Did a quick search, didn’t see confirmation that they’re blind/that all radars had been knocked out. Was asking whether others who know more about this topic than me would confirm.
This is the second time in 2 weeks I’ve seen a comment like this on HN. 37 years old. Been on here 16 years. Incredibly odd to me. Just announce “can someone else tell me if this is true?”
I watched an interview with a retired British military guy who said that the radar destruction does complicate things, but the US still has the other AWACs, so there is still early warning and visibility, just complicates things and reduced range/more risk.
The E3 fleet is aging and difficult to keep airworthy. Of the 32 or so planes the US has, it sounds as though they struggle to keep the operational number above 16, and moving more to the gulf means they have to pull them from other theaters. In short, they simply don't have enough to provide coverage of all the areas they want them.
This was completely foreseeable and is a situation that appears to have arisen entirely due to vest interests stifling procurement of a suitable replacement in order to spruik up business for their own competing, but unfinished offering. Prior to the war in Iran, total cancellation of the procurement of E7's had been announced.
that's true about assertions, but blindly saying "Fact check!" is still an attempt to offload a wished-for effort onto other people while simultaneously sowing seeds of discernment and distrust into the topic.
What happens when someone yells "Fact check!" at absolutely true things constantly? It erodes confidence. That's why "Person yelling fact check" isn't a typical or generalized role in normal discourse.
Yes, it's good to correct the incorrect. How does one do that typically? A rebuttal.
A supposed 'deferment to experts' on the internet is worth next to nothing, just a way to paint yourself a bit more altruistically while producing FUD.
I asked if anyone could rebut it. Normally I'd do the work myself, but I'm not very up to speed on this stuff and I wasn't in a good place to do a bunch of research, and someone who's been following it more closely could probably do a better job pretty quickly. The comment smelled like a possible propaganda account to me, making what I thought were some pretty wild claims, and the commenters that were there were piling on because tribalism, so I was trying to act like an antibody in HN's immune system against nonsense, and flag it. Sorry if it sounded like a demand, it was probably too terse.
And it's worse than spam when someone is posting incorrect things and people are downvoting people questioning it. As another user has already posted, the Iron Dome does not use the same radar they are talking about and is not "blind"
IMHO, people making claims should provide the evidence for them. One link is behind a paywall and the other clearly states that it is making informed speculations.
I could make all sorts of claims on the spot here. It doesn't create a duty for people reading this thread to go investigate them.
You're so close, just one more step, and it's easy, just have to step away from keeping it hypothetical.
<SPOILER>
Then it certainly does not create a duty for people to go investigate, when the only difference is "someone replied telling someone to fact check"
</SPOILER>
You're the one in this thread claiming people are responsible for "going and finding the evidence" of other people's unsourced claims. You could have just not replied since you didn't have something to contribute.
I apologize for not quoting you directly “Then go get some!”. That’s what you said in response to there being no evidence. Would you like a link to your comment?
"People are responsible for going and finding the evidence" and "Then go get some!" are not paraphrases of each other. They don't share a single word, or advance a similar idea. I am uncertain linking comments can change that.
I'm not sure what's going on: "People are responsible for going and finding the evidence" and "Then go get some!" are not paraphrases.
Best steelman I can come up with is you're seeing deep red, so it's hard to see "Then go get some!" is suggesting he could fact-check his own question instead of asking the room to do it for him.
Which is the opposite of your characterization that I think people are responsible for investigating strangers' unsourced claims. We violently agree, not disagree.
Making this exchange all the curiouser.
Are you inebriated? I only ask because it's unusual to see someone on HN choosing to say obviously incorrect things, aggressively, on purpose, just to talk down to someone. Much less making bullying attempts based on comment history.
Traveling with kids on spring break, I don’t have time to read all war related news, and it tends to set off my propaganda account alarm when someone registers a new account to drop a bunch of assertions on such a politically divisive topic. So I was asking whether someone could confirm things like “The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.”
There’s a good reason new accounts are colored green.
I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching.
The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.
Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.
It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
Could you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.
> ... but how do you scale this up right 20 kow used to be enough to power a full rack of computer gear but we're seeing predictions now of 100 kilowatts per rack and that's just one rack in a data center racks right the 48U 19in rack which is you know big and it's just dense with computers how does that fit into a flat satellite well it turns out that like 19in rack is about 50 cm wide it's about 1 m deep per unit and if you've got a 24 1/2 square meter satellite and you take all your one U units and stack them ...
One rack per satellite doesn't seem like it is that compelling of a story.
Put a 100 kW rack in my basement in the winter and hook up the power and I'll be happy to deal with the waste heat for several months (and then ship it to somewhere in the southern hemisphere).
Could you build a data center in space? Yes, absolutely I am sure there are no physical barriers. We have computers in space now, and those computers have telecom links to Earth.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.
I think you're understating the permitting problem - it's a major reason for the very large/rapid price hikes on power in the PJM region, and the populist backlash against data center construction, including moratoriums on DC construction. The difficulty in getting new electrical generation interconnected in many parts of the US is one of the major marks in favor of the plan.
I'm not understating it. But I'm not buying the line that suddenly it's impossible to build industrial buildings in the US. I am realizing that there are thousands of jurisdictions in the US with wildly different permitting regimes, and then hundreds of other countries in the world that might be more welcoming.
But let's say they need to stay in the US. Are DC operators offering to buy down utility capex costs so that existing residents don't see a spike in rates? If not, obviously that is going to create opposition as nobody wants their utility bills to rise rapidly. It would probably be cheaper & easier to e.g. write a check to Southern Company to prevent rate hikes directly tied to their DC than to put a DC in space.
The math also barely pencils? IF Starship hits its $100/kg, getting a single rack of servers to orbit will cost ~$100k. A 500MW data center might have ~5k racks, so ~$500m to orbit. SpaceX estimates $100/kg - $300/kg so it could be $1.5B - $2B just to put the racks in orbit, plus the cost of the servers, plus the cost of the actual orbital data center itself, plus the cost of getting the orbital data center to orbit. That's getting into the "hand every resident a check for $100k in exchange for their county approving the permit" territory.
One Vera Rubin rack costs $3-7M and eats something like 600 kw, so you’re probably looking at more like 800 racks for that 500 MW DC. $100k launch costs per rack doesn’t seem too terrible if that’s what it works out to. I’m sure there’s a mountain of solar panels that aren’t included, though?
And it’s not that simple, building out power generation is very constrained, the interconnection queue is years long in many places, and the current backlog for new natural gas turbines is multiple years right now. Fixing the permitting isn’t impossible with some political will, but energy permitting reform is something that’s been bandied around for years in Congress and hasn’t made it across the finish line. EPRA almost made it at the end of last Congress but that session ended before it did. Hopefully it makes it this time, everyone should contact their congresspeople and ask them to support energy permitting reform.
You will have a setup working based on solar energy and battery storage before you get spaceship to not explode anymore and to deliver low price for payload.
And we are talking about AI Datacenters, they are a lot less latency dependend than websites.
Alone the idea that Musk would be able to break through any burocrazy for space stuff and sets up a supply chain for everything space is easier than just setting up some energy and fiber, feels ridicoulys
I don't understand how years spent building an orbital DC is better than years spent permitting. I guess maybe they expect to somehow be able to build these faster? (How?)
Anyway, is it technically possible? Yes. My suspicion is it's at best a wash vs building on the ground. Applying a similar price premium & similar engineering resources to a ground-based system is likely to deliver much more predictable results.
Tech obviously can have success at lobbying. The TikTok ban IIRC got 90 votes in the Senate. I'm sure the total cost of the required astroturf campaign was much less than launching a single orbital DC.
As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will counter each hard constraint with a handful of hopeful speculations.
As for pure scientific analysis, like the Scott Manley one, they tend to entertain themselves too much with the physics and mathematics and forget the economics behind it all.
Take Google’s own paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468) that estimates that launch costs, just to roughly match data center energy costs on earth, would need to reach 200USD/kg, which requires a 10 fold cost reduction relative to the current launch costs of Falcon 9. And that is to launch a _disposable_ server into orbit, that will disintegrate after a few years and likely have hardware failures well before that.
And these servers are not anything like a “data center”, and they won’t run the applications that we are already scrambling to find demand in earth. No, these would theoretically run some ultra-niche, highly experimental workloads maybe for NASA or the military. That alone can’t possibly justify the investment, at least not for the retail investor that actually expects a positive ROI. Nevertheless the tech elite and their pet journalists are more than happy to sell this fantasy to the average people.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Project Natick to materialize, Microsoft’s data center on the ocean, which makes far, far more sense than data centers on frigging space. Still they didn’t manage to make that one work in any meaningful sense.
Thanks, I took a look, couple things - the inlet temp on the VR is 45 C, but that’s not the radiator operating temp, you can probably run those chips closer to 90-100 C. And they’re building custom silicon for this, presumably that’ll be one of their design targets. Also, most bit flips should be fine when you’re running inference, you’re presumably running with some randomness anyway. If a node fails/becomes too unreliable, it can be detected and shut off.
Idk, building in the ocean seems a lot harder to me than space. Salt water is ridiculously corrosive, extreme pressure, etc. And one of the main justifications for this is massively increasing the output of solar and making it consistently output its nameplate capacity, which space is great for, and ocean is terrible for. The only benefit for that one I can see is some power savings on cooling, and a whole boatload of drawbacks, whereas we might not be able to keep up with demand with terrestrial power. So I can totally see why they never bothered to complete their subsea datacenter.
They’re definitely not aiming to put niche applications up, they want to run models by the bucketful.
I don’t see how the economics make it impossible? To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s something that’s going to end up happening, I have no idea if it will, but I don’t see how it’s structurally impossible, and I can see some things to commend it if token usage volumes grow like I think they will.
These are US telecoms, the satellites blanket the entire Earth at all times. Lower ARPU, but still. Also, it seems like they're swallowing a large percentage of flight/cruise/military internet. And direct-to-cell data coverage of the entire Earth.
Absolutely. I wonder how many parents have been no contacted, SOs broken off with, friendships broken because of the Reddit hivemind's attitude. Pretty sure it's doing a huge amount of societal damage.
It's aluminum, glass, silicon, and some conductive metal. Surely you all have those materials.
And even if you don't make them yourselves, they aren't make and then burn like fossil fuels, they are durable infrastructure, you don't have to replace them often - they have an expected lifespan of >30 years. Buy as many as China will sell you, and once you have more than enough installed, you're good for a long time, regardless of whether they cut you off.
I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long, it's a bit tricky to mindset shift that once these things are installed, you're just good. And they're super fungible, you don't need any precision replacement parts, so you can make your own replacement parts if you want.
Yes, and France currently has a huge problem with keeping their plants online in the summer when it's too warm. And building new plants is outrageously expensive, see Hinkley Point C. Oh, ans you still need to import fission material, so you're dependent again on other countries. Nuclear was good in the 70s, now it's beaten thoroughly by renewables.
The Swedish government is very pro renewables, yet it is initiating large investments in nuclear because they believe it is the only way to ensure enough electricity for the larger and larger need for it in the near future. I’d say they have some good information to base that decision on, since you’re right it’s really expensive, but also it’s the only way to get large amounts of production when the sun ain’t shining (all winter here) and there’s no wind (also happens a lot in the colder months).
Right, a mix of uncorrelated sources is much more resilient than 100% renewables. Of the cleantech industry people I listen to, none of them are advocating for 100% renewables, you need a mix for grid reliability. But renewables can take on much of the load. And overpaneling can help significantly, and makes a lot more sense now that solar is super cheap.
Most panels have a 25 year 80% production warranty. Unless they're planning on being out of business, they're not planning on them lasting <25 years. So their useful life is significantly longer than 30 years, unless we come up with massively more efficient panels and the land opportunity cost is high enough that we should swap them out rather than let them just keep pumping out electricity.
I don't know about others but personally I'd like my electricity source to not be constantly degrading over time and requiring maintenance crews to go out and replace the panels as they randomly start falling below the required efficiency levels. I'd prefer if the entire production unit was a single all-inclusive compound maintained by the team on site, with a relatively compact ecological footprint.
Well, also, LLM servers get much more efficient with request queue depth >1 - tokens per second per gpu are massively higher with 100 concurrents than 1 on eg vllm.
reply