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I guess I'd assume that the premise driving this would be that there will eventually be enough business in space that it's necessary for space-centric use, and that terrestrial use is just a fringe benefit or loss leader or something. But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed. My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
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If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t).
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
tbh this feels lot like people throwing Drake equation around. You put in whatever random numbers together and you can get any result you want.
The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
I guess I'd assume that the premise driving this would be that there will eventually be enough business in space that it's necessary for space-centric use, and that terrestrial use is just a fringe benefit or loss leader or something. But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed. My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more. It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or v…
I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.
> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even…
Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…
Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.
The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.
With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.
Space is a much harder place to run datacenters.
I realize terrestrial data centers have environmental risks, but are the risks greater for an orbital data center? I would think space debris, solar flares, or a bad actor satellite with a laser could do a lot of damage. Good luck repairing the orbital data center.