7 comments

• Richard M

  December 11, 2025 at 1:07 pm

  Thank you for the clarification — I wasn’t sure if the inability to load the site was a problem on my end!

  I will reiterate what I posted on the first post: Eric Berger says his sources say this is for real, as something Elon is actually pursuing; see his new article on Ars Technica today for Elon’s rationales. But more to the point, Elon himself reacted to Eric’s comment: “As usual, Eric is accurate.”

  https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1998900795207725073

  So, we have it from the horse’s mouth.

  But we will have to see just how this unfolds. Elon might change his mind.
• Richard M

  December 11, 2025 at 1:09 pm

  Tom Mueller, SpaceX employee #1 and now CEO of Impulse Space, made an interesting comment on Eric’s X thread as well:

  “Here’s how this helps the Mars program. Colonizing Mars will require hundreds of Starships, and they can only fly for a few weeks out of every 26 months (assuming an efficient Hohmann transfer). What do you do with the hundreds of Starships the other 25 months of the Mars cycle? Fly data centers to space, paid for by investors.”

  https://x.com/lrocket/status/1998986839852724327
• Dick Eagleson

  December 11, 2025 at 2:08 pm

  Richard M,

  I always figured Elon would be doing non-trivial things on the Moon for exactly the reason Tom Mueller suggests. The basis for such activity has simply been particularized in sharp focus now by Musk’s recent remarks about the Moon and AI data centers in space, plus his confirmation of the IPO plans.

  It also provides a definitive answer to the long-time supposed “gotcha” question so often posed by folks like Robert Oler, namely “What is there to do on the Moon that is worth what it would cost to go there?” Asked, and now answered.

  The rest of this comment is a copy of one that I left on a Dec. 6 post about SpaceX IPO rumors earlier today before the restoration of yesterday’s posts:

  Robert Zimmerman & Jay,

  Eric Berger has joined the SpaceX IPO chorus on Ars Technica and Elon has tweeted that his reporting is “accurate.” So it seems we were all wrong. SpaceX is going to do an IPO next year.

  Why?

  I’ve been giving this some thought.

  Starlink has raised SpaceX’s annual revenue to a projected $15.5 billion for 2025 with several billion of that representing net profit. For 2026, revenue should handily exceed $20 billion with perhaps 10 of those billions as net profit. So what could be the impetus to raise $25 – $30+ billion in the next six months if that amount in profit should be in-hand within the next three years anyway?

  The answer appears to be AI. It is known that Musk thinks the future of AI must not be left in the hands of people like Sam Altman and Larry Page. The only way to insure that doesn’t happen is for Musk and his companies to be the dominant AI players. I find this rationale quite convincing.

  Toward this end, xAI and Tesla are both building out as much terrestrial AI data center infrastructure as they can. But there are sizable obstacles on this path. Siting hassles and energy supply are the most consequential of these. And these obstacles are faced by all major AI players, not just the Musk-iverse.

  These considerations have driven increasing discussion, and a few start-up efforts, aimed at siting the needed AI data center capacity in space rather than on the ground. Among other things, it was the motivation behind Sam Altman’s recent unsuccessful attempt to buy Stoke Space.

  Elon and his SpaceX, xAI and Tesla folks have apparently been busily formulating scenarios and running numbers for awhile and the conclusion seems to be that there is a way for the Musk-iverse companies to secure and extend the lead they already have over AI competitors by upping the ante still further and not only basing giant AI data centers in space, but actually doing most of the fabrication required on the Moon using lunar-sourced materials.

  This sort of thing, especially at the required scale, needless to say, cannot be whistled up overnight. While a massive effort to industrialize the Moon is being ginned up, SpaceX has come up with an interim path forward involving use of modified versions of its Starlink birds as nodes in a distributed space-based AI data center that can begin deployment quite soon in the form of a piggy-back on additional Starlink build-out that was always going to happen anyway.

  To meet the schedule required for all efforts, it seems, a fairly prompt infusion of at least $25 billion is needed sooner than it can be accumulated via Starlink-driven SpaceX profits. Thus, the IPO, even with all of the known downstream downsides, is now deemed worth pursuing because it gets the Musk-iverse AI efforts into an even more commanding position faster than would waiting for a comparable accumulation of profits from extant operations at their projected growth rates.

  The projected timing of the IPO – mid-2026 – is likely based on a desire to demonstrate that Starship has reached at least an initial state of operational readiness by that time, making SpaceX’s stock more desirable than it would be at present. That allows more money to be raised by selling fewer shares to the general public.

  Raising, say, $30 billion in an IPO that would value SpaceX at a total of $1.5 trillion implies selling just 2% of company-owned outstanding shares. Given how much appreciation their shares have already seen over the years and the huge bump in value that will be occasioned by the IPO, I foresee little or no prospect of major prompt share sales by long-time SpaceX investors.

  So SpaceX will be public, but with very little of its total value in public hands, rendering moot many of the more common forms of public company downside. A hostile takeover would be impossible and even the inveterate Musk-hating shorts would find very limited leverage.

  For SpaceX, the challenge of relatively quickly bootstrapping up a sizable industrial infrastructure on the Moon – from absolute scratch – means, at the very least – the following:

  1) Everything Moon-related anent Starship will be pursued even more aggressively than it already has been even in the wake of all of the recent argy-bargy, in Congress and elsewhere, about Starship anent Artemis and the recent test stand failure of Super Heavy B18.

  2) On-orbit refilling will be a thing ASAP in 2026 as will deployment of the first Starlink V3s with the AI data center payloads. Both might well happen before the IPO as that would boost the yield from same still more.

  3) There will definitely be Earth-to-lunar-orbit-and-back Starships in both crew and cargo variants developed. The first of these could well be ready to sub in for SLS-Orion on Artemis 3.

  4) The scale of what SpaceX and the rest of the Musk-iverse intend to do on the Moon will dwarf the Artemis program, as currently envisioned, into comparative insignificance. If the Musk-iverse lunar efforts can be compared to WW2, then Artemis is roughly comparable, on that scale, to a gang rumble in Chicago. The notional lunar efforts of the PRC will, on this scale, be comparable to a street mugging.

  5) Given that Musk is already pretty much a half-trillionaire, with his net worth actually having briefly exceeded that amount on three separate occasions in recent weeks and continuing to be just below that level, this IPO should instantly catapult him over and past the trillionaire mark on his way to being the species’s first deci-trillionaire sometime in the 2030s.

  It would be better if SpaceX didn’t have to go public, but tempus fugit and Elon – based on hard experience with Tesla – is going to arrange the SpaceX IPO so that as much as possible of the public company downsides do not descend upon SpaceX. I don’t think he would be planning to do this unless he thought it would provide him with advantages, overall – including accomplishing the Musk-iverse’s AI ambitions significantly sooner – that far eclipse the inevitable downsides.

  If we think we’ve been living in interesting times to this point, I think we ain’t seen nothing yet.
• Rob Crawford

  December 11, 2025 at 2:59 pm

  Will “AI” be useful when every query gets a 2.6 second lag at minimum?
• Dick Eagleson

  December 11, 2025 at 7:04 pm

  Rob Crawford,

  To the extent an AI architecture features direct user interface with the giant data center running the large language model, then that architecture is unsuitable for use on space-based data centers located any further away from Earth than LEO.

  But many AI architectures split the learning function from the application inference function. The latter runs on relatively modest local hardware executing against a model that is the result of the learning done with vast amounts of input data and the giant data center, but which does not necessarily require connection to it in real-time to do its thing. An example would be Telsa’s Full Self-Driving and the equivalent downloads that run on its Optimus robots. Both Tesla vehicles and Optimus robots also capture lots of camera data to inform future rounds of learning at the massive data centers, but this can be stored and forwarded. It doesn’t have to be transmitted in real-time.
• Jeff Wright

  December 12, 2025 at 1:14 pm

  I thought you might get a kick out of this:
  https://x.com/NASAWatch/status/1999213910772351437

  The negativism persists
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09643
• Dick Eagleson

  December 12, 2025 at 8:35 pm

  Jeff Wright,

  NDGT: “I’m not a real scientist, I just play one on TV.”