,
Speaker 2: I gosh, should have just gone down there and checked
Speaker 2: it out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, O kidding, but yeah, I'm sure they're gonna. As
Speaker 5: you're saying, continue, well, yeah, eventually the solar activity subsides again.
Speaker 5: It's in a cycle roughly eleven years or so, so
Speaker 5: it depends. The challenge is this is why we have
Speaker 5: problems with lowerth orbits, because so when the atmosphere expands
Speaker 5: like this, it increases the drag on satellites, and so
Speaker 5: satellite orbits shift unreliably. This is how we ended up
Speaker 5: losing Skylab. The plan with Skylab all along was to
Speaker 5: get the Space Shuttle up there to rescue it. Only
Speaker 5: because we went through a solar maximum in the late seventies,
Speaker 5: there was a lot more drag on Skylab than expected,
Speaker 5: and so it deorbited well before the time they expected.
Speaker 5: Plus space upletok, way too long. We'd lost Skylab in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy nine and didn't get Shuttle up till eady
Speaker 5: one anyway. And I bring them all that up because
Speaker 5: when you are trying to track satellites, you actually have
Speaker 5: to scan them from the ground to figure out where
Speaker 5: they are because the atmosphere disrupts them on a routine basis,
Speaker 5: the same for a debris. Another aspect of satellite is important,
Speaker 5: So where you orbit matters, and then your inclination of
Speaker 5: orbit matters also. So if you're going to have a
Speaker 5: geostationary satellite, in order for it to be geostationary, it
Speaker 5: has an inclination of zero akaa over the equator. That's
Speaker 5: the only way geostationary works, so that it stays in
Speaker 5: place essentially. But as soon as you're in any other
Speaker 5: orbit and you want to cover more of the Earth, essentially,
Speaker 5: then you change the inclination. For example, the International Space
Speaker 5: Station is an inclination of fifty one fifty one point
Speaker 5: six degrees, and that inclination allows it to pass over
Speaker 5: Russia on a regular basis because as much of Russian
Speaker 5: modules there and they want to communicate with them. You know,
Speaker 5: communications have to relay from the ground, and so where
Speaker 5: it flies matters.
Speaker 2: Interesting that you know, where I live is forty one
Speaker 2: degrees north. Yeah, and I often see the ISS passing
Speaker 2: overhead and it looks like it's directly overhead.
Speaker 4: Yea, but yeah, it whis is by. And if you're
Speaker 4: going to build a there is polar orbits. Those are
Speaker 4: a little more tricky. But if you want to map
Speaker 4: the whole Earth, or you want to you've got a
Speaker 4: Spice satellite where you want to be able to fly
Speaker 4: over everything, then you'll fly in like a ninety plus
Speaker 4: degree orbit, so you'll literally fly out north or south.
Speaker 4: Like Vandenberg Air Force, based on the West coast California,
Speaker 4: has a clear shot south for launching rockets, so they
Speaker 4: can do the polar orbits from there. It takes more energy,
Speaker 4: but that allows you to cover more of the Earth.
Speaker 4: So when you talk about starlink, the largest area of
Speaker 4: satellites out there, it's there in about a fifty five
Speaker 4: fifty six degree inclination orbit. There's a few variations on that,
Speaker 4: and that covers most of the land that's inhabited. It
Speaker 4: doesn't cover the poles, but it's close enough. Speaking of
Speaker 4: Starlink and SpaceX in general, this is an important part
Speaker 4: of the equation. So before Starlink, which rerely started in
Speaker 4: about twenty nineteen, there was only about six thousand satellites
Speaker 4: had been flown. Ever at about three thousand of them
Speaker 4: operational at that time. But with the introduction of Falcon
Speaker 4: nine by SpaceX, which lowered the price to flight traumatically. Today,
Speaker 4: not counting Starlink, there's about forty five hundred operational satellites.
Speaker 4: Anybody who has a choice of launch vehicles to fly
Speaker 4: into space is going to choose Falcon nine because it's
Speaker 4: so much cheaper. It's literally like five times cheaper than
Speaker 4: the next closest competitor. The notable exception, of course is China,
Speaker 4: who's not allowed to fly on Falcon nine, but everybody
Speaker 4: else already does. But Starlink alone, they do one hundred
Speaker 4: plus launches a year of twenty five to thirty satellites,
Speaker 4: and so today there's about ninety five hundred starlink satellite. Wow,
Speaker 4: so double everybody else out of twelve thousand launch So
Speaker 4: they've already lost three thousand of them now and they
Speaker 4: go ahead.
Speaker 2: I have a question about starlink. Yeah, is the reason
Speaker 2: they have so many for coverage or does it actually
Speaker 2: every single one of them that goes up increase the
Speaker 2: bandwidth to everybody? Like it's coverage? How is it network together?
Speaker 2: Is it's coverage?
Speaker 4: The vast majority of starlink communications is a direct relay,
Speaker 4: So you're not connected to a ground based Internet connection,
Speaker 4: say here, which you know on the coast. So, but
Speaker 4: you're going to bounce off of that satellite, which is
Speaker 4: then going to bounce it back to a ground station
Speaker 4: that is connected to a land based connection. Yeah, that
Speaker 4: is the vast majority of starlink communications. It's just one
Speaker 4: paying up down to a ground station that's in reach.
Speaker 4: The only when they need to will they relay between satellites,
Speaker 4: which they can do. So this is how you get coverage,
Speaker 4: say in the middle of Pacific Ocean, right where there
Speaker 4: is no land immediately accessible, and so they will relay
Speaker 4: across a couple of satellites before they come back. Doesn't
Speaker 4: have to go very far, and lasers work pretty efficiently,
Speaker 4: but it is slower to do that. But your best
Speaker 4: performance on starlink is literally a single pin back down
Speaker 4: of the terrestrial network. Understand that the fully populated starlink network,
Speaker 4: which is not quite there yet, they should finish it
Speaker 4: this year at twelve thousand satellites will be the complete network.
Speaker 4: You're only got about as much about seven six hundred
Speaker 4: to seven hundred gigabits of total bandwidth terabits of total
Speaker 4: bandwidth capacity, which is one percent of the traffic over
Speaker 4: the Internet. Basically, the total capacity of starlink is the
Speaker 4: equivalent of one or two top of the line under
Speaker 4: sea cables. It's just not that much bandwidth, relatively speaking,
Speaker 4: and there's a reason for that. You can just cram
Speaker 4: a lot more data down a piece of fiber than
Speaker 4: you can through an atmosphere or even across space. It's
Speaker 4: just not as focused and so you know the cable.
Speaker 4: The undersea cables are long, but they're not as long
Speaker 4: as space is long, so they're very efficient at moving
Speaker 4: data arounds. So almost all data moves under the NDERC
Speaker 4: cable network. Very little of it moves across systems like starlink,
Speaker 4: but it's a last mile solution, right, you can get
Speaker 4: that relay point and get it back down again. All right,
Speaker 4: But we were talking about building data centers in space right,
Speaker 4: specifically for AI compute. And this is where this whole
Speaker 4: story comes up, as the situation with the AIH cycle
Speaker 4: has gotten really serious and folks don't want too many
Speaker 4: more data centers. So the sort of lash back has
Speaker 4: been Okay, we'll just build them in space. The question
Speaker 4: is what's practical. So we got to start. We're going
Speaker 4: to build a satellite, so first us, we have to
Speaker 4: start with our payload, because our payload's going to define
Speaker 4: a bunch of things around the satellite. The unit of
Speaker 4: work that I've chosen for this is an Nvidia NVL
Speaker 4: seventy two. Okay, so this is a seventy two U
Speaker 4: RAQ hence the name that has thirty six Grace GPUs
Speaker 4: and seventy two Blackwell GPUs for total compute power about
Speaker 4: seven hundred and twenty petaflops. So that's powerful enough to
Speaker 4: run GPT four full on n FP four mode, so
Speaker 4: trillion parameters could run in this rack. Yeah, okay, it's powerful.
Speaker 4: Just to be clear, it's one point three metric tons.
Speaker 4: Admittedly that's because it's in a housing and it's got
Speaker 4: metal cases and stuff like that that that weight is
Speaker 4: noted for making your floor strong enough if you're going
Speaker 4: to build out a bunch of these things. And they
Speaker 4: run about three million dollars a piece and consume one
Speaker 4: hundred and thirty five kilowatts of electricity, which is the
Speaker 4: same as the entire International Space Station. Actually wow. Now,
Speaker 4: just to get scale on this, Microsoft recently announced in
Speaker 4: one of their giant data centers they installed forty six
Speaker 4: hundred of the okay, and normally these racks sit side
Speaker 4: by side. They're liquid cooled, so they have pipes running
Speaker 4: through them to do their cooling, and they're strung connected
Speaker 4: together within finiband connections. And finiband connections are four hundred,
Speaker 4: eight hundred or one point six gigabits per second. That's
Speaker 4: terribits per second if you get to one point six,
Speaker 4: so four hundred gigabits eight hundred gigabits are one point
Speaker 4: six terabits per second at sub millisecond latencies. So when
Speaker 4: you want to do a model build, if you're going
Speaker 4: to make a new version of a model, you need
Speaker 4: a lot of compute, huge amounts of compute, and it
Speaker 4: has to be tightly tied together because there's lots of
Speaker 4: communication going between all of these machines. And that speaks
Speaker 4: to if we're just going to fly satellites with one
Speaker 4: rack in them, we really can't build models with that.
Speaker 4: We can do work right, you can utilize the model
Speaker 4: up there, but you'd build models elsewhere, maybe in geostation
Speaker 4: orbit one of these massive systems, or maybe on the ground.
Speaker 4: But if you want low latency in low Werth orbit,
Speaker 4: you're going to be smaller than this. And so a
Speaker 4: rack like this is kind of as big as you
Speaker 4: can go realistically. Now, the pay that racks only about
Speaker 4: a ton ton and a half. Maybe we can lighten
Speaker 4: it up with aluminum framing and so forth and get
Speaker 4: it under a ton, But now we have to build
Speaker 4: a satellite around it. So what are the components that
Speaker 4: go into a satellite. Well, you need a bus, so
Speaker 4: basically a carrier that this payload's going to sit inside.
Speaker 4: It's going to need some on board compute for operating
Speaker 4: the satellite itself, managing, doing health monitoring, command and control,
Speaker 4: and so forth. A big piece of every satellite is
Speaker 4: what we call attitude determination and control. So I need
Speaker 4: to know which way I'm pointing and be able to
Speaker 4: change my pointing direction as I need to. So you
Speaker 4: have a need, you have a set of tools in there.
Speaker 4: Main one will be inertial measurement units. So these are
Speaker 4: a kind of gyroscope that basically measure the orientation constantly
Speaker 4: the satellite. They're very precise, but they do drift over time,
Speaker 4: so they need they do what we called relative tracking.
Speaker 4: You need correction every so often, so then you need correctors,
Speaker 4: and they're basically a couple of species of those. One
Speaker 4: is what we call a star tracker. So these are
Speaker 4: small telescopes electronically controlled that are watching for certain constellations
Speaker 4: and knowing roughly where you are and what time it
Speaker 4: is and what stars you're seeing, you can correct your
Speaker 4: im used to be more precise. Obviously, you can't use
Speaker 4: those when the sun is out, so we also have
Speaker 4: sun trackers, and the sun tracker does the same sort
Speaker 4: of job. It can infer a location based on the
Speaker 4: location of the sun and the time, and so between
Speaker 4: those sets of instruments is and they also use GPS
Speaker 4: in certain cases for this as well. You can figure
Speaker 4: out where you are and which way you're pointing, so
Speaker 4: that is your attitude determination. Next comes your attitude control.
Speaker 4: How do you turn the satellite, because you're going to
Speaker 4: need to do that. You need to keep your intennas
Speaker 4: pointed towards the ground for communication, you need to keep
Speaker 4: your solar panels pointing towards the sun for power. You
Speaker 4: need to keep your cooling away from the sun to
Speaker 4: disperse heat. And so you have reaction wheels. Reaction wheels
Speaker 4: literally are weighted wheels spinning in different orientations inside of
Speaker 4: the chassis. And when you increase the spin on one,
Speaker 4: just make it spin a little faster. It'll force the
Speaker 4: satellite to rotate in an accent and you just keep
Speaker 4: doing that to keep your alignment the way you want to.
Speaker 4: Although eventually those flywheels hit top speed, which they call saturation.
Speaker 4: And it's saturation you're gonna need to d spin, and
Speaker 4: so you need to have a backup pointing system for
Speaker 4: while you're d spinning or desaturating, and that's when you
Speaker 4: might use thrusters. Or at least if you're in the
Speaker 4: lower orbit, you can use magneto torkers, which you'll literally
Speaker 4: press against the gravitational field of the Earth to orient
Speaker 4: the satellite while you're desaturating.
Speaker 2: Here, you're making this.
Speaker 4: I know, I love it. It's so much fun. Like
Speaker 4: just so many put bits and pieces to all this.
Speaker 4: And believe me, what have we got so far? Command
Speaker 4: and control and just attitude and orientation, right, that's all
Speaker 4: we're managing so far. We're probably still going to need
Speaker 4: an engine for actual boosts, which is a separate that
Speaker 4: we shall work as part of this, but it's a
Speaker 4: separate system and needs fuel on that. But we haven't
Speaker 4: gotten to the heavy parts and the complicated parts that
Speaker 4: really have to do with the payload. We have to
Speaker 4: power it and we have to cool it, so obviously
Speaker 4: it's going to be solar panels to power it. The
Speaker 4: challenge here is it's one hundred and thirty five kilowatts
Speaker 4: plus whatever the system itself needs. But we can probably
Speaker 4: go with one hundred and thirty five kilowots. We get
Speaker 4: thirteen hundred and sixty watts per square meter while we're
Speaker 4: in orbit. We're going to be able to collect about
Speaker 4: thirty five percent of that. So let's go with about
Speaker 4: three hundred watts per square meter, So to get one
Speaker 4: hundred and thirty five kilots, that's four hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: square meters, So that's panels thirty meters long and seven
Speaker 4: and a half meters right. Actually, it nets out almost
Speaker 4: to exactly what the solar arrays are for the International
Speaker 4: Space Station, although there are older rays up there and
Speaker 4: there are new arrays, and new arrays are smaller, so
Speaker 4: we have gotten more efficient with trying quadjunction panels. These
Speaker 4: still would be big, big, big wings, and they're heavy
Speaker 4: relatively speaking. So you know, our operating pala was only
Speaker 4: about a ton. This would be three tons of solar
Speaker 4: panels to generate that much power. Now, if you've got
Speaker 4: one hundred and thirty five kilowatts of power generation, how
Speaker 4: much cooling do you think you need?
Speaker 2: God, geez, it's a good question.
Speaker 4: One hundred and thirty five kilowats because every bit of
Speaker 4: power you put in that spicy rock in there still
Speaker 4: comes out as heat. And this is where we get
Speaker 4: to the largest problem for the satellite is usually with satellites,
Speaker 4: we're not running on anywhere near this much power, and
Speaker 4: so you always have conformal cooling because space is a vacuum.
Speaker 4: So it's like you're inside a thermist model and you're
Speaker 4: making heat inside thermist moodel. It's really hard to get
Speaker 4: that heat out and you don't have a medium to
Speaker 4: do conduction or invection with. So your only way to
Speaker 4: dissipate heat is radiatively. And so you've seen these on
Speaker 4: the International Space Station, these cooling arrays. They are or
Speaker 4: a U panels, these big white panels. So they actually
Speaker 4: pump liquid ammonia through. Wow, because ammonia functions very well
Speaker 4: in space, tends not the freeze, tends that it doesn't
Speaker 4: boil too difficultly, and so and the phase change is useful,
Speaker 4: will take the heat away. So you use ammonia in
Speaker 4: the cooling loops on the processors and as that vaporizes,
Speaker 4: it takes a lot of heat away. You then pump
Speaker 4: it out into these radiators and they dissipate the heat radiatively,
Speaker 4: and then that liquid comes back and loops in again.
Speaker 4: Now again we can count on the International Space Station
Speaker 4: for this is about the same power. There are two
Speaker 4: sets of radiators with three spars each eight of eight panels.
Speaker 4: They actually are heavier than everything else. They are about
Speaker 4: three metric tons each and you need two of them,
Speaker 4: so it's six tons worth of cooling for three tons
Speaker 4: worth of power in a one to one and a
Speaker 4: half ton paid Now.
Speaker 2: I thought space was if you're on the sun facing
Speaker 2: the sun extremely hot, and if you're not facing the
Speaker 2: sun extremely cold it is can you take advantage of
Speaker 2: that to cool.
Speaker 4: Well, normally you do to a degree. Being in the
Speaker 4: shade is useful, but in the end it's it's cold,
Speaker 4: but there's no way to move the heat.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you got to get the heat out.
Speaker 4: Because there's nothing to communicate with, right, Yeah, you got
Speaker 4: to get the heat out. Yeah, right, So that's why
Speaker 4: you need these big radiators, and those radiators need to
Speaker 4: be in the shade. Now, you can do that with
Speaker 4: your satellite and your solar arrays just to shade these
Speaker 4: cooling arrays. But in a normal satellite, in a normal orbit,
Speaker 4: especially in lowerth orbit like the space station, you spend
Speaker 4: forty five minutes in the sun and forty five minutes
Speaker 4: in the dark. Think about the power system that that involves.
Speaker 4: So for forty five minutes you're collecting electricity off those panels,
Speaker 4: and you're also charged up the batteries for the forty
Speaker 4: five minutes that you're in the shade where you're running
Speaker 4: entirely on battery, and then you have to do it
Speaker 4: again over and over and over and over again. So
Speaker 4: that also speaks to we're gonna need some honk and
Speaker 4: big batteries for this as well.
Speaker 2: Right, Fortunately, the guy sending the satellites up there makes batteries.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so figure about a ton and a half for
Speaker 4: one hundred and forty kilowatts of battery, right, I mean
Speaker 4: you're going to need a little bit of cushion here,
Speaker 4: so you're only going to be in shade for forty
Speaker 4: five minutes. But we can also play with orbits where
Speaker 4: you're not in shade at all, so you may not
Speaker 4: need these batteries. Yeah, that's one of the options, is
Speaker 4: the one that Elon's talking about. It's actually going into
Speaker 4: a sun synchronous orbit where you're never in the shades,
Speaker 4: so you don't have to hold the batteries run because
Speaker 4: batteries we're out and they need chargers, and those chargers
Speaker 4: can generate more heat. So as soon as you go
Speaker 4: down the battery path. You need more heat management. Ramming
Speaker 4: that power into those batteries that quickly is very hard.
Speaker 4: Final piece on this thing would be the communications systems,
Speaker 4: and again we're used to InFine ban, which is incredibly
Speaker 4: lit latency, incredibly high bandwidth. We don't have the equivalent
Speaker 4: in space. The fastest system is actually made by SpaceX.
Speaker 4: It's their optical mesh, which does do one hundred gigabits,
Speaker 4: which is pretty compelling, and you could probably gang these
Speaker 4: up if you need more bandwidth than that. Which you're
Speaker 4: not going to be able to get away from is
Speaker 4: the latency because you're still transmitting some distance and so
Speaker 4: it's still several milliseconds between satellites, which is fine when
Speaker 4: it's starlink, but if you were trying to mesh a
Speaker 4: bunch of these satellites together, as if they were in
Speaker 4: a data center, it's not fast enough. You're going to
Speaker 4: have problems. And they're not particularly heavy, not even particularly
Speaker 4: power consumptive, but they are. They're just not as efficient
Speaker 4: and relating to the ground. You're going to go with
Speaker 4: various kinds of microwave transmitters, and so we've got a
Speaker 4: rough concept of a satellite now something in the neighborhood
Speaker 4: of twelve metric tons, which is big but not unprecedantly big,
Speaker 4: and big solar arrays and cooling panels on this and
Speaker 4: if you actually go on the SpaceX website, they talk
Speaker 4: about the AISAT Mini and that's pretty much exactly what
Speaker 4: I've described. So, but they are big. The largest commercial
Speaker 4: satellite in the world today is a satellite called Jupiter
Speaker 4: three and it's about ten metric tons. There are military
Speaker 4: satellites bigger than that Keyhole was fifteen, like, there's probably
Speaker 4: some twenties out there. So we're in the ballpark at
Speaker 4: twelve metric tons. That's very feasible, but that also now
Speaker 4: gets into our launch and location problems. Before we get
Speaker 4: into that, why don't we take a break.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds good. We'll be right back after these
Speaker 2: very important messages. Stick around Arabak. It's a dot net
Speaker 2: rocks midyear geek out data centers in space. Right back
Speaker 2: to you, Richard.
Speaker 4: So we got a twelve metric tons satellite we need
Speaker 4: to lift. How are we going to lift it? Well,
Speaker 4: if you're using Falcon nines, which can lift like twenty
Speaker 4: five starlings at a time at twelve metric tons, though
Speaker 4: you know those starlings are eight hundred kilos less than
Speaker 4: a done so here we're talking fulkon down could lift
Speaker 4: maybe one if you could fold it up tight enough
Speaker 4: to even fit in the payload bay faulk and heavy.
Speaker 4: Maybe five. The new Glen rocket, the one that just
Speaker 4: blew up from Blue Origin, we could lift three. Starship
Speaker 4: Block three. The current one that we're testing right now
Speaker 4: could fly eight. Right, So it's going to take a
Speaker 4: while to lift a lot of these. You remember Elon
Speaker 4: was talking about flying millions of these, which is kind
Speaker 4: of crazy. Uh, for no other reason? Then, how many
Speaker 4: satellites can you reasonably fly? Yeah? You know how many
Speaker 4: of these aisats are you're actually going to need? When
Speaker 4: you think that Microsoft alone in one data center put
Speaker 4: in forty six hundreds NVL seventy two's you know you
Speaker 4: could that's forty six hundred satellites. Like that's about you know,
Speaker 4: five hundred launches of starlink alone. That's a crazy number.
Speaker 4: How many things to reasonably need? And they also makes
Speaker 4: the question like how many can we actually have in
Speaker 4: lower th orbit? Like what's feasible right now? We have
Speaker 4: somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve thousand satellites in lower thorbit,
Speaker 4: most of which are starlink, and they're not the only
Speaker 4: network right Amazon is working on their LEO project, formerly
Speaker 4: known as Project Kuiper, which I'd like to name better,
Speaker 4: but now they're calling it LEO is in lowerth orbit.
Speaker 4: They've already flown three hundred to their satellites. Their goal
Speaker 4: is thirty two hundred satellites. They think they can provide
Speaker 4: a good array of thirty two hundred satellites, so I
Speaker 4: guess we'll see. I know this folks who would like
Speaker 4: to use something other than starlink, So that's a competition
Speaker 4: coming up. And then there's the Chinese, because the Chinese
Speaker 4: are actually proposing three different mega constellations. The one that's
Speaker 4: the farthest along is they call the thousand Sales constellation.
Speaker 4: It's out of Shanghai. They've flown seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: satellites already and they plan on global coverage by twenty
Speaker 4: twenty seven, coming maxing out by twenty thirty at fifteen
Speaker 4: thousand satellites. So if you're doing the math, we got
Speaker 4: about fifteen thousand satellites now all told, plus another fifteen
Speaker 4: thousand China three thousand plus from LEO, So we're thirty
Speaker 4: three thirty four thousand satellites. And then there's two other
Speaker 4: networks that Chinese want to fly, one specifically military orient
Speaker 4: and the other one's a different project altogether.
Speaker 2: So sounds like it's Sharky's day today. Do you get
Speaker 2: the reference? No, it's a sky blue sky. Satellites are
Speaker 2: out tonight. Laurie Anderson.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's Laurie Anderson.
Speaker 2: Yeh, satellites are out tonight.
Speaker 4: Satellites are out tonight. Boy, that's going to be a
Speaker 4: lot of satellites, and it really bakes it.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of satellites.
Speaker 4: Let's go back to Wade's question about what about collisions,
Speaker 4: because we have had collisions right although generally speaking, as
Speaker 4: long as the satellites are active, they can avoid each other.
Speaker 4: It's when we deal with debris that we really get problematic,
Speaker 4: and the anti satellite tests that have happened are really
Speaker 4: catastrophically stupid, invigorating more debris. The numbers are a little
Speaker 4: bit secretive. Not everybody's talking about this in large scale,
Speaker 4: but NASA has to publish their numbers for the Space
Speaker 4: station and so I went back and looked at the
Speaker 4: space station being the largest object in order by far,
Speaker 4: it's the size of a football field. Before starlink started,
Speaker 4: back in the day twenty nineteen, when there was about
Speaker 4: three thousand operational satellites total, which the space station was
Speaker 4: one of them. There was also twenty thousand tracked objects. Okay,
Speaker 4: so that's is that space junk space junk exactly. And
Speaker 4: the goal here is to keep everything at least three
Speaker 4: kilometers away from each other. And so you're using radar
Speaker 4: on the surface, especially in Leo, because the orbits keep
Speaker 4: changing based on atmospheric effect, and they would have a
Speaker 4: couple they get a couple dozen mornings a day, most
Speaker 4: of which could resolve without a maneuvering at all. Is like, yeah, no,
Speaker 4: they're not going to get that close because they would
Speaker 4: have to do more precise calculations each time to sort
Speaker 4: of adjust that. Most satellites pre twenty nineteen never needed
Speaker 4: to maneuver to avoid anything. The space station, as the
Speaker 4: largest object up there, would maneuver once or twice a year. Now.
Speaker 4: Partly that was because the projective boundary around the space
Speaker 4: station is much larger because there are people on board,
Speaker 4: and so we're way more careful, but also it's very
Speaker 4: very big. As starlink has grown as a network, SpaceX
Speaker 4: is instituted a mechanism where the satellites are talking to
Speaker 4: each other and avoiding each other because they're all in
Speaker 4: similar orbits, and so they now all maneuver almost every day.
Speaker 4: They're ninety five hundred so satellites, and the space station's
Speaker 4: reevaluate its location is reevaluated three times a day to
Speaker 4: cope with potential junk and so forth, wow, and is
Speaker 4: at least a maneuver every other month to avoid debris.
Speaker 4: And that's at fifteen thousand satellites and about fifty thousand
Speaker 4: total objects in order now is twenty twenty six. So
Speaker 4: the fifty thousand objects that we're tracking, fifteen thousand of
Speaker 4: them are working satellites, fourteen hundred dollars defunct satellites no
Speaker 4: longer operational. There are nineteen hundred rocket bodies. So these
Speaker 4: are the largest inert objects in orbit. Now, what's a
Speaker 4: rocket body? These are typically top stages that were used
Speaker 4: to boost into high orbits and then weren't rendered. Most
Speaker 4: boost stages or second stages, deliberately deorbit, so they save
Speaker 4: a little fuel and after they push the payload off,
Speaker 4: then they wait for the payload to get away, they
Speaker 4: turn around and they do a burn to deorbit to
Speaker 4: land in the ocean, especially with larger spacecraft, where it's
Speaker 4: very likely that the upper stage will make it to
Speaker 4: land will actually hit the ground, so they aim to
Speaker 4: land in water.
Speaker 2: And that's what we saw last summer, right when the
Speaker 2: was it a Falcon nine body that was ejected and
Speaker 2: it was spinning in space and people thought it was
Speaker 2: a UFO and stuff.
Speaker 4: Do you remember this, Yeah, we've had we've seen a
Speaker 4: few burn ups now because there's far more burnings out
Speaker 4: up there. So that's about eighteen thousand of the fifty
Speaker 4: thousand objects. The other thirty two thousand objects are debris
Speaker 4: ten centimeters or bigger, so that's about five inches or
Speaker 4: four inches across. Smaller than that we can't track. Wow,
Speaker 4: it's just too small.
Speaker 2: But they're still deadly because, like you know, something the
Speaker 2: size of a bbie could puncture a hole in an
Speaker 2: engine or in a satellite and completely destroy it.
Speaker 4: Well, we had impacts on the space station, which does
Speaker 4: have impact protection. We've seen chips and glass and so forth.
Speaker 4: The small debris still hits hard, Yeah, but the systems
Speaker 4: largely can tolerated bigger than ten centimeters and they probably
Speaker 4: can't protect from it, which is why they keep track
Speaker 4: of all of those things. And so there is a
Speaker 4: big push on you know, minute, we've been working hard
Speaker 4: to not generate more debris. Please, no more any satellite tests,
Speaker 4: stupid deorbit, your bodies, doorbit your satellites, like, be responsible
Speaker 4: about it. But there is a whole conversation about, well,
Speaker 4: how many satellites are reasonable in lowerth orbit, like how
Speaker 4: many could we really handle? And I found a study
Speaker 4: published by the Miter organization, which is a non governmental
Speaker 4: entity that does this kind of research. They published it
Speaker 4: in Breaking Events in twenty twenty four, and what they
Speaker 4: talked about was these mega constellations, these huge eras of
Speaker 4: satellites like Starlink, all talking to each other, all cooperating
Speaker 4: to avoid each other. So that would mean you know,
Speaker 4: Amazon and SpaceX getting along and doing shared communications to
Speaker 4: avoid each other. And the Chinese government also playing ball
Speaker 4: on this as well. Wow, the belief is they could
Speaker 4: get to one hundred thousand satellites in lower th orbit. Jeez, now,
Speaker 4: considering we're already talking about forty fifty thousand satellites just
Speaker 4: for communications, these low latency communications solutions. It doesn't leave
Speaker 4: a lot of room for aideas. There's certainly not the
Speaker 4: millions that SpaceX has talked about.
Speaker 2: Do they all need to be at the same elevation though,
Speaker 2: I mean, can you have like highways?
Speaker 4: But they don't. They're running different shells. Yeah, they have
Speaker 4: different layers, without a doubt. But remember they're constantly subjected
Speaker 4: to drag from the atmosphere, so their orbits are changing
Speaker 4: all the time and they have to be adjusted for that,
Speaker 4: and then they only have so much fuel. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's an interesting aspect of Starlink. This is a bit
Speaker 4: of a digression, but an interesting one. Starlink's lifespan on
Speaker 4: their satellites is only five years twelve thousand satellites. That
Speaker 4: means every year they expect twenty percent of the fleet,
Speaker 4: or twenty four hundred satellites to deorbit. How much is that?
Speaker 4: You know, that's fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred metric tons
Speaker 4: of debris burning up in the atmosphere. It's just a
Speaker 4: lot of aluminum. It's a lot. Yeah, And it also
Speaker 4: means you're going to have to replace it, and if
Speaker 4: you only flit twenty five per fulk and nine means
Speaker 4: it's one hundred Falcon nine flights just to maintain the
Speaker 4: network right now, presumably with Starship, they're going to be
Speaker 4: able to fly bigger satellites and more of them, so
Speaker 4: they will you know, that equation will change a bit.
Speaker 4: But yeah, there's a lot of debris coming in the
Speaker 4: nineteen hundred. Rocket bodies are by far the most concerning
Speaker 4: thing today. Again, they generally deorbit these things that they can,
Speaker 4: but they don't have enough fuel to do that. At
Speaker 4: least they depressurize them. Because if you leave a pressurized
Speaker 4: vessel in orbit, sooner or later something's going to break
Speaker 4: and they're going to explode and make debris. And so today,
Speaker 4: if you're doing a geostationary transfer to something, you're probably
Speaker 4: not gonna be able to get the booster back onto
Speaker 4: the Earth anytime soon, and so after you release your payload,
Speaker 4: you'll at least depressurreized. So it's in a nerd object.
Speaker 4: It's not dangerous with satellites. Many satellites now it's normal
Speaker 4: practice is simply maintain enough fuel on board that before
Speaker 4: you're fully out of fuel, you will burn the last
Speaker 4: of your maneuvering fuel to put yourself in a deliberate
Speaker 4: deorbit into the ocean. That's just you know, response behavior.
Speaker 4: There's also some passive deorbit strategies which have always been
Speaker 4: tested but never used, like a solar sale is a
Speaker 4: real thing, a very thin film of capon or something
Speaker 4: similar like that, like aluminum foil that you stretch out
Speaker 4: that the solar radiation, the particles coming from the Sun
Speaker 4: actually pressing against and will slow you down. So you
Speaker 4: show it in the prograde direction so that it's causing
Speaker 4: a retrograde acceleration. So you put it up when the
Speaker 4: Sun's in front of you and it'll slow you down,
Speaker 4: and then what's behind you, you close it up so
Speaker 4: it doesn't accelerate you and you can speed up your deorbit.
Speaker 4: Depends on the size of the satellite, of course, only
Speaker 4: smaller ones. So that's going to work for our twelve
Speaker 4: ton beast that is this AI data center. That's probably
Speaker 4: not a practical thing for. Further to Wade's comment on
Speaker 4: the show about managing debris, there are now as cost
Speaker 4: of flying the orbit has gotten cheaper, we're starting to
Speaker 4: see more initiatives to deliberately remove debris, so like actually
Speaker 4: netting debris and dragging it down inner accepting the larger
Speaker 4: stuff like old rocket bodies and hard putting them or
Speaker 4: capturing them, and then redliberately reanturning because you have fuel
Speaker 4: on board. And then the coolest thing is for the
Speaker 4: smallest the debris lasers because laser and space are always fun,
Speaker 4: but the reality being, if I can point a laser
Speaker 4: at a small object and heat it up, it'll actually
Speaker 4: cause more drag on it. So if I time it
Speaker 4: the right way, I can actually force these things to
Speaker 4: re enter just by hitting them with microwaves or optical lasers.
Speaker 4: So we can put together more initiatives to reduce the
Speaker 4: amount of debris, but we're limited to how many satellites
Speaker 4: we can put in lower th orbit. To be clear,
Speaker 4: it's definitely a limitation, and it's not comparable to anything
Speaker 4: that modern data centers can possibly handle. It were it's
Speaker 4: not going to build a million of these satellites. Ten
Speaker 4: thousand probably is the reasonable limit, and even then it's questionable. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so there's a few places trying to raise money.
Speaker 4: But the only reason I think this is AI data
Speaker 4: center thing has got any traction. Google did a paper
Speaker 4: on it called Suncatcher, But it's SpaceX that gives it
Speaker 4: credibility because Elon jumped all over it. And that really
Speaker 4: leads us to this whole conversation about the SpaceX ipo,
Speaker 4: which just happened shortly before we recorded this. Why the
Speaker 4: heck did SpaceX ipo money? It's weird, isn't it. Well,
Speaker 4: does he need it? He's already the wealthiest man in
Speaker 4: the world. Well, now he's a trillionaire. Oh boy, great, yeah,
Speaker 4: I know that's a feature. And the more interesting thing
Speaker 4: is if you go back and see him talk about SpaceX.
Speaker 4: He always said, I'm going to keep this as a
Speaker 4: private company because the goal is to put a city
Speaker 4: on Mars, and that's not what a public company would do.
Speaker 4: Sherylders aren't going to go for that. There's no money
Speaker 4: in that. This was supposed to stay at private offering.
Speaker 4: So why did he change his mind?
Speaker 2: Why do you think?
Speaker 4: Well, Bunny, you should ask. So when you're a billionaire,
Speaker 4: you only become a billionaire one way, right, You own
Speaker 4: a lot of stock in a very valuable C company,
Speaker 4: a company's wildly overvalued like Tesla and you never sell
Speaker 4: that stock because A you're limited how much you're allowed
Speaker 4: to sell anyway, the SEC keeps controls controls over that,
Speaker 4: and B it just looks bad to sell the stock,
Speaker 4: right you're supposed to be a believer.
Speaker 2: Well, also, once you sell it, then you are taxed
Speaker 2: on it and not and it will be talking one
Speaker 2: which pays tax because he probably doesn't well because he.
Speaker 4: Never sells stock. What he does is that is he
Speaker 4: borrows against that stock. Right right when he needed twelve
Speaker 4: and a half billion dollars for Twitter, he borrowed against
Speaker 4: his Tesla stock. And so the deal he makes with
Speaker 4: the bank, which is a very low risk loan for
Speaker 4: the bank, is hey, here's this block of stock at
Speaker 4: this price, and you can sell that stock at any
Speaker 4: time essentially to pay off this loan. And so as
Speaker 4: long as the stock is above that price, above the
Speaker 4: strike price, they're fine. You know, you just collect a
Speaker 4: low interest on that which we can cover. No big deal,
Speaker 4: and you keep going. And this is what billionaires do, right,
Speaker 4: They just borrow against their stock.
Speaker 2: That's what they do. I know now, I listened to
Speaker 2: Planet Money. I know a few things.
Speaker 4: Sure he know the game. Yeah, And so now you
Speaker 4: get at the situation with Star with Tesla, which is,
Speaker 4: you know, Elon succeeded in making the electric car come true,
Speaker 4: and lots of companies are making electric cars now, and
Speaker 4: Tesla's valuation made sense when they were the only ev
Speaker 4: in game in town. But now that they aren't, it's
Speaker 4: just isn't that it's too overvalued? And he hasn't worked
Speaker 4: on new cars per se. And I think it's simply
Speaker 4: because he would never get the offering that the valuation
Speaker 4: that he need if he's just making more electric cars,
Speaker 4: which is why he's talking about stuff like robot taxis
Speaker 4: and androids and things like that. Good for keeping the
Speaker 4: stock price up, because if it reaches the strike price
Speaker 4: on his loans, he's got big problems.
Speaker 2: Throw back to episode sixty nine. Why doesn't he make
Speaker 2: flying cars?
Speaker 4: Well, I don't think he gets the valuation for that either,
Speaker 4: But what he really needs to do is move the
Speaker 4: loans to a company that's going to be worth more.
Speaker 4: So he takes space X. Okay, he sells XAI into Twitter,
Speaker 4: sells Twitter into SpaceX and IPO. SpaceX gets a huge
Speaker 4: and that even then, he's still got problems because SpaceX
Speaker 4: already dominates the launch platform. Eighty percent of everything that
Speaker 4: goes into space goes via SpaceX Falcon nine anyway, so
Speaker 4: you know, he had to publish the numbers of what
Speaker 4: his company actually can do, right what they call a
Speaker 4: total addressable market. He was talking about three hundred billion
Speaker 4: or so for flying other people's payloads in the space.
Speaker 4: Eight hundred billion for starlink is awesome, but it's not
Speaker 4: a multi trillion dollar company that way. And then there
Speaker 4: was the AI side, Like the AI side is where
Speaker 4: he could say, oh, this is a twenty six trillion
Speaker 4: dollar offering, right that the opportunity to address this market
Speaker 4: is trillions of dollars. So it's very self serving to say, hey,
Speaker 4: we're going to change it now. And see, if you
Speaker 4: have to read the whole IPO. In it, it says
Speaker 4: we may have an issue with the number of satellites
Speaker 4: we can lunch. So they're admitting it, just people aren't
Speaker 4: reading it closely enough. But the reality it is he's
Speaker 4: fundamentally crippled SpaceX's original mission of puking a city on Mars.
Speaker 4: Not that I ever thought that was a good idea.
Speaker 4: I never did either to I'm sorry be able to
Speaker 4: IPO this thing and fix his own loans, and he's
Speaker 4: leveraging that on the back of these AI data centers,
Speaker 4: So he's got a clear incentive to do this. Is
Speaker 4: he going to build some of them? Sure? Does it
Speaker 4: really make sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So much?
Speaker 2: What about that?
Speaker 4: You know, we can only put so much in low
Speaker 4: Earth orbit? And the real question you have to ask is, well,
Speaker 4: what's the problem with data centers anyway? And the only
Speaker 4: thing wrong with data centers is the way that companies
Speaker 4: are going about building them right now, right, they're just
Speaker 4: doing it, And you don't need to build them that
Speaker 4: closest cities. They could be out in the countryside. So
Speaker 4: what if it's two hundred kilometers out of town, that's
Speaker 4: a couple of milliseconds. Nobody cares, right, build it away
Speaker 4: from people. Treat it like heavy industry, where it should
Speaker 4: be away from people. And you're also responsible for your
Speaker 4: own power, right, And that really, if you're really going
Speaker 4: to lift this much stuff into space, if you really
Speaker 4: got that capability, shouldn't we go back and look at
Speaker 4: space based power again. We did a whole show on this,
Speaker 4: We did Starship Comes Online, and it's really as cheap
Speaker 4: as they believe it's going to be and by all
Speaker 4: cases it should be twenty to two hundred dollars kilogram
Speaker 4: to low Earth orbit compared to fault at ninety eighteen hundred,
Speaker 4: which is a bargain without a doubt. But this would
Speaker 4: be literally in order or to magnitude less. So I
Speaker 4: went and dusted off the latest plans. The British Astronomical
Speaker 4: Society does a review of space based power and a
Speaker 4: regular basis. The latest set is from twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: The design they call SPS Alpha Mark four and the
Speaker 4: specsond are pretty compelling. A gigawant is about thirty two
Speaker 4: hundred metric tons. Now you'd put this in geostationary orbit,
Speaker 4: so it would always have sunshine all of the time.
Speaker 4: There's lots of concerns with how big this thing would
Speaker 4: be be several kilometers long, so it would be an
Speaker 4: incredible thing to build. And you are transmitting the power
Speaker 4: to the surface with microwaves high frequency microsoft nine gigahertz
Speaker 4: or so. The power the energy is not dense enough
Speaker 4: to like cook birds in flight or anything like that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but it would land on a circle about four kilometers across.
Speaker 4: You'd put us at a rect tennison that to collect
Speaker 4: that electricity. You're probably gonna want to put a fence
Speaker 4: around that thing because you don't really want people walking
Speaker 4: around in there, not that they're going to burst into
Speaker 4: flames or anything. But you could beam a gang a
Speaker 4: lot of power onto the surface of the planet and
Speaker 4: that gets rid of your power problems because they run
Speaker 4: that runs twenty four hours a day. Like, instead of
Speaker 4: doing this AI data center thing, why not mature this
Speaker 4: technology and actually be beneficial for all kinds of things,
Speaker 4: not just data centers, but making electricity that zero emission
Speaker 4: and works twenty four hours a day. Right. We could
Speaker 4: put quite a few of these up into geostationary orbit.
Speaker 2: And polar orbit too, I think is one thing we
Speaker 2: talked about.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, you do. You'd probably want to keep these
Speaker 4: beaming onto the same location all the time, so you're
Speaker 4: going to want to be geostationary, right you might. You'll
Speaker 4: have some ability to point like you could use this
Speaker 4: for a disaster response in a dam in an area
Speaker 4: that got hit by a hurricane or something like this,
Speaker 4: but it's a lot of aiming to move it around
Speaker 4: too quickly. But in geostationary well, I guess.
Speaker 2: I guess I was thinking geostationary, but out a pole.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can't only do that around the equator. It's
Speaker 4: the only place at your geostationary.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, there's.
Speaker 4: Really no other choice. And look, this whole bit of
Speaker 4: craziness about AI has only been going on for I
Speaker 4: know it's hard to imagine, but three years, right, really
Speaker 4: kicked off in twenty twenty three when one hundred million
Speaker 4: people signed up a Chat GPT. And so we're just
Speaker 4: over three years now, which means exactly no data centers
Speaker 4: have been built for AI. It takes three years a
Speaker 4: minimum to build a data center, closer to five most
Speaker 4: of the time. So the AI data centers you're hearing
Speaker 4: about right now, they were already in development before chat
Speaker 4: GPT showed up. There's been no power plants built for
Speaker 4: AI because it takes longer than that. There's just no
Speaker 4: way to do it, really, And the real issue here
Speaker 4: is that as long as you're building data centers close
Speaker 4: into cities and trying to use city power, people don't
Speaker 4: like them. No, they don't, and that's always been true.
Speaker 4: They know it's causing more trouble than it's worth and
Speaker 4: demanding tax breaks and things. It's just kind of stupid,
Speaker 4: like this business is average profitable or not, but these
Speaker 4: big companies have learned to manipulate local governments right right.
Speaker 4: I've heard it described as it's like they're trying to
Speaker 4: get Taylor Swift tickets, so they open ten browsers to
Speaker 4: get one pair of tickets. That they're using third party
Speaker 4: entities to lock up as much land and doing as
Speaker 4: many orders as possible. And many of them are never
Speaker 4: going to build in the first place, but right now
Speaker 4: while they're able to get away with it because AI
Speaker 4: they're doing as many as they can.
Speaker 2: I would think in the deserts of West Texas where
Speaker 2: there's a lot of sunlight all the time and nobody
Speaker 2: lives out there, you know, there is just a whole
Speaker 2: lot of nothing, or in the planes area, right, those
Speaker 2: would be great places to have solar farms and data centers, yeah,
Speaker 2: next to each other.
Speaker 4: So I ran the numbers on this. Yeah, I'm going
Speaker 4: to stick with a gigawatt, which is a bit big
Speaker 4: for any data center, but we're going to get there,
Speaker 4: Like we're clearly building five hundred megawatts now ones now.
Speaker 4: But let's go with a gigawa because is a nice number.
Speaker 4: So if you want to build a giggle out of
Speaker 4: electricity in a hurry, your fastest mechanism would be combined cycle.
Speaker 4: Natural guests we should in North America would be awesme
Speaker 4: because it's a lot of natural guests everywhere. It's small,
Speaker 4: maybe two square miles for that power plant. It's cheap
Speaker 4: maybe a billion, billion and a half dollars half a
Speaker 4: million a month a year to run. You'll get it
Speaker 4: done in three to five years. That's why you build
Speaker 4: so much natural power plants these days. They're really efficient,
Speaker 4: they're really cheap, they build really fast. They just emit
Speaker 4: a bunch of carbon now megawatt for megawatt. They emit
Speaker 4: far less carbon than say coal. But don't consider that
Speaker 4: an achievement, right, Like you really want to have no emissions,
Speaker 4: Ideally you'd go with solar, except that solar ad best
Speaker 4: is still half load. Right we talk about about capacity.
Speaker 4: In reality, solar doesn't even get to fifty percent. It's
Speaker 4: typically around thirty percent. So the only way you solar
Speaker 4: work is you need a gigga WoT with the solar
Speaker 4: panels and a couple of gigawats with a battery, and
Speaker 4: that's the tough part. Well, first off, a gigawatt of
Speaker 4: solar panels and maybe you'll throw some wind in there.
Speaker 4: You're talking about a hundred square miles like, it's big.
Speaker 4: It takes a lot to collect that much solar power, right,
Speaker 4: and that's expensive, Like you're going to spend five to
Speaker 4: ten billion on that, But then you need forty eight
Speaker 4: gigawatt hours of battery right so that you can run.
Speaker 4: That's even more expensive. I extended period of time twenty billion, easy,
Speaker 4: and that'll be the largest battery pack ever made, which
Speaker 4: actually has reliability problems, so things tend to catch on fire. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so you know this is not a trivial problem to do.
Speaker 4: It's going to take longer to build, it's going to
Speaker 4: cost more to operate at that scale. It would almost
Speaker 4: be more rational to mix solar and natural gas. So
Speaker 4: if you did a solar system, that is enough power
Speaker 4: to run at least during the day with some battery.
Speaker 4: So if you get good solar and only when you
Speaker 4: really need to are you kicking over to gas. That
Speaker 4: gets more down to reasonable size and a reasonable price point,
Speaker 4: and you can build it relatively quickly. Obviously at a
Speaker 4: gigawatt nuclear power makes perfect sense. Sure, the challenge is
Speaker 4: it's more expensive. It's not as expensive as that straight
Speaker 4: solar and storage you're talking if you you know, we
Speaker 4: take the Voguetel reactors in new Westinghouse ones they just finished,
Speaker 4: which they spent almost twenty years and forty billion building,
Speaker 4: and actually build them efficiently. You should be able to
Speaker 4: knock them out in maybe ten years at maybe ten
Speaker 4: billion a shot, right, and build a few of them,
Speaker 4: and those are a deal candidate in many respects, in
Speaker 4: the sense that that's a gigaut of power that likes
Speaker 4: running full ball or twenty four hours a day. They
Speaker 4: work the most efficiently like that maybe a mature small
Speaker 4: nuclear The problem is the regulatory regime and time to build.
Speaker 4: It's twice the amount of time of these other solutions.
Speaker 4: There has been some breakthrough in geothermal, but geothermal doesn't
Speaker 4: come that big. So if you were going to do
Speaker 4: this with geothermal power, you're actually talking about building a
Speaker 4: dozen geothermal sites over maybe one hundred square miles and
Speaker 4: that's going to take a while as well, and only
Speaker 4: to be fair, because space based power is in if
Speaker 4: it is immature realistically, if you're going to do space
Speaker 4: based power. You're talking probably as much as forty billion,
Speaker 4: maybe more for the first ghost. That's expensive and at
Speaker 4: least a decade to build it out, Like, we have
Speaker 4: to learn a bunch of things to pull that off.
Speaker 4: Operating costs would be low, and the landing site is small,
Speaker 4: so it's pretty compelling. None of these answers are easy.
Speaker 4: The hybrid is probably the best choice. Like, I think
Speaker 4: it would make sense for municipalities to agree that if
Speaker 4: you want to build it a data center, you build
Speaker 4: enough power to power it at least most of the time, right,
Speaker 4: and maybe I'll grid tie for the rest of the time.
Speaker 4: And like any heavy industry, you negotiate for consumption of
Speaker 4: grid power. You don't get it by default any more
Speaker 4: than an aluminum smelter gets it by default. But they
Speaker 4: sure these power problems are real, and then none of
Speaker 4: them as quickly as anybody wants, right, including AI data centers.
Speaker 4: ADI data centers are not going to build that fast
Speaker 4: and have a meaningful impact any more than Starlink has
Speaker 4: had a huge impact on the total amount of bandwidth
Speaker 4: on the Internet, right, It took building out that whole
Speaker 4: network to have widespread coverage, but it's still not a
Speaker 4: lot of bandwidth. You know, fifteen thousand of these satellites,
Speaker 4: how many customers is that twenty thirty, forty thousand. It's
Speaker 4: not enough, right, We just can't build enough to actually
Speaker 4: make a huge impact on the business as a whole.
Speaker 4: It's great for the marketing. It certainly made the SpaceX
Speaker 4: IPO come true. He's postponed the problem for another couple
Speaker 4: of years. He gets the mature starship. Maybe he'll switch
Speaker 4: over to space based power at some point, which really
Speaker 4: could make a difference in the world, but it will
Speaker 4: take longer to execute on. But data center wise, if
Speaker 4: you just build data centers like reasonable people do in
Speaker 4: a reasonable way, they don't have to be a problem.
Speaker 4: They can be a good member of society. Essentially, something
Speaker 4: that provides its own power, participates in the system overall,
Speaker 4: provides some jobs, and does some compute. It's just that
Speaker 4: right now, inside of this AI bubble, everything is a
Speaker 4: bit dumb. It's a bit dumb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did before we end. I've seen some stories lately
Speaker 2: about ways to clean up emissions from coal and or
Speaker 2: natural gas, you know, not sequestering carbon but actually putting
Speaker 2: it back into a cycle where it is double you know,
Speaker 2: goes through a double dip and burns somehow have you
Speaker 2: seen anything like us?
Speaker 4: I mean, one way or the other, you're still you
Speaker 4: can capture carbon. You just have to do something with it, right,
Speaker 4: Like you can actually turn it back into gasoline. It's
Speaker 4: just really expensive gasoline. One way or the other. You
Speaker 4: have to you shouldn't let the carbon go up the stack.
Speaker 4: But it's not one hundred percent. It never one hundred percent, right. Obviously,
Speaker 4: the logical one if you're going to play that game
Speaker 4: is in the combined cycle natural gas. Just because it
Speaker 4: emits relatively a little carbon for the amount of power emits,
Speaker 4: capture systems costs more money, so it's going to increase
Speaker 4: the price of it. But they were already pretty cheap.
Speaker 4: They're not they're not high load systems, so they do
Speaker 4: need more tinkering and so forth to keep it running
Speaker 4: at capacity. And you do have to do something with
Speaker 4: a carbon, right, whether you can turn it into calcium carbonate,
Speaker 4: or you can even turn it into graph Like you
Speaker 4: can turn it to costs and carbinate with a little
Speaker 4: bit of chemistry, but you need a lot of calcium.
Speaker 4: You can turn it into graphite with a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of heat. Blow the oxygen off of it, and it's
Speaker 4: just dry carbon which has got industrial applications so forth.
Speaker 4: It just takes more power. So you know, I think
Speaker 4: governments would not have to make these decisions. They would
Speaker 4: just have to make the rules. Hey, you can do
Speaker 4: whatever power you want as long as it's zero mission.
Speaker 4: And if that means use natural gas but capture it
Speaker 4: all fine. If that means go a small module or
Speaker 4: nuclear that doesn't have those emissions in the first place,
Speaker 4: great build out solar panels with huge raise of batteries, awesome.
Speaker 4: If you got the space, go for it and the money.
Speaker 4: My shoulder takes up a lot of space. All of
Speaker 4: it costs money. But last time I looked, all of
Speaker 4: these companies are making record profits. They can afford it, right, Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 4: anything else? I don't know. I think I ran the
Speaker 4: gamut there.
Speaker 2: I think you did. Your brain needs a rest.
Speaker 4: It's been a passion project for me, initially as a talk,
Speaker 4: but it's fun to put it down as a podcast
Speaker 4: as well. We'll see how it lasts, you know, SpaceX
Speaker 4: having just iPod now we'll see what happens in a year.
Speaker 4: Or two as the realities of the commitments come to rest.
Speaker 2: All right, well that's our show, Thank you, Richard.
Speaker 4: Pleasure always a pleasure, the luxury of a summertime geek out,
Speaker 4: just for Christmas anymore.
Speaker 6: All right, we'll see you next time on dot net rocks.
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Speaker 1: See you next time you.
Speaker 2: Got jam Vans and time that means is hard.
Speaker 6: Then my Texas in line.
Speaker 2: Credit Ball