I finally have some pretty interesting space news to share with you. SpaceX just dropped days away from their IPO this Friday. Elon Musk sat down and did an interview with employees in Bastrop, Texas, which is not far from Austin in the Starlink factory that I in fact started covering their development back in 2022. But quite frankly, the first 10 minutes of this interview are, you know, Elon saying things that I've heard him say many times before. So, I want to get to the newer information. If you want to hear him talk about a Kardashev level civilization, or how Starship is the holy grail for reusable rockets, you can listen to the whole thing. But this is the part that I found most interesting.
People probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say like data center in space. Like we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there. These actually look pretty different. So, kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.
Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't actually know what the inside of a data center even looks like, right? And it's some mythical place where the internet's in the cloud or something.
Yeah, some people envision wire, some people envision boxes, but it actually comes down to a set number of chips. The things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how to get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing Starlink technology, the solar arrays, we want to utilize that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into itself. We like to look at this and say what is the actual engineering problem here, and it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space as you mentioned.
Yeah. Now, the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. Because a Starlink satellite has gigantic phased array antennas, parabolic antennas, and a lot of laser links. It's much more complicated than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. So, given the two, the easier one to design for is the AI satellite.
Yeah. It's just a little bit bigger.
Just make stuff bigger, yeah. So we've got this is our AI one. If you guys want to walk us through.
Yeah, so the first thing that we're really looking at here is you first got to make something compelling, right. And we thought that the right place to start is around the 150 kW peak power level. But as we look at the workloads with our experience with xAI, we get to actually see that we can also support about 120 kW of average compute. There's a difference. What we're showing here is kind of a draft version of the version one of the SpaceX AI satellite. The AI one, I guess you could call it. And it seems like a reasonable place to start is 150 kW peak power, 120 kW sustained power. And to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiators, size of the solar panels. The assumptions here are 250 W per square meter for the solar array. And about 1,400 W per square meter for the radiators. So, the radiators, these are double-sided radiators radiating both sides. They're oriented knife edge to the sun. And 1,400 W per square meter is a very achievable goal. Over time we think we can probably do above 250 W per square meter and above 1,400 W per square meter for the solar panels and radiators respectively. But this gives you a sense of what the satellite's going to look like. It's a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small by comparison.
And these are like evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date.
That's really I think the cool part to me is that we're looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V3 Starlink vehicle. So, I'm really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.
Yeah. Part of what we want to convey here is that there's not some magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the AI satellites. As Ian said, a lot of this is technology we've already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. So, we basically don't think this is a super hard problem compared to things we already do. There would also be probably something on the order of a terabit of laser link connectivity from the satellite. The 150 kW peak power level roughly matches what an Nvidia GB300 rack would do. So if you've got a GB300 with 72 GPUs, its peak power I think is around 140 kilowatts. But it's almost impossible to get it to be at that peak power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120 kilowatts average power. But it can peak up to 150. So it's basically think of it as a rack of compute in space. And then you can connect these racks of compute to either each other by the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellation. So you can close the link with the Starlink constellation and then Starlink can then send that data to the ground using the existing KA and KU antennas on the vehicle. It also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. And this would not be at a particularly high latency. We're talking about maybe being around 600 to 800 kilometers above the Earth. And light travels 300 kilometers per millisecond. So it's about 3 milliseconds away basically. It's not very far.
Don't worry about that too much then.
It's not. Sometimes people worry that this is going to be some high latency. I'm like, yeah, speed of light moves pretty fast.
Pretty fast. It's all one.
Yeah. I think the cool thing also is the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar arrays for the V3 vehicle. Kind of in that realm where we're flying today.
Yeah. So I mean they got about a 70 meter wingspan. So these are fairly large. And we're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there. But space is in the name, there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even up to a million satellites, you got plenty of room to move around up there.
Yeah, space is really big. So it's not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous. Like if you zoom in close the satellite looks big. But if you actually look at it relative to the earth the satellites are so tiny you can't even see them. So they're very very tiny compared to earth.
And I mean we have about 10,000 Starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now, right? We are the only operator that has any experience at that scale. It's a great thing that we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and fly them safely. That's our number one goal when we look at the constellation.
We're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop, right? So we've got this which... So we're in that building kind of in the middle which... This is my first time here. The building is massive. Like you come around the corner you see it through the trees and you're like oh wow. But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we?
