Step 1: SpaceX IPO
Step 2: Trillion dollar payout
Step 3: Nothing matters any more
Something tells me that Musk isn't the sort of person who'd ever be satisfied. It's easier for me to imagine him like Mr. House from Fallout, trying to control everything over centuries.
For example, NASA has evaluated SpaceX financial status as part of awarding COTS and HLS contracts and determined it reasonable. Also, SpaceX isn’t getting a significant fraction of the costs of Starship development from the HLS contract.
To credibly harness off-world resources at any scale, there are going to need to be automated refueling depots and many kinds of robotic automation for resource extraction. With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.
That would also completely remove the lid on how many $ trillions of market cap SpaceX could accrue.
So I find it ironic that Tesla is moving away from cars as product, and still talking up humanoid robots, which as yet are not a product, and as research don't seem to have an edge on anyone.
ALSO: Data centers on the moon make more sense than data centers in orbit. Obviously where latency isn't king, but compute is. Simple cooling sinks, dense (low local latency) expansion, dense (efficient) maintenance, etc.
> Simple cooling sinks, dense
I'll also mention that the moon isn't very cold, except on the dark side. In the moon's day the temperature is 120C and at night -130C. The same side of the moon always faces us and the moon isn't always full. I'll let you figure out the rest.
Basic physics: The moon is very cold in surface shadows and below the surface. It is an enormous pre-chilled heat sink.
The surface is also the support structure for any scale of radiative cooling with the same heat physics as orbit, but much better for larger and enhanced radiative engineering.
For example, heat pumps can centralize waste heat energy. Higher heat density vastly increases radiative efficiency.
• Permanent shadow: 40-60 ˚K, -230 to 210 ˚C
• In polar shadow: 25-30 ˚K, -250 to -245 ˚C
• Under 1 meter of surface, equatorial: 250 ˚K, -23 ˚C
• Under 1 meter of surface, polar: 200-220 ˚K, -75 to -50 ˚C
Many advantages beyond unlimited heat sink/radiative area: all compute in one place, i.e no size limit, so low inter-center latencies, no orbit safety negotiations or periodic orbit re-lifts required, able to update entire data center in a single trip, easier maintenance and stability in gravity on a surface, solar panels can be distributed over distance limiting total space debris risk, different component lifetimes don't result in wasted components, ...
Only downsides are a higher Earth-Datacenter latency, lunar dust resistant design, and a need to be at a pole for all-month solar power.
Nuclear power, or nuclear + solar, would allow any site.
Note that shade can be created anywhere on the surface via reflective shielding, and power can be used to heat, in order to stabilize temperatures in a desired band. Buried installations can use insulation for even greater temperature control.
Watch out universe, here we come!
What could possibly go wrong, mining asteroids? An awful lot, when we start messing with orbital dynamics in the asteroid belt.
But Space X can externalise those risks. It will probably be centuries before disturbed orbits start to threaten Earth... So who cares?
Me.
Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.
Sure, an asteroid theoretically has eighty quadrillion dollars of whatever, but you're going to spend ninety bajillion getting anything there and back, plus you'd ...well, crater the market even if you did.
We're not hurting for heat sinks. There's the entire ocean to work with, for one.
What? You're in a huge vacuum thermos