Context missing. This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers.
Full paragraph quote comes from:
> While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.
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> This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers.
In the meantime, how about affordable insulin for everybody?
Exactly; most of the world's problems are political problems.
Which Musk has no intention to fix, of course, because he's more about money and (buying) status with it. He had an opportunity but decided to aid the regime in extracting people's data instead (probably selling it to adversaries).
Why is it cheaper to ship all of the materials to space, then to the moon for assembly (which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive), then back into space vs just…
It's not like satellites need anything like computer chips, which are finicky things to build that require parts with a sole supplier on the entire planet.
You can make propellant on the Moon (aluminum based solid fuels), and the energy to get into orbit or into deep space is far, far less that from Earth’s surface.
That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far?
Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point?
It would appeal to naive technofetishists, the same crowd of investors enamored by many of Elon's other impossible schemes.
The moon mfg makes significantly more sense than the hilarious plan to establish a permanent Mars base in the next 50 years, but that's not saying much.
> Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point?
From lunar regolith you would extract: oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, silicon, calcium, and magnesium.
From the poles you can get fuel (water ice -> water + hydrogen + oxygen).
The real constraint is not materials, but rather power generation, automation reliability, and initial capital investment.
So you have to shuttle machines, energy systems, and electronics.
The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure.
Satellites that would benefit most are: huge comms platforms, space-based power satellites, large radar arrays, deep-space telescopes, etc.
It's solvents, lubricants, cooling, and all the other boring industrial components and feedstocks that people seem to forget exist. Just because raw materials exist in lunar regolith doesn't mean much if you can't actually smelt and refine it into useful forms.
This is the big one - Musk knows that if he convinces enough people, they will invest the billions / trillions necessary, making him stupendously rich.
But anyone investing in that is... not a good investor, to be politically correct, because what's the expected return on investment? Who are the customers? What is the monetization? Or bar that, how does it benefit humanity?
It's throwing money down the drain. If you're an investor and are considering this, consider investing in earth instead. Real projects with real benefits. There's enough money to fix hunger, poverty, housing, education, and everything. Enough money to buy and / or fund politicians to make the necessary changes.
> There's enough money to fix hunger, poverty, housing, education, and everything. Enough money to buy and / or fund politicians to make the necessary changes.
Perhaps. But I can also see someone wanting to use their money to fund space exploration because it is more exciting.
As an aside, I strongly suspect that to solve the problems you think are more worthy, it isn't money that is the problem, but rather social, structural, cultural, and other issues mostly.
If you successfully solve hunger, poverty, housing, education, etc. Then humanity will back you doing whatever billionaire space or submarine shit you want.
Trying to do billionaire space shit while there is extreme poverty is a dangerous game imo; but I guess flaunting their wealth hasn't had any consequences so far.
Power would almost certainly mostly come from solar panels. The SpaceX-xAI press release mentions using mass drivers which are electrically powered. Could make Hydrogen-Oxygen rocket fuel but not needed in Moon's lower gravity/thin atmosphere.
It has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public.
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
It's all BS. There is no viable way to put industrial levels of compute into a space based platform that can work within the severe thermal, power, mass/volume, radiation, reliability, and economic demands. It is just stupid smoke blowing to separate idiot investors from their money. J-school grads don't have a clue what they're parroting about.
it wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible
Google, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume.
yup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass.
Was doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be
AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.
Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.
The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun.
Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.
The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.
Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.
Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.
The $44B Twitter/X buyout was not a failure. For example Fidelity has its $19M investment in the buyout - now xAI common shares - marked at $62M (up over 3X) as of 12/31/25. It was certainly valued even higher on 1/31/26 after xAI had an oversubcribed fund raise in January. All before this merger announcement.
The fact that it had to be successively bailed out by xAI (which itself was funded by Tesla) and now SpaceX shareholders is exactly what makes the acquisition a failure.
He spent other people's money (or maybe even imaginary money) he couldn't have used for himself (since selling off major stakes in your company is a big nono)
Translation: Musk gets the full 2018 compensation plans (worth ~$139 billion); plaintiff get $1 and plaintiff's lawyers get $54.3 million plus interest.
Actually it's mass public transit that can't scale. Despite $1.3T in cumulative subsides US public transit usage is tiny: ~1.5% of trips and ~1% of passenger-miles.
Getting 100 people in a bus is not "easy" because very rarely do 100 people all want to from/to the same place at the same time. We end up bunching people in both time and space and making multiple stops and/or connections - which all make the journey longer and less competitive with alternatives.
And even then buses are only near capacity in our very biggest cities (top 10-15) for a hundful of hours during weekday rush hours. For example, in SF while buses/railcars may occasionally get crowded they are usually empty: Muni averages only 6 passengers per vehicle, BART only 8 per traincar. On a passenger-mile basis this makes the service very expensive (Muni ~$4 and BART ~$2 including capital) and very energy inefficient (Muni(LRV) ~400Wh and BART ~600Wh). Explaining why both systems are struggling financially and require massive ongoing subsides keep operating.
Because busses/subways/trains (i.e. mass transit) require lots of passengers to make financial - or even environmental - sense they will always be a niche, if very important, part of transportation. Robotaxis are competing in the much, much larger car/light truck market (80-85% of trips and passenger-miles). Uber/Lyft (plus traditional taxis) is already much bigger than public transit (~2% vs ~1-1.5%) and still growing and with what should eventually be a much lower cost structure robotaxis should greatly expand this. In other words robotaxis like Tesla will likely be much more scalable than public transit.
Not as familiar with EU statistics but for shorter trips (under 300km) public transit is well under 10% of trips while cars are over 50%. For all intra-EU travel in passenger-miles cars are around 75% while busses/trains of all types is well under 15%. Viable sure, more scalable probably not.
I bet much less than half of the hundreds of HN commenters here bother to read it. Many are clearly unfamiliar with its content.