No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!
It's a matter of deploying it for cheaper or with fewer downsides than what can be done on earth. Launching things to space is expensive even with reusable rockets, and a single server blade would need a lot of accompanying tech to power it, cool it, and connect to other satellites and earth.
Right now only upsides an expensive satellite acting as a server node would be physical security and avoiding various local environmental laws and effects
Lower latency is a major one. And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it. Both are fairly limited as far as resources go, and gets exponentially expensive with competition.
The major downside is, of course, cost. In my opinion, this has never really stopped humans from building and scaling up things until the economies of scale work out.
> connect to other satellites and earth
If only there was a large number of satellites in low earth orbit and a company with expertise building these ;)
> And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it.
It's interesting that you bring that up as a benfit. If waterless cooling (i.e. closed cooling system) works in space, wouldn't it work even better on Earth?
You need to understand more of basic physics and thermodynamics. Fighting thermodynamics is a losing race by every measure of what we understand of the physical world.
From what I understand, very, very large radiators every few racks. Almost as much solar panels every few racks. Radiation shielding to avoid transient errors or damage to the hardware. Then some form of propulsion for orbital corrections, I suppose. Then hauling all of this stuff to space (on a high orbit, otherwise they'd be in shade at night), where no maintenance whatsoever is possible. Then watching your hardware progressively fail and/or become obsolete every few years and having to rebuild everything from scratch again.
The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.
There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.
Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
SpaceX is heavily subsidized and has extremely lucrative contracts with the US government. Not to mention they get to rely on the public research NASA produces.
He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
Not to be crass, but as much as I dislike Musk US taxpayers are not responsible for the lives of children half a world away. Why is the US the only country held to this standard? No one ever complains that Turkey is killing thousands of children by not funding healthcare initiatives in Africa.
It is our money and we're not obligated to give it away if we think it's needed for something else. I'd note though, that in terms of the budget, USAID was like change in the couch cushions and nothing else in the world was even close in terms of lives saved per dollar. Why the man tasked with saving the government trillions of dollars went there at all was nonsensical to begin with.
Nevertheless, it is fully within our rights to pull back aid if we (collectively) decide it's best thing to do. But the only legal way to do that is through the democratic process. Elected can legislators take up the issue, have their debates, and vote.
If congress had canceled these programs through the democratic process, there almost certainly would've been a gradual draw down. Notice and time would be given for other organizations to step in and provide continuity where they could.
And since our aid programs had been so reliable and trusted, in many cases they became a logistics backbone for all sorts of other aid programs and charities. Shutting it all down so abruptly caused widespread disruption far beyond own aid programs. Food rotting in warehouses as people starved. Medications sitting in warehouses while people who needed them urgently died. The absolute waste of life and resources caused by the sudden disruption of the aid is a true atrocity.
Neither Elon or Trump had legal authority to unilaterally destroy those programs outside of the democratic process the way they did, so they are most directly morally responsible for the resulting death.
To add insult-to-injury, Elon was all over twitter justifying all of it with utterly deranged, insane conspiracy theories. He was either lying cynically or is so far gone mentally that he believed them. I'm not sure which is worse.
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.