Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#31

Post by toss1 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #6

root-parent wrote: post #3

Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility, as well as making no economic sense. Engineering and the laws of physics get on the way. Just because Scott Manley refuses to call that out, so he can do another eight videos about it, don´t stop listening to somebody with the feet on the ground: "Orbital Data Centers: Spacecraft Constraints and Economic Viability" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27197 "Ho…

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late. Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

I used to make similar arguments.

But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.

Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.

Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".

SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.

But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.

If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#32

Post by dreamcompiler » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #6

root-parent wrote: post #3

Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility, as well as making no economic sense. Engineering and the laws of physics get on the way. Just because Scott Manley refuses to call that out, so he can do another eight videos about it, don´t stop listening to somebody with the feet on the ground: "Orbital Data Centers: Spacecraft Constraints and Economic Viability" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27197 "Ho…

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late. Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter.

He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to have lost interest in EVs unless they're robotaxis.

Just recently he scammed Wall Street with a horrific overvaluation for a company whose only profits come from Starlink and whose biggest rockets blow up before they reach orbit.

Now he's talking about orbital data centers which make no sense to any engineer who understands thermodynamics (and sadly, many don't) and which are unnecessary because within the next 5 years 90% of inference will be done on local machines in users' homes because the hardware and the algorithms will be good enough to enable it and every Joe and Jane are fed up with surveillance capitalism.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#33

Post by wpm » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

NishanStepak wrote: post #2

The advantage is solar power in space. They will never stop getting sunlight.

Solar and batteries get you through the entire day right here on Earth, plus you can shit in a toilet when you need to go on site to fix or upgrade something, not in a little tube. Plus you can probably just drive there instead of needing 15,000 feet/sec delta-v to get to orbit. And you can breathe. Surely the cost of batteries and panels do not exceed the costs and logistical pain-in-the-dick going into orbit will impose.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#34

Post by throw310822 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #27

chuckadams wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but I don't see the costs getting anywhere near being worth it. You'd need a space elevator or to manufacture the sinks IN SPAA— er, in space. The latter is theoretically possible but still extremely remote, the former still requires unobtanium.

It all depends on how far you are willing to go to make your server invulnerable to a police raid.

The police will just arrest you and/ or anyone who operates the downlinks or connects to you. The server can stay in space.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#35

Post by Mountain_Skies » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

rose-knuckle17 wrote: post #16

aeternum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late. Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor? From the SpaceX S-1: "For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net." In plain terms: SpaceX's rocket division charges outside customers roughly $102 million p…

It would be interesting to see how much of Starlink's business is due to global conflicts, especially the one in Ukraine. If peace should break out, how does that impact Starlink's bottom line? I have strong doubts that rural villagers in the Amazon are a high profit customer base. In my area everyone was clamoring for Starlink to rescue us from DSL. Then fiber came and everyone lost interest in Starlink.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#36

Post by Mountain_Skies » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #32

aeternum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late. Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter. He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to hav…

On the plus side, there's enough surplus Tesla equipment that a boutique vehicle factory in Detroit is planning on using some of their cast off engine hubs to produce Kei style truck kits.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#37

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #8

aeternum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late. Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?

There's a difference between "infeasible given materials and manufacturing capabilities of the time" and "infeasible as a scalable solution due to the laws of physics"

[deleted]

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#38

Post by advisedwang » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #15

have you ever seen a detailed photo of the ISS? * https://images2.imgbox.com/64/4b/GhtUtq1m_o.jpg look at how massive the solar panels and more importantly the thermal radiators are outside compare to the size of the human habitat tubes "AI" in space would demand as much if not even more for each node

The hotter you are, the less radiators you need for the same heat dissipation. The ISS needs to run at human-comfort temperatures, but a datacenter can run much hotter than that (note the "at 60 °C" in the article). I forget the scaling parameter, but it's like T^2 or T^4 or something like that, so running hotter makes a huge difference.

Of course, that's offset by the enormous heat output of a datacenter. I'm not saying it's viable, just that you actually need to do the math instead of eyeballing the ISS radiators.

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#39

Post by advisedwang » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #10

I think everyone misses the real point - they're completely outside the jurisdiction of any government. Short of launching an ASAT and the risk of space debris, nobody will be able to shut them down.

What are they going to do in these orbiting datacenters that would be getting them shut down on earth?

Re: Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

#40

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #26

chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train-in-a-vacuum-tube isn't even restricted by the laws of physics, and it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum anyway, just low pressure. Data Centers IN SPAAAAAACE have the teensy little problem of cooling that you can't just brute-force a solution to. Those giant things dangling off the ISS that make up most of its footprint aren't solar panels, they're heatsinks, and they still have issues managing heat.

Energy radiation scales T^4 so physics is really on your side here. If you can engineer GPUs to run a little hotter you get significant decreases in radiator size required.

That will have to wait 10 years, or even a few more years, for a transition from silicon to a semiconductor with a wider bandgap.