Anonymous
10/31/2025, 4:06:41 PM
No.16832531
>>16832494
what musk is describing sounds like non-monolithic
according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deployment) (the source is some FCC filing from 2022 in a table, scroll down) the solar panel area is 256.94 m^2 for a V2 (in 2022 bound for starship) which I guess is v3 in the pic from eyeballing the sizes roughly i.e. 8.1m x1 panel, 12.8m x 2 panels and 20.2m x 2 panels on the wikipedia table
the 256.94 m^2 of solar panel area translates to about 71kW according to grok and LLM inference focused data centers are in the 50-60MW range, i.e. you would need about 1k V3 sized satellites to have roughly the same power as a big ground based data center, assuming the overheads for power etc are similar
then if you need a similar area for heat rejection, you would need roughly 2x the mass so can launch half as many compute-links or whatever vs v3 starlinks with starship
a 50-60MW data center is about 1.5bil with one third of that in chips, so launching 1k satellites would have to cost on the order of 1bil to manufacture and launch, which translates to 1mil per satellite
currently manucturing + launching v2minis is about 1-1.5 mil in total with F9, launch is about half of that cost (lets say 700k), those are about 1 tonne each, a v3 is about 2 tonnes and the compute-links would be about double that again due to radiators, so with F9 would be around 3mil just to launch
so if Starship can bring costs down 5-10x of F9, then maybe a compute-link could be competitive with a ground based data center (with massive handwaving)
what musk is describing sounds like non-monolithic
according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deployment) (the source is some FCC filing from 2022 in a table, scroll down) the solar panel area is 256.94 m^2 for a V2 (in 2022 bound for starship) which I guess is v3 in the pic from eyeballing the sizes roughly i.e. 8.1m x1 panel, 12.8m x 2 panels and 20.2m x 2 panels on the wikipedia table
the 256.94 m^2 of solar panel area translates to about 71kW according to grok and LLM inference focused data centers are in the 50-60MW range, i.e. you would need about 1k V3 sized satellites to have roughly the same power as a big ground based data center, assuming the overheads for power etc are similar
then if you need a similar area for heat rejection, you would need roughly 2x the mass so can launch half as many compute-links or whatever vs v3 starlinks with starship
a 50-60MW data center is about 1.5bil with one third of that in chips, so launching 1k satellites would have to cost on the order of 1bil to manufacture and launch, which translates to 1mil per satellite
currently manucturing + launching v2minis is about 1-1.5 mil in total with F9, launch is about half of that cost (lets say 700k), those are about 1 tonne each, a v3 is about 2 tonnes and the compute-links would be about double that again due to radiators, so with F9 would be around 3mil just to launch
so if Starship can bring costs down 5-10x of F9, then maybe a compute-link could be competitive with a ground based data center (with massive handwaving)