[n_u]

A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging:

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.

I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...

But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.

[bgnn]

The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.

[dubeye]

both can be true, he can excel at 'narrative' and also deliver me my Tesla and my starlink, it's not either or

[rob74]

Ok, he delivered your Tesla and your Starlink, but so far he has hasn't delivered your Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...

[burnerRhodov2]

>Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...

Lets go through this one by one

[1]Robotaxi. Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.

[2] Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.

[3] Lunar Lander Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.

[4]Space Datacenter Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?

Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.

[SurRea1]

Eventually comes through? Have you forgotten Hyperloop, new roadster, instant battery swaps, tunnels to replace all traffic, your car appreciating in value, your car being used as a robotaxi during downtime to make you money, semi convoys, etc etc?

[indoordin0saur]

They don't come through on every thing but they come through on innovative more than any other groups of companies I can think of. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink... you really don't think they've delivered incredible products on these things already?

Also, hyperloop wasn't something he really stuck with.

[burnerRhodov2]

hyperloop got open sourced. He spawned and gave engineering support for a wide variety of companies, i think richard branson started one too/ provided a bunch of funding. He saw the biggest problem as the tunnel boring, so he focused on that and thought the other companies would figure it out. One of the OG's from SpaceX now runs boring company and they are on v5-6 of the tunnel boring machine?

He makes big prenouncements, but once he gets in the engineering details... they cease to make sense. Tesla in tunnels makes more sense because they can be end to end. Instead of a hypoerloop, you can drive a cybertruck fast AF down a tunnel. (Again, tunnel boring is the bottleneck here.)

New roadster is on like revision 20+. They had 4 roadsters in 2018, each different from the last. Last i've heard on this, the roadster is going "to fly".I think what he means by this is they are going to add krypton, or some sort of thruster to the car. They don't want to launch the roadster to compete with the cyber truck.

Instant battery swaps were for rigidity purposes. If you cast the battery directly into the car, the battery becomes part of the frame, resulting in a much smoother ride. They did have a couple prototypes of Battery swaps, but they decided not to pursue it and instead focus on improving the megachargers.

Tunnels to replace all traffic was discussed above a bit, but he did do the vegas loop and is doing it for waaaaayyyyyyy less than any other underground system. Something like $42m for the whole vegas loop. I think the boring company has like 5-6 ongoing projects around the US. Did you expect him to do it over night? They custom built a boring machine, like 6 times over and are doing projects all over the US.

your car appreciating in value... I mean, they actually kinda did... If you had an early enough reservation on the model 3, you could make a big flip. Thats why they put a clause in for the cybertruck where you couldn't flip. Also, renting it out on E-turo was very profitable for the longest time. All jokes aside, cause i know that's not what you're talking about... Yeah, that's a bold face lie from elons part. Because latest models only are going to run on AI6 chip.

Semi Convoys are an awesome idea and could totally work. I mean... like i said, AI self driving is pretty good. Especially on freeways. Streets, not 100% solved, but i literally never have to disengage on the freeway. They just built an entire dedicated manufacturing facility that started commisioning this month for the Semi. You will see this alot more often. Obviously they'll still have human drivers, but i'm sure they can write some software to make this possible and provide some "draft effect" for the semis.

[youarentrightjr]

> [1]Robotaxi. Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot.

Where's the source for this?

[indoordin0saur]

https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-itself-...

[msie]

Your note on Optimus does a lot of heavy lifting. He hasn’t sold one yet.

[dubeye]

You don't have to win them all.

[kimixa]

He does (or at least a good proportion) if you want to use as precedent for delivering on these promises, though. Especially for the larger more extreme statements and not just buying himself into an existing business.

[dubeye]

Why does he?

that's an arbitrary standard set by you.

His investors are quite happy with his success rate. He is constantly building new stuff. And as a consumer who has had great experience with every product I've bought, so am I

[andruby]

exactly. This smells like a way to boost the SpaceX IPO to meme-stock premiums

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean, personally I'd probably have invested in SpaceX but it's a hard no with xAI attached.

I'm probably an outlier though.

[UltraSane]

That seems to be exactly what the goal is.

[dartharva]

What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?

[UltraSane]

Rich people use stock as collateral for loans.

[thefounder]

I think you can get loans in the stock. That’s how “most people” live(and die)

[jstummbillig]

I don't understand the claim. SpaceX is literally delivering? And I don't think there is any delusion about that being optional.

[theshrike79]

[flagged]

[blockmarker]

Yeah yeah, the person you dislike is stupid and the success of his multiple companies is just luck and everybody else does the work.

[UltraSane]

The product Elon has been most directly involved in is the Cybertruck which is a complete disaster. When talking about Elon you have to specify pre drug addict Elon and ketamine fried brain Elon. The latter makes very bad decisions.

[theshrike79]

I’m not the source of this information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719

[davidguetta]

[flagged]

[theshrike79]

Source: this HN comment from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719

[tomhow]

Please stop posting these throwaway, sneering replies, no matter how bad the comment you're replying to. Just downvote it, and if you must comment, do so substantively.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[adammarples]

The wild claim is that they will deliver data centres in space

[mortarion]

Yeah, delivering using Falcon 9.

The Starship stack? Not so much. It's plagued, and will continue to be plagued, by endless problems. BO will beat them with NG.

[taurath]

We don’t even have a habitable structure in space when the ISS falls, there is no world in which space datacenters are a thing in the next 10, I’d argue even 30 years. People really need to ground themselves in reality.

Edit: okay Tiangong - but that is not a data center.

[nickff]

Who is “we”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

[taurath]

Good point. Still a long, long way from data centers.

[whamlastxmas]

We have 15,000 satellites in orbit that are almost literally the exact same premise currently being proposed - a computer with solar panels attached. We've being doing exactly this for decades.

[tzs]

I don't think any of the companies that say they are working on space data centers intend them to be habitable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We don’t even have a habitable structure in space

Silicon is way more forgiving than biology. This isn’t an argument for this proposal. But there is no technical connection between humans in space and data centers other than launch-cost synergies.

[fluoridation]

Okay, but a human being represents what, 200 W of power? The ISS has a crew of 3, so that's less than a beefy single user AI workstation at full tilt. If the question is whether it's practical to put 1-2 kW worth of computing power in orbit, the answer is obviously yes, but somehow I don't think that's what's meant by "datacenter in space".

[IX-103]

I don't know, 10 years seems reasonable for development. There's not that much new technology that needs to be developed. Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs. Other systems may be able to be lifted wholesale with minimal integration. I think if there were obstacles to building data centers on the ground then we might see them in orbit within the next ten years.

I don't see those obstacles appearing though.

[doctorwho42]

The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years.

We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.

Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?

Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.

[throwup238]

> A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station.

The ISS is powered by eight Solar Array Wings. Each wing weighs about 1,050kg. The station also has two radiator wings with three radiator orbital replacement units weighing about 1,100kg each. That's about 15,000 kg total so if the ISS can power three racks, that's 5,000kg of payload per rack not including the rack or any other support structure, shielding, heat distribution like heat pipes, and so on.

Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload, that's 12 racks launched for about $100 million. That's basically tripling or quadrupling (at least) the cost of each rack, assuming that's the only extra cost and there's zero maintenance.

[hvb2]

Falcon Heavy does not cost 100M when launching 60 metric tons.

At 60 metric tons, you're expending all cores and only getting to LEO. These probably shouldn't be in LEO because they don't need to be and you probably don't want to be expending cores for these launches if you care about cost.

The real problem typically isn't weight, it's volume. Can you fit all of that in that fairing? It's onli 13m long by 5m diameter...

[throwup238]

Good point on the fairing volume. All of the solar array wings were launched from the shuttle.

I was being charitable on the back of the napkin math.

[jpfromlondon]

> Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload

Casually six times more than it has ever lifted.

[rlt]

His time estimates are notoriously, um, aggressive. But I think that's part of how his companies are able to accomplish so much. And they do, even if you're upset they haven't put a human on Mars fast enough or built one of his side quests.

"We specialize in making the impossible merely late"

[acdha]

I note that their accomplishments tend to be in the past, prior to his Twitter addiction absorbing his attention. Tesla is a solid decade late on FSD, cutting models, and losing market share rapidly thanks to his influencer stunts. SpaceX has a solid government launch business, which is great, but they’ve been struggling with what’s been the next big thing for a while and none of that talk about Mars has made meaningful progress. Boring Company, Neurolink, etc. show no signs of profit anytime soon no matter how cool they sound.

Being ambitious is good to an extent but you need to be able to deliver to keep a company healthy. Right now, if you’re a sharp engineer you are looking at Tesla’s competition if you want to work on a project which doesn’t get cancelled (like it’s cars) and the stock price being hyped to the moon means that options aren’t going to be as competitive.

[rlt]

I agree he leans into the hype aggressively, and spends too much time on Twitter, but they are making progress regardless.

Starlink is growing rapidly.

Starship has been making steady progress.

Neuralink is helping ~12 real people with spinal cord injuries/ALs.

Optimus seems to be making progress.

Tesla is beginning to roll out robotaxis without safety drivers.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs.

"Minor" cooling changes, for a radically different operating environment that does not even have a temperature, is a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and will actively heat things up via incoming radiation? "Minor" ? Citation very much lacking.

[DoctorOetker]

Take the area of solar panels, multiply by 3, thats the area of black body thermal radiation surface. The sattelite will chillax to 27 deg C (300 K):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862869

[SideburnsOfDoom]

And is that "Minor" ? Is that actually practical on a reasonable budget? Aren't there better uses for the solar panels etc?

[DoctorOetker]

if you focus on shedding heat and make it sound like an impossibility, don't be surprised when people describe what it would take.

[rlt]

We also don't have fully reusable launch vehicles, yet. But we will shortly. That will decrease the cost of launch by at least an order of magnitude.

Still there will be a lot of engineering problems to solve.

2-3 years seems very short, but 10 years seems long to me.

[TheBlight]

Ok then short SpaceX stock when it IPOs.

[int0x29]

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes

[taurath]

What does stock price have to do with anything?

That someone could put a data center in space for the price of 100 years of eliminating world hunger doesn’t mean shit.

[satvikpendem]

People always make this claim about world hunger elimination with no sources. Keep in mind we make more than enough calories to feed everyone on the planet many times over, it's a problem of distribution, of getting the food to the right areas and continuing cultivation for self sufficiency.

[taurath]

That’s right, it’s an allocation of resources problem, and some people seem to control almost all the resources.

[satvikpendem]

Even the most magnanimous allocators cannot defeat the realities of boots on the ground in terms of distribution. It is a very difficult problem that cannot be solved top down, the only solution we've seen is growth of economic activity via capitalistic means, lifting millions, billions out of poverty as Asia has done in the last century for example.

[CamperBob2]

If you're hellbent on arguing with a cult, it will be much cheaper to go down to your local Church of Scientology and try to convince them that their e-meter doesn't work.

[Sohcahtoa82]

As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches.

For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.

[techblueberry]

Why would you short the stock?

[999900000999]

It's much easier to find a country or jurisdiction that doesn't care about a bunch of data centers vs launching them into space.

I don't get why we aren't building mixed use buildings, maybe the first floor can be retail and restaurants, the next two floors can be data centers, and then above that apartments.

[TrackerFF]

I think data centers, in the areas where they are most relevant (cold climates), are going to face an uphill battle in the near future.

Where I live, Norway, we've seen that:

1) The data centers don't generate the numbers of jobs they promise. Sure, during building phase, they do generate a lot of business, but during operations and maintenance phase, not so much. Typically these companies will promise hundreds of long-term jobs, while in reality that number is only a fraction.

2) They are extremely power hungry, to the point where households can expect to see their utility bill go up a non-trivial amount. That's for a single data center. In the colder climate areas where data centers are being promoted, power infrastructure might not be able to handle the centers (something seen in northern Norway, for example) at a larger scale, due to decades of stagnation.

3) The environmental effects have come more under scrutiny. And, unfortunately for the companies owning data centers, pretty much all cold-climate western countries have stringent environmental laws.

[kuon]

In Switzerland infomaniak built a data center under apartments and DC heat is used for heating. There are some videos about it.

[999900000999]

Americans have trouble understanding something like that. We believe anything short of a 3bdrm house with a lawn and backyard is communism.

I'd love to live in a dense city. My office within waking distance. A Cafe in my apartment building, etc.

[extraduder_ire]

The US has district heating systems. The country is very big and varied, as much as people like to paint it as homogenous.

[reaperducer]

And district cooling.

When I lived on a chilling grid, my summer AC bill was around $80, while friends whose buildings weren't connected paid $200+.

[extraduder_ire]

Are they doing anything with that heat, or are those savings from the scale they're operating at?

[petesergeant]

> I'd love to live in a dense city. My office within waking distance. A Cafe in my apartment building, etc.

Then move to one?

[SecretDreams]

Probably for the same reasons they aren't doing mixed use prison and restaurant buildings.

[shimman]

What you don't want to live near the newest poisonous abomination that the whiz kids dreamt up? Do you want China to take over America or something?

[zaptrem]

Data centers don't do anything other than sit there and turn electricity into heat. They only emit nothing but heat (which could be useful to others in the building).

[ZeroGravitas]

In America they have "temporary" jet turbines parked next to them burning gas inefficiently with limited oversight on pollution and noise because they are "temporary".

[shimman]

False, come up with new talking points please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw

If these things were so safe the rich should build them next to their homes.

[NoGravitas]

Heat and noise. The noise and the increased electrical bills are the main things people living near data centers complain about.

[CamperBob2]

Mixed-use buildings with restaurants on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors are very common. Not sure what prisons have to do with anything.

[wat10000]

The cost per square foot goes up as you add more floors. Construction goes multi-story to save space where land is expensive. But data centers don't need to be in places where land is expensive.

[tech_ken]

> I don't get why we aren't building mixed use buildings, maybe the first floor can be retail and restaurants, the next two floors can be data centers, and then above that apartments.

I mean a DC needs a lot of infrastructure and space. I think the real estate economics in places where people want to live, shop, and eat preclude the kinds of land usage common in DC design. Keep in mind that most DCs are actually like 4 or 5 datahalls tethered together with massive fiber optic networks.

Also people prefer to build parking in those levels that you're proposing to put DCs into.

[bandrami]

It's not just "very challenging", it's "very challenging and also solves no actual problem we face".

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging

It's curious that we live in a world in which I think the majority of people somehow think this ISN'T complicated.

Like, have we long since reached the point where technology is suitably advanced to average people that it seems like magic, where people can almost literally propose companies that just "conjure magic" and the average person thinks that's reasonable?

[jitl]

you can’t tell me the microwave isn’t magic. it’s magic.

[jasondrowley]

I can put things in a box that uses spooky electromagnetic waves to tickle water molecules to the point that they get hot and maybe boil off, given the chance? Sounds like magic to me

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

I think it counts as necromancy. After all it brings frozen hamsters back to life.

[solid_fuel]

It's just the thought process that comes with shallow understanding:

    "I can buy a server"
    "We can put things in space"
    "What do you mean I can't get a server in space?!"

[spikels]

Google is currently working on AI data centers in space.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/go...

[sejje]

It's not like launching stuff into space doesn't have pushback, either. See: starlink satellites.

[Ajedi32]

I was skeptical at first for much the same reason the author of that first article is; there are a lot of obstacles. But the more I think about it the less daunting those obstacles seem.

The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship, and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.

The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.

The only unsolved technical challenge I see in that article is radiation tolerance. It's unclear how big of a problem that will actually be in practice. But SpaceX probably has more experience with that than anyone other than perhaps NASA so if they think it can be done I don't see much reason to doubt them.

Ultimately I think this is doable from a technical perspective, it's just a question of whether it will be economical. Traditional wisdom would say no even just due to launch costs, but if SpaceX can get Starship working reliably that could alter the equation a lot. We'll see. This could turn out to be a boondoggle, or it could be the next Starlink. The prospect of 24/7 solar power with no need for battery storage or ground infrastructure does seem tempting.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/zzwpue/with_starlin...

[tech_ken]

> The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship,

Your link here isn't really a fair comparison, and also you're still short a factor of 10x. Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.

> and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.

This reasoning doesn't make any sense to me, the heat dissipation issues seem very much unresolved. A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts, a datacenter is hitting like O(1/10) of gigawatts. The heat dissipation problem is literally orders of magnitude more difficult for each DC than for their current fleet. This is like saying that your gaming PC will never overheat because NetGear already solved heat dissipation in their routers.

> The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.

Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max? Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days). They have at most like O(1)Pbps across their entire fleet (based on O(10K) satellites deployed and assuming they have no failover protection). They would need to entirely abandon their consumer base and use their entire fleet to support up/down + interconnections for just 2 or 3 datacenters. They would basically need to redeploy a sizeable chunk of their entire fleet every time they launched a DC.

[Ajedi32]

> Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.

So 3 years ago they managed to get to 10% of the power budget of one data center by accident, using satellites not explicitly designed for that purpose, using a partially reusable launch platform with 1/10th the payload capacity of Starship. My point is they've already demonstrated they can do this at the scale that's needed.

> A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts

Then why does each satellite have a 6 kW solar array? Re-read that post I linked; the analysis is pretty thorough.

> Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max?

Gen 3 is reportedly up to 1 Tbps ground link capacity, for one satellite.[1] There will be thousands.

> Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days).

Intra-satellite connections use the laser links and would not consume any ground link capacity.

You're also ignoring that this is explicitly being pitched as a solution for compute-heavy workloads (AI training and inference) not bandwidth-heavy workloads.

[1]: https://starlink.com/updates/network-update

[tech_ken]

> So 3 years ago they managed to get to 10% of the power budget of one data center by accident, using satellites not explicitly designed for that purpose, using a partially reusable launch platform with 1/10th the payload capacity of Starship. My point is they've already demonstrated they can do this at scale.

How was it by accident? You make it sound like it was easy rather than a total revolution of the space industry? To achieve 1/10th of what they would need for a single DC (and most industry leaders have 5 or 6)? Demonstrating they could generate power at DC scale would be actually standing up a gigawatt of orbital power generation, IMO. And again, this is across thousands of units. They either have to build this capacity all in for a single DC, or somehow consolidate the power from thousands of satellites.

> Then why does each satellite have a 6 kW solar array? Re-read that post I linked; the analysis is pretty thorough.

You're right, my bad. So they're only short like 6 orders of magnitude instead of 9? Still seems massively disingenuous to conclude that they've solved the heat transfer issue.

> Gen 3 is reportedly up to 1 Tbps ground link capacity, for one satellite.[1] There will be thousands.

Okay I'll concede this one, they could probably get the data up and down. What's the latency like?

[Ajedi32]

> How was it by accident?

I say by accident because high power capacity wasn't a design goal of Starlink, merely a side effect of deploying a communications network.

> My bad. So they're only short like 6 orders of magnitude instead of 9?

No, they're 1 order of magnitude off. (22 MW total capacity of the constellation vs your bar of 100 MW for a single DC.) Again, 3 years ago, using an inferior launch platform, without that even being a design goal.

> What's the latency like?

Starlink latency is quite good, about 30ms round trip for real-world customers on the ground connecting through the constellation to another site on the ground. Sun synchronous orbit would add another ms or two for speed of light delay.

AFAIK nobody outside SpaceX has metrics on intra-satilite latency using the laser links but I have no reason to think it would be materially worse than a direct fiber connection provided the satellites aren't spread out too far. (Starlink sats are very spread out, but you obviously wouldn't do that for a data center.)

[tech_ken]

> No, they're 1 order of magnitude off. (22 MW total capacity of the constellation vs your bar of 100 MW for a single DC.)

Why on earth would you compare their entire fleet to one project? Power generation trivially parallelizes only if you can transmit power between generation sites. Unless they've figure out how to beam power between satellites the appropriate comparison is 6Kw to 100Mw. And again, the generation is the easy side; the heat dissipation absolutely does not parallelize so that also needs to go by 3-5 orders of mag.

And also: radiation. Terrestrial GPUs are going to be substantially more power and heat efficient than space-based ones (as outlined in TFA). All this for what benefits? An additional 1.4x boost in solar power availability? There's simply no way the unit economics of this work out. Satellite communications have fundamental advantages over terrestrial networks if you can get the launch economics right. Orbital DCs have only the solar availability thing; everything else is cheaper and easier on land.

[YetAnotherNick]

> It(Solar) works, but it isn't somehow magically better than installing solar panels on the ground

Umm, if this is the point, I don't know whether to take rest of author's arguments seriously. Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land.

Also there is so limited calculations for the numbers in the article, while the article throws of numbers left and right.

[jhanschoo]

> Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land

The same goes for LEO!

[YetAnotherNick]

Most space datacenter plan plans to use sun-synchronous orbit.

[lpcvoid]

Nice article, the first one. I hope they try it, burn many billions of cash, and then fail. I also hope they don't spread radioactive material across the whole atmosphere when failing, though.

[edhelas]

"Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"

[boxedemp]

Just like rockets landing themselves

[sollewitt]

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.

[Sparyjerry]

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!

[fooker]

> Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics.

Radiators should work pretty well, and large solar panels can do double duty as radiators.

Also, curiously, newer GPUs are developed to require significantly less cooling than previous generations. Perhaps not so coincidentally?

[doctorwho42]

Well there lies the rub, solar panels already need their own thermal radiators when used in space ...

[fooker]

Great, so you seem to agree the technology exists for this and it is a matter of deploying more of it?

[kristjansson]

1kW TDP chips need LESS cooling?

[fooker]

Yes, Rubin reportedly can deal with running significantly hotter.

That makes radiating a much more practical approach to cooling it.

[rlt]

Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is just building very large radiators.

[throw310822]

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.

[fourseventy]

His point is that everyone said landing and reusing rockets was impossible and made fun of Elon and SpaceX for years for attempting it.

[audunw]

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.

[myko]

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.

DC-X test flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4

It's awesome that Falcon 9 exists and it is great technology but this guy really isn't the one anyone should want in charge of it.

[kortilla]

>Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.

This doesn’t pass the smell test given that the cost of launch with spacex is lower than it ever was under ULA.

NASA has never been about cheap launches, just novel technology. Look at the costs of Saturn and SLS to see what happens when they do launch.

[SmirkingRevenge]

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

[sejje]

Elon Musk killed hundreds of thousands of people?

[haspok]

> landing and reusing rockets

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!).

[techblueberry]

He said impossible, this was done recently, by spacex themselves.

[moomoo11]

Yeah but he’s an expert his opinion can be dismissed bro this is 2026

[jaimex2]

No one is interested in excuses on why it can't be done. Were in interested in the plan on how they plan to do it.

The guy is saying satellite communication is restricted to 1Gbps ffs. SpaceX is way past that.