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    Elon Musk Is Taking the X Playbook to Starlink
    Futurology

    Elon Musk Is Taking the X Playbook to Starlink

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    1. theatlantic on

      Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff: “If Elon Musk gets his way, space will soon look very different. Through his ownership of SpaceX, the world’s richest man already operates most of the roughly 14,000 active satellites that are orbiting Earth. Now his rocket company is asking the government for permission to launch up to 1 million more. It’s part of Musk’s plan to build data centers in space that can harness the power of the sun for AI. ‘You’re power-constrained on Earth,’ Musk said last month. ‘Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.’

      “Musk has a lot riding on these orbital data centers. To help finance them, he is set to take SpaceX public as early as June, at a reported valuation of $2 trillion. Musk has claimed that data centers in space can ‘enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilization on Mars, and ultimately expansion to the universe.’ It’s all classic Musk, who has a habit of making big promises that he can’t always keep. Data centers in space are an untested technology, and it’s not clear if they’d actually work. (Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment.)

      “Even if Musk falls short of his lofty space dreams, his venture may still pay him considerable dividends. That’s because it could help him secure regulatory approval to accelerate a land grab in space. There are only so many satellites that can circle Earth’s low orbit before the risk of collision becomes unacceptably high. By flooding space with his own satellites, Musk can make it impossible for other companies to gain entry while dramatically expanding one of the most important and valuable parts of his empire: Starlink.

      “The world’s largest satellite-internet provider, Starlink already boasts more than 10 million active customers in at least 150 countries. Subscribers set up a flat antenna that looks a bit like a pizza box to connect their devices to the internet anywhere they are in the world.”

      Read more: [https://theatln.tc/oc4rGUgw](https://theatln.tc/oc4rGUgw)

    2. eskimospy212 on

      Has anyone explained how they will solve the real problem, which is not power but cooling?

    3. pam_the_dude on

      I’m still not sure whether puttler or musk will be the reason space travel will be completely fucked by triggering the kessler effect

    4. smack54az on

      Just the idea of putting up millions of satellites just to power LLM’S and other generative models is depressing. Space should be about science, exploration, and pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve. It shouldn’t be up for sale, especially to a grifter like Elon Musk. LLM’S and the like are not the future, they won’t lead to AGI and are opposed by the majority of the public. Where as reaching the stars amd understanding the universe is. I sincerely hope SpaceX fails and it’s IPO is a bust.

    7. Calm-Insurance-5169 on

      it sounds like a cool idea, i just dont like elon. there is a lot of space in space.

    8. FelixTreasurebuns on

      Would this cause problems for slave travel in the future? I feel like if he truly flooded it with satellites that would make the calculations harder and more expensive to exit earth’s atmosphere

    10. vizag on

      Don’t focus on the tech. For musk orbital data centers are the ultimate carrot! That is what he wants to come up with for all his businesses – the one promise, feature that people really like but is far away and takes a while to achieve. This gives him the leverage to hype the stock up many many folds.

      This is what he did with Tesla and self driving, now robots. He did that with twitter and the all in one app. He did that with doge and his political leanings too. Now orbital data center is his Trojan horse to hype up the stock and essentially monopolize space. He doesn’t give a fuck about the practicality of it, doesn’t care if it’s possible or not, the hype is all he cares about now.

    13. Stu_Thom4s on

      Like so many Elon does, the physical end result will be something half arsed that barely works. That’s okay though, because the stock will have been pumped and the government grifted.

    14. hoops_n_politics on

      This guy hacked the government’s infrastructure in order to make several regulatory (and possibly criminal) investigations into his companies go away. And now we’re supposed to give him permission to launch one million more satellites (under his control) into orbit? I think there needs to be a serious look into how dependence on SpaceX and Starlink are compromising the national security interests of this country.

    15. cernegiant on

      SpaceX is the one Musk affiliated project that is actually a massive success and that has actually changed its industry in a major way.

      And now he’s just destroying it.