The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
I actually do. The math is more strained than anything present. But a lot of people are rejecting it out of hand without doing anything back of the envelope. Truth is, barring a seismic shift in how we permit data centers on the ground, it takes a within-the-envelope decreases in launch costs to make space-based data centers profitable. Which is then just a cheat code for building a Dyson sphere.
> Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now?
They all explode all the time. Starship has also been consistently improving its suborbital flight characteristics. I don’t see a good argument for a fundamental design fuckup in the data we have.
> But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour?
This is nonsense. But within ten years? I think so. At least, we don’t have a good reason to reject that with current data. And that would make the cost equation flip to favoring space-based infrastructure. Which, honestly, is not the answer I expected. (I’ve done aerospace stuff for a while. Most of the back-of-the-envelope math fails. It failed for space-based solar power. It failed for asteroid mining. And it currently fails for space-based data centers. But let launch costs dip a bit, or permitting delays and risks rise a bit, and the equation balances sooner than one would think.)
> Changing permits sounds to me a lot easier than building anything in space
Having done a little bit of both, the latter around data centers, I’ll say they’re different kinds of hard.
> Alright, show me
Fair question. But no, I’m still refining my math and making bets on this. But I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread.
My basic argument is to try pinning out current datacenter costs, pin out lifted costs, and then work out what cost/kg you need to balance the two. Hint: approval time and interest rates are meaningful variables.
> I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread
iirc HN threads automatically close, due to inactivity and (/or?) based on time since the original post. I wasn’t able to find a thread with the comments still open from 16 days ago, let alone a “few weeks”, but in good faith I’m assuming that you already know that, and aren’t using that as an out to avoid replying, not that anyone is “owed” a reply by you, or by anyone.
This is all to say, I appreciate the thread as a bystander, and would thus naturally eagerly await your reply if and when it arrives before the closure of individual this post’s comment section.
Yes, everything at CERN, at least in the 2000s, was in AFS. Fermilab was also using AFS extensively.
I remember compiling AFS from source for Scientific Linux 3.x because there was a weird bug that didn't let the machines mount AFS when they were integrated with LCG (before it was renamed to WLCG: https://wlcg.web.cern.ch/)
Well I'm 50 but AFS in college was superior to all the NFS and NIS silliness I've put up with at the 8 companies I've worked at since then. I wrote another comment about our Unix groups at work and how we have a setuid root command that we type in our password and it changes our groups dynamically.
I’ve been lucky enough to see in person many of these pieces when they were exhibited in DFJ’s offices in Sand Hill Road (~2017-2018). It’s an extraordinary collection.
I don't know much about Jurvetson (apart from him being a VC) but his passion, enthusiasm, and deep knowledge of each of these items in the video is infectious.
