SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/spacex-data-centre-one-million-satellites-9.7117772

27•billybuckwheat•1h ago

Comments

codingdave•1h ago

> ... data centres that won’t have an environmental impact here on Earth.

Really? I wonder how they are going to get them up there without rocket launches?

Ekaros•1h ago

And getting them down. Or allowing them to come down on their own... I doubt that is entirely environmental impact free.

JPLeRouzic•1h ago

I wonder about the impact on our health of all the metals that will be present in the atmosphere after several months. For example, it is well known that lead in gasoline has increased crime.

aruggirello•1h ago

LEO satellites come down on their own in a few months/years. 100 tons of metal burning in the atmosphere seems a lot, but it's barely the total mass of meteorites falling in 24-48 hours, actually.

johnea•5m ago

Totally sidestepping the issue and refuting the words.

Regardless of how they fall, they still fall on the planet.

And this still ignores the massive atmospheric pollution of chemical rocket launch.

Space elevator would be a big help with launch, but the trash is still dropped on the ground, or in the ocean, in the end.

ReptileMan•1h ago

100 tons is quite a lot of gpus. If they manage to solve such "minor" problems as powering and cooling them they could run for a decade or so without consuming or polluting. The methane burned to get mass into orbit is trivial - a 500MW powerplant burns that much in under a day.

codingdave•1h ago

Yeah, that response trivializes the massive burn that power plants perform each day.

When I worked in a midstream gas company, I recall a meeting when we were explaining the business to some new IT folk, and talking about the plants that process 100K barrels. One new guy in particular literally dropped his jaw and said, "you process 100K barrels of gas a year??" The room looked at him like he was insane and the woman running the meeting politely replied: "No, per day."

So acting as if "it burns less than a power plant" somehow means it is trivial is just a really odd take.

Besides, the methane burn is one piece of the puzzle. There is more to environmental impact than just methane.

ReptileMan•52m ago

Yes it is trivial when humanity is burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and 300 tons of coal per second and 100 tons of natural gas per second.

vkou•59m ago

The problem isn't GPUs the problem is cooling them.

Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.

kingleopold•52m ago

Also they are not building them in 3D space with current tech. We clearly don't have it. Cars barely drive themselves in cities, they are decade behind building and maintaining a. datacenter in space.

ericd•13m ago

ISS is not comparable, we don't have to keep GPUs in human-habitable temp ranges, and radiation speed goes way up with increased temps.

SilverElfin•1h ago

Should be banned. These companies are destroying a piece of the environment that belongs to all of us - the night sky.

Bender•1h ago

Along that line people should look into BUG ratings [1] for outdoor lighting, especially city operated lights. [1]

[1] - https://www.landscapeforms.com/ideas/bug-rating-system-101

tristanj•56m ago

Banning Starlink is inadequate and won't change anything. China is building their own larger version with 20,000+ satellites. Russia is building their own network. The EU is building their own network.

amelius•41m ago

Let's ban ads too, while we're at it.

Keyframe•8m ago

Where do we sign?

androiddrew•1h ago

Let me fix your title:

SpaceX wants investors to think that they will be able to launch millions of satellites.

torginus•37m ago

Yeah I remember reading that what killed the space industry in the 90s-2000s other than the collapse of the USSR and cessation of great power competition was the massive move to digital communications, particularly satellite TV - which mean that a smaller number of satellites could serve the expected demand.

timschmidt•4m ago

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

tristanj•1h ago

Starlink has been so successful, it is facing a lot of competition in the next few years. Every major power wants their own, national starlink network.

Amazon Leo plans for 3,000 satellites in orbit, and is already launching satellites.

China's state-backed starlink competitor GuoWang is putting 13,000 satellites in orbit by 2030. They've already started launching satellites.

China's Qianfan plans 15,000 satellites by 2030.

AST SpaceMobile is building their own network.

The EU is building EU: IRIS², explicitly as a Starlink alternative.

Russia, after realizing how critical starlink is on the battlefield, is planning its own Rassvet network. They've already launched satellites.

LightBug1•40m ago

Oh ffs ... how is the homebrew laser defense industry coming along?

Spec Priority: ability to attach said laser defense instrument to home telescope ... and enable user to blast those madafakkas out of the sky.

amelius•39m ago

How long until they turn a constellation into a giant LED billboard, showing commercials for Tesla?

28304283409234•34m ago

Isn't that a scene in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy?

dwd•9m ago

Red Dwarf.

A little more destructive pushing suns into supernova to write "Coke is Life" across the sky.

doublerabbit•32m ago

ASAP.

https://futurism.com/russian-scientists-huge-advertisements-...

ridgeguy•12m ago

Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it - the thought, at least.

Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon

variety8675•37m ago

> Most people likely don’t think about how often they use satellite communications. But that Instagram post you made? You used a satellite.

This article seems to confuse Starlink with ordinary cellular communications

ivanjermakov•7m ago

They also might confuse Starlink with GPS satellites which are completely different things.

johnea•36m ago

There is an upside: this may be the shortest route to eliminating any future launches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Sorry Buck Rogers fan bois, should have left this fantasy in the 1950s...

exabrial•20m ago

An angle to consider: LEO Satellite internet connectivity has actually connected more people than Biden's BEAD program, which largely just lined the pockets of already [literal] entrenched monopolies, while doing so at 1/5 of the cost.

Which by the way, is not a hard number to beat... Biden's BEAD connected exactly 0 people at the cost of $42 billion dollars.

ceejayoz•13m ago

Well, no shit. First grants went out in 2024, right in time for the administration to change; Lutnick put it on hold almost immediately. It also hasn't cost $42B; "By 2026, about half of the $42.45 billion allocated by Congress during the passage of the IIJA remained unused".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Equity,_Access,_and_...

Incidentally, BEAD includes LEO satellites as part of it. SpaceX got grants from it. (https://texasstandard.org/stories/spacex-demands-changes-fed...)

onlypassingthru•9m ago

They've only spent half of the BEAD funds, $21B. 50 out of 56 final plans have been approved so the remaining half will be released.

https://www.ntia.gov/press-release/2026/assistant-secretary-...

wrs•11m ago

The people who want to put data centers in orbit must be either much smarter than me, or much dumber than me, because I just don't get how that makes any technical or economic sense.

Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")

6d6b73•10m ago

Spacex will cause Kessler syndrom and bring the world economy down.

ChrisArchitect•7m ago

March 8th story OP?

Some previous discussion:

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598415

Part of this announcement:

xAI joins SpaceX

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

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SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

Comments

Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

Local AI needs to be the norm

Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

Traces Of Humanity

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider

Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes

Eight More 8-bit Era Microprocessors (2024)

Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem

Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer

What's a mathematician to do? (2010)

YC's Biggest Scandals

Idempotency is easy until the second request is different

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

The One Dollar Counterfeiter

Show HN: An index of indie web/blog indexes

Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

Think Linear Algebra (2023)

Shunting-Yard Animation

Task Paralysis and AI

SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites

Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI

Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring

The people preserving the scientific practice of bird banding

Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

I’ve banned query strings

The River Otter's Remarkable Comeback

We see something that works, and then we understand it