I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it’s doing.
The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can’t confiscate it and therefore you can’t control it. Hell once it’s up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).
It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.
Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it’s a multi-decade operation and doesn’t look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody’s excited to talk about.
It’s going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you’ll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don’t see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don’t have all the facts.
I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!
Space ain’t happening.
I can see the point of underwater datacenters though, for some very specific use cases. Compute heavy workloads with high energy densities could possibly make sense to ”free cool” below water. DLC everything and pump the heat straight into the ocean.
and cooling needed in space.
Turns out you can’t cool something just by putting it in space because most heat transfers require convection, which requires a medium, say, air… which is notably lacking in space.
Yeah, heat dissipation is surprisingly difficult in space, because the only real way to do it is via radiation. And radiation is one of the least effective methods of dissipating heat.
The vast majority of heat transfer on earth happens via physical contact, in the form of fluids or solids touching each other. That’s what a heat sink is for. It increases surface area, so more fluid (air) can touch it and carry heat away. But without some sort of fluid contact, a heat sink isn’t going to help much. It’ll act as a radiator, but the cooling efficiency will only be a fraction of what is achieved via traditional forced air cooling.
The real issue with space-based data centers isn’t just whether they’re a “bad idea” from an engineering perspective; it’s that they represent the ultimate transition toward a vertically integrated, unregulated monopoly. While everyone is focused on the technical hurdles, we need to look at who actually benefits from this shift. For someone like Elon Musk, this isn’t just a project—it’s a way to own the entire global internet stack. Because he owns the “truck” (SpaceX) and the “road” (Starlink), he can launch and link these data centers essentially for free. This creates a market that is so tightly locked into one ecosystem that it can never be challenged by a terrestrial competitor.
From a purely operational standpoint, space turns every earthly liability into a superpower. Data centers on the ground are a nightmare of land taxes, massive water consumption for cooling, and constant strain on local power grids. In orbit, those costs vanish. Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free, and solar power is available 24/7 without weather or night cycles getting in the way. Even the physical security is inherently top-notch because the hardware is literally unreachable. When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely. The user just needs an antenna, and the “gatekeeper” handles everything else in the sky.
The terrifying downside is that this creates a jurisdictional black hole. If a server is orbiting 500km above the Earth, whose laws actually apply to the data stored on it? We’re talking about a “gated community” where the ownership, pricing, surveillance policies, and privacy standards are all controlled by a single entity with zero competition or government oversight.
Once we stop building ground infrastructure and rely solely on the “space cloud,” we lose all leverage. It’s an engineering miracle for the person who owns it, but it’s a democratic nightmare for the rest of us. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s the construction of a digital kingdom that sits physically and legally beyond our reach.
Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free,
Is it though?
Thoughts?
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I’m under the assumption that radiating heat in vacuum is NOT easy. Normally, heat escapes from sources into the surrounding atmosphere, whereas in space, only radiant heat (IR?) can bleed off into vacuum. The conductive heat from, say, a cycling loop of water still needs a radiator that vents into surrounding volume. Without atmosphere, radiators can’t conduct efficiently, right?
Please set me straight if possible.
I’m no expert, but this is my understanding as well.
These are my thoughts https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
Your thoughts were really well written. I’m glad you took the time to explain your viewpoints organically instead of taking an easy way out to avoid having to do it yourself.
How about this for what my post was trying to say…
It’s a good idea to the person who can pull it off. It will be highly profitable and they will monopolize that ecosystem. For the rest of us, if this were ever to become adopted wide spread, it has the potential to make something that normal people can no longer compete with and can’t easily avoid (assuming it is significantly subsidized initially to offset cost and get users to adopt it)
I’m no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn’t necessarily want to contend with.
While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it’s not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They’re harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.
I’m not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.
LOL don’t worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.
But the dads that never loved them are dying, this is their last chance to try to earn that love by recreating the sci fi fever dreams of the 1950s.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.
It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
Interesting. So the “post-truth era” isn’t just for the masses, but the rich as well, as they cannibalise each other.
Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn’t it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?
Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.
If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.
People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s a fantasy in billionaire’s heads, a self-perpetuating meme, and no one is telling them no. So they’re going to fund it, whether it makes any sense or not.
Reality doesn’t really matter anymore.
I wish them the same success that the metaverse once had.
By the time you launched and assembled one in orbit their hardware would already be outdated. Sounds like a great plan!
They’re a great idea if you happen to own a company making AI, a company making rockets, and a company controlling public opinion.
I envision a future so shitty that people are willing to physically destroy data centers in self-defense. Putting them in space is a really good way to combat that.
Keep people from destroying data centers by having them destroy themselves? Is this some sort of zen koan?
Putting them in space also puts them technically outside of the legal jurisdiction of any country. I figure fElon probably assumes that means said servers can never be subpoenaed.
Little Space James
I mean a data center barge or one in Antarctica would do much the same and be wildly cheaper and (relatively) more practical.
But those aren’t as “cool”
Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?
Oh yeah it’s totally a bullshit argument, it wouldn’t hold water in any court. Hell if nothing else, the ground stations like you said, or the country whose airspace the center exists over, would be in jurisdiction.
But I do believe that Musk believes it’s a get out of jail free card.
Agreed. The US can access/subpoena any data it wants from US companies, even if the servers they host the data on are in Europe or Asia or…
It doesn’t matter where the servers and the data is located. It matters who posses (or controls the access) to it.
Putting data centers in space is a good way to keep people from destroying them. Thermodynamics on the other hand, will have a field day with them.
Have to destroy the rockets that are used to maintain them then and just wait.
They aren’t maintained. They’re a constellation of small satellites in LEO like starlink that just go up and eventually come down.
If they’re too far up latency would be too high
No one is repairing any of these starlink type dishes.
Wasn’t it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.
Pastry in spaaace! Still, eventually they will stop working.
S o l a r. F l a r e
Also the whole being a vacuum thing makes heat dissipation much more difficult.
And an excellent way to scam a little. And fleece the flock
That’s an insightful way of putting it, 10 points.
It’s as stupid as solar roadways, a solution nobody asked for and we also already have way better solutions.
I mean why.
Solar roadways are the future! Driving on solar panels is the only way forward. Until all our roads are solar we will never be free people.
My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world’s largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
We already have data centers in space.
Oh? Good. Problem solved then.
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
From that to a space elevator…
Have you never seen a movie set in space? Evrytime someone gets sucked into space they freeze. You saying every movie got it wrong?? Space is cold. Duh.
Please tell me you aren’t serious.
They are completely cereal!
dude! how do you expect anyone to answer if you don’t say surely you can’t be?
I am serious, and don’t call me dude!
Dude stop
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
A radiator. Next question?
What’s going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?
Obnoxious as he seems to be, he’s actually right, there will be no convection, but they’d radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.
You’d need an enormous radiator to move the heat a data center puts out. Not even all the billionaires put together could afford that.
To do that they’d have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It’s not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
What part of radiator don’t you understand?
What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.
It’s conserved.
Tell me you don’t know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?
Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.
Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.
Radiators dissipate heat through…wait for it…
Radiation.Right… and a carpet is a pet you keep in your car, got it.
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With radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI&t=12m57s
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
I’ll just note that I am not a fan of putting internet infrastructure in space. I think polluting the upper atmosphere with a bunch of metals every time a satellite deorbits will certainly have negative consequences. So IMO space should be limited to things we can’t do with earthbound infrastructure.
Have you seen the size of the radiators on the ISS ? And that’s just what’s needed for cooling of body heat for 9 people and basic computer and support equipment.
A data center that is actively pumping out massive amounts of heat would need humongous radiator panels.
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don’t want them radiating onto each other.
And those radiator panels are heavy and big, therefore enormously expensive to launch, and vulnerable to micro meteorites and other orbital debris.
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn’t matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.
They’re called fins. Not panels.
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Yeah the amount of heat a data center vs a satellite your going to super heat the space in that orbit over time. It they are geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.
Um, it doesn’t make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.
The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn’t be any better in any other orbit.
Radiators in space work by radiating electromagnetic energy(light). Heat can only accumulate in matter, not in space, so that is definitely not one of the things we need to worry about.
geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Geostationary would leave the satellite in shadow anytime it was night time over the part of the earth since a geostationary orbit is stationary in the sky over a given point at the equator.
That doesn’t solve any of the cooling problems just saying that you do get some shadow at geostationary orbits.
There are other orbits that get less shadow though.
I was under the impressions cpu’s were very sensitive to radiation. If we could mine and manufacture in space I could see this maybe.
It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).
They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they’ve figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.
Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.
They’re shielded by being in a very low orbit. I don’t think that would work for a data center.
Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don’t see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don’t wring out any subudies or soemthing.
I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.
They aren’t these massive things. They’re going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW
Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x’d the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that’s still tiny. It’s the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.
ugh so we are talking massive constellations. That is so much worse.
Ya its going to be massive, I imagine larger than starlink if these dreams come true.
I said so long ago. Flying masses of stuff into orbit, keeping it alive in a relative high radiation environment, cooling issues (there is no local river you can conveniently turn into steam), the list is long. Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it.
Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it
For the power required “large” is actually a gargantuan understatement. It would need to be larger than what would be easily seen from the planet surface.
Elon is a complete moron.
Plus when you build a datacenter on Earth you can use it for decades. You can swap out small parts (like the servers and networking hardware), which keeps it useful. Cooling and power setups are often good for a very long time and those can also be upgraded if needed. The building itself and all of the supporting infrastructure is good for at least 50 years. And a lot of the building is dedicated to easy access for humans to do stuff like maintenance. This is a design requirement for any datacenter.
When shooting shit into space, that’s it, you can’t access it for upgrades or maintenance. And we’ve seen these past years cutting edge AI hardware is good for maybe 3 years at best. After that it’s basically worthless, maybe useful for some niche uses, but mostly useless and definitely not profitable. Not that this matters much, as to keep latency down the orbits would be so low they deorbit within 3-5 years anyways, like with the current Starlink constellation.
But this is of course very useful for a cheap launch provider, as it keeps them yeeting shit into space non-stop. And what a surprise, Elon Musk is one of the people pushing this concept hard. No alternate motives there for sure.
but mostly useless and definitely not profitable
The main reason for this unprofitability is, quite frankly, energy costs. Wouldn’t be much of an issue in space where your energy is free.
No such thing as a free lunch tho. It’s like saying solar energy on Earth is free, it’s obviously not. Sure, once the panels are produced and installed, the running costs are minimal. But that doesn’t mean that energy is now suddenly free. When I did the calculation on my solar installation, I took the costs of buying the panels, installing them, maintaining them and in the end tearing them down and properly recycling them. Then we calculated the estimated total energy produced during the lifetime of the system and thus arrived at a cost per unit of energy. Then we can compare that to what the cost would be as compared to other energy sources. At the time it didn’t make financial sense, as over the lifetime other energy sources (which might have been solar as well, just out of large scale installations) would be cheaper. But some government subsidies, plus a feeling the cost of energy in the future is unsure and wanting to contribute to sustainable energy production made me pay for them anyways.
It’s the exact same with launching a datacenter into space. Once it’s up there the energy might not cost anything and running costs per satellite might be relatively low (although there still are running costs for sure, often just spread out over the entire constellation), but that doesn’t mean the thing is free. Investers would want to see a return. So that means a lot of the costs are upfront, developing the system, paying the launch provider, getting the right licenses, etc, etc. Then during the lifetime of the system, it needs to sell the compute in order to make a profit. When directly competing with newer ground based systems that run cutting edge technology, it doesn’t really matter where or how the compute is done. It’s simply a unit of work being sold at market rate. Newer technology will push the price per unit down, as the new tech is more efficient. And it might make your compute less attractive as it’s lacking in newer capabilities, so it can only be sold at a lower price.
So even if the system would be designed for a lifespan of 10 years and put into an orbit that can last 10 years, the compute would be very hard to be sold for any reasonable price after 5 years. And as mentioned, operating a satellite is far from free, there are many running costs associated.
There was one study where they set the price of launching at 0 and it’s still a lot more expensive to use data centers in space.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this is because space is an absolutely terrible place to put computers. Getting power is actually the easiest problem to solve, and is still really hard, because building any kind of infrastructure in space is hard. Then you’ve got all that radiation you have to shield against because you’re no longer protected by the Earth’s atmosphere, and worst of all you’ve got the cooling problem because Jesus fucking Christ, space is not cold!
This is why I get annoyed every time a scifi movie shows people freezing to death in space. Because it leads to this level of mass delusion and then suddenly it matters and everyone just unquestioningly believes the lie that space is cold. Space is a vacuum. A vacuum is what your Contigo travel mug uses to keep your coffee scalding hot after four hours. If vacuums are that good at keeping something hot when it naturally wants to get colder, think about what they’ll do to something that is actively generating heat. All of your components are going to cook.
There are proposals to put data centres at the bottom of the ocean that are substantially more credible than this idiocy.
I’m always annoyed that people don’t get that space isn’t cold or hot, since heat is a property of matter, and that’s exactly what a vacuum doesn’t have. Your travel mug example is great. I’m going to start using it.
That’s because science literacy is pretty low.
And to be fair, the average person doesn’t need to understand vacuum thermodynamics. The issues is when a few of those “average people” are now billionaires making unilateral decisions, surrounded by yes men and feeds instead of experts informing them of reality.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but with the shielding they have on the ISS doesn’t it have issues that consumer grade computers they use last a few months due to various radiation and heat that they die? So an AI data center is going to be insane to protect long enough to make its components useful.
Yep. Radiation is deadly to computers, and without the atmosphere to protect you there is a LOT of radiation in space.
Maybe we should put datacenters on Mars, to warm it up.
I’d rather on the moon. It’ll melt all the cheese and there’ll be fondue lakes!
Whatever you do, don’t put it on Jupiter! It’ll get more stupider!
What if we put it on Uranus though?
There should be a reductio ad uranum for talks about space, similar to the reductio ad hitlerum for political discussions.
I don’t know if it would work but… Could an infrared laser expel enough heat?
You need to think about how an infrared laser works. You’re taking electricity, converting it into light and then focusing the light.
So you’d need to take the heat from your GPUs, inefficiently convert it into electricity (a lot of it would remain as heat), then inefficiently convert electricity into light (much of the electricity would turn back into heat in this process) and then focus the light away from the space data centre.
Now, we already have a process for moving heat away from things as infrared light, without going through all those steps (which would just reduce the efficiency of the process). It’s called a radiator, and it’s how we cool things in space. That’s literally where the name comes from; they radiate heat away as infrared light. That’s why hot things glow in thermal cameras.
It is incredibly inefficient. Radiation (ie, infrared light) is, by far, the worst way of cooling things. But in space its the only option you have, because there’s no convection or conduction across vacuum.
A top end GPU puts out about 1,000 watts of waste heat. The entire International Space Station has enough cooling for 14 of those, if it was doing nothing else whatsoever. An average server rack contains 72. The ISS cost $100 billion dollars. So at a minimum you’re looking at around $500 billion to put one single server rack in space. And that’s before accounting for the heat from the sun, which we can’t avoid because we need solar power to run this thing. So probably closer to a trillion. In other words, twice the already ludicrous price tag of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project. For a single server rack.
But in space its the only option you have
Hmm, this has me thinking about the stealth ships in The Expanse. The engineering needed to make it work makes me want to cry, but in principle you could run a Peltier cooler with a swappable heat sink.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a viable option, but it’s interesting to think about.
Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you’re not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.
You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it’s safe to do so.
(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)
You could cool them through radiative panels but you would need quite big panels to radiate away the heat a data center produces.
The entire ISS has 14GW of cooling (and a lot of that just goes towards keeping the sun from cooking it). A single server rack can produce around 72GW of heat.
The ISS cost about $100 billion.
Basically, if you took the entire budget of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project (money that, to be clear, he does not have and will not get) and put it into space data centres you might, optimistically, put one rack in space.
Most data centres have dozens to hundreds.
You’re absolutely correct, but “quite big” might be the single biggest understatement I’ve seen in my life.
The thing is spacex’s whole falcon 9 architecture needs something to do. They very quickly cleared the backlog of satellites waiting to launch and now they’re waiting for space start ups to materialize and want to launch things into space. The majority of falcon 9 launches now only launch starlink. It’ll get even worse if they can make starship work, they’ll have a huge capacity with nothing to put in it. Ai data centers in space are an attempt at justifying the entire concept of starship or at the very least employ the falcon 9 team.
This and spacex going public tell me the return on investment of a space based internet provider maybe isn’t profitable enough to fund a rocket development program. Their big cash cow, being the ISS taxi, is winding down and now they’re looking for suckers with money.
If starship works (huge if) the markets it can open will be very different than the markets Falcon9 opened.
Something will need to develop around the new capabilities to use beyond their own use for starlink, but its going to be much easier for companies to come up with uses for it.
They make most of their money off starlink now, not ISS.
Something will need to develop around the new capabilities
Send Musk to Mars.
