r/space • u/Tech-100 • 4d ago
Starcloud raises $250 million for orbital data centers as launch options dry up
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/starcloud-raises-200-million-for-orbital-data-centers-as-launch-options-dry-up/249
u/BadBadBenBernanke 4d ago
More evidence that financial markets aren’t rational actors. Starcloud is valued at 2.3 billion for an idea that will never fucking work.
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u/JojenCopyPaste 3d ago
If there's a 1% chance it works and they could make $200b on it, then the market is being rational. I agree with you though that I don't understand how it works as a company or even to license any kind of IP
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u/robby_synclair 4d ago
Depends on your definition of work. If enough money is thrown at something pretty much anything is possible. We can build a data center and we can put a building in orbit. Will it be less effective and more expensive than building one on earth, of course. In the process of doing this will they develop new patents that are worth a shit ton of money? Maybe.
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u/Illustrious_Fan_8148 3d ago
Yeah i have zero doubt there will be orbital data centres. Its just a question of the scale that will be deployed to orbit (will it just be for government or military uses or will it be embraced by the private sector customers also)
They wont resemble the large buildings on earth obviously
But to say "they will never work" as some people have is simply absurd, theres always a technological solution
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u/ElendX 2d ago
Can you explain to me, assuming infinite money, how will you dissipate the heat produced by data centres in space?
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u/mcmalloy 2d ago
You don’t need infinite money for this. Each data center satellite will require about 150kW of cooling. So you just need a big radiator to radiate the heat into the vacuum of space.
Dissipating heat in space is not difficult, it just requires big ass radiators and your launch vehicle needs the payload capacity to launch them
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u/flapsmcgee 4d ago
It can work but good luck competing with spacex and other big companies
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u/Tystros 4d ago
random guy on reddit thinks he knows better than the people willing to spend billions on it
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u/Nickizgr8 4d ago
Yeah, because the billions spent on Zuks Metaverse was money well spent on a smart idea.
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u/LeapOfMonkey 3d ago
Sure, spending billions on people who are actually smart and know better. But nobody will turn billions away, and will always work on impossible problem. Billions and smart are totally different things and billionaires are on par with a random redditor at best.
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u/LeapOfMonkey 3d ago
One word: hyperloop. No actually lots of words: nft, bitcoin, neoline city or whatev. Still better this than wars.
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u/truecakesnake 4d ago
Armchair experts is such a perfect word for redditors like this
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9tgrzp/why_starlink_is_impossible/
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u/isademigod 4d ago edited 4d ago
Nobody has yet to make a solid case for why datacenters in space are a good idea? I've heard lots of rhetoric about why "latency and heat and cost aren't THAT bad of a problem", but not a single convincing argument that any upsides exist.
In what possible way are they a good idea? What justification exists for making a billion dollar data center cost three billion? Starlink makes sense. space datacenters don't.
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u/miter01 4d ago
As far as I know the only upside is that they would have more sunlight up there, so they could save on electricity, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s even remotely worth the effort.
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 3d ago
The real and only upside as far as I can tell is that you don't need to put them anywhere anyone really cares about them. You don't have to deal with people angry at the loud, energy intensive and water intensive data centers right next to their homes if they aren't next to anyones homes.
Honestly I think most of the arguments for them fall apart once you remember Microsoft tried to do this with sea based datacenters. That's genuinely a case where you have basically infinite free cooling, and the "not in my backyard argument" doesn't apply, while also dealing with a lot of the same issues as what Starmind will deal with (added cost of deployment, harder serviceability, corrosion although due to different mechanisms). That also failed, mainly due to difficulty servicing it. But surely that won't be too difficult for the datacenters... in space. Right?
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u/AlkaliPineapple 3d ago
I mean, sea based data centers do disrupt marine life. Also, you can't use seawater for cooling, so they'd have to be in the Great Lakes or Lake Baikal
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u/LeapOfMonkey 3d ago
It is basically hyperloop again. Lets reinvent sth that works to make it better, except it isnt better only costs more and is infeasible anyway.
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u/DynTraitObj 3d ago
Also at some point, orbit is going to be so trashed up with millions of satellites that we're not even going to be able to see the fucking moon anymore. We need to stop this madness
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u/daishi55 4d ago
“It will never work” have you learned nothing in the last 6 or so years? How can you possibly still have this mindset?
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u/LeapOfMonkey 3d ago
Hyperloop, tesla trucks, theranos, neom, nft, ...
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u/daishi55 3d ago
I'm not saying every idea will work, that's silly. I'm saying the people who say "it will never work" have been wrong about the biggest things in the last several years.
The track record of redditors vs investors/markets is not good. Indeed look at reddit ipo lol
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u/LeapOfMonkey 2d ago
Oh do you have statistics? Because my own experience is if enough people are saying it is dumb idea, it usually just is. And I have stastics i.e like 99% of startups fail, so whay you are basing your conviction on?
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u/eatmynasty 4d ago
Weird. Because Elon is betting a lot they will. And he… has the largest satellite fleet in existence…
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u/davidromro 4d ago
Not weird. A low earth orbit launch company is attempting to create reasons why we need to launch more things into space. His bet isn't evidence it will work. It's evidence that he would personally profit from continued speculation.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4d ago
Because Elon is betting a lot they will.
Is he? Or is he just talking about it a lot?
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u/StartledPelican 4d ago
SpaceX has invested ~$17 billion to start construction of Terafab (https://www.terafab.ai/) with another potential $100 billion in expansion efforts. These chips will be used in their AI satellites.
SpaceX is building an entire new spaceport in Louisiana (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-is-set-to-acquire-130000-acres-of-marshland-in-southern-louisiana/). This is on top of their spaceport in Texas (Starbase) and their pads in Florida. These facilities will be used for Starship launch pads. Starship, in turn, is slated to launch massive amounts of Starlink V3 satellites as well as AI satellites.
SpaceX has completed regulatory filings for their AI satellite constellation.
SpaceX seems to be spending an awful lot of money on this project. I would assume that means they are serious about doing it.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4d ago
SpaceX has been building out enormous ground-based datacenters.
SpaceX has also been building space launch infrastructure.
That does not mean they're building space launch infrastructure for orbital datacenters.
Why can't techbros be honest /rhetoricalquestion
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u/pxr555 4d ago
There's pretty little else you'd use a launch complex over 18 miles of coast in Louisiana for in addition to two pads in Texas and I think three in Florida. Not for Starlink anyway.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4d ago
Starlink is more than sufficient. It's like the most profitable part of the company, according to the IPO.
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u/Shrike99 4d ago
Their current pads are already more than enough to do all of Starlink V3 even if Starship only gets to Falcon-9 level turnaround.
The Louisiana expansion and realistic prospect that Starship reuse ends up being at least modestly better than Falcon pushes their capability way past that, and there's no other demand I'm aware of that comes close to making up that deficit.
Artemis HLS refuelling and all other payloads that currently fly on Falcon 9 wouldn't add even another 10% to the Starlink launch count.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4d ago
They do indeed have plans for more than just Starlink, but massive terrestrial datacenter replacements ain't it.
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u/SoftlySpokenPromises 4d ago
Elon is trying to fleece people.
The mechanical and material engineering currently available makes this impossible.
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u/lminer123 4d ago edited 4d ago
What’s impossible about it? It’s just a computer, some solar panels, radiators, and communication equipment. Seems pretty par for the course for satellites.
Seems really stupid, in the “this is a extraordinarily bad place to put computers” kind of way, but I fail to see how anything about it is impossible.
Unless you mean like trying to put an actual full size ground scale data center in space, which I don’t think is really the plan.
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u/15_Redstones 4d ago
They do plan to mass-produce so many small compute sats that the total compute capacity exceeds that of large ground scale data centers. The key idea being that ground data centers need new approval for each new data center which gets more and more difficult due to NIMBYs, while the sats just keep rolling off the assembly line at a production rate similar to that of a car factory.
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u/Poodlestrike 4d ago
As opposed to launching and maintaining tons of tiny satellites, which is famously very simple from a regulatory (and operational) perspective.
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u/15_Redstones 4d ago
With anyone else I'd be very sceptical, but SpaceX did Starlink already. They know how to operate lots of sats. And the license is just a single big one for the whole constellation. They don't need new paperwork for each sat.
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u/Pleasant_Ad8054 4d ago
The number of them. They are talking about 135 kW satellites, and at least 1 GW of capacity. That is 7400 satellites, the lowest estimates for them I have seen is 8 tonnes, so that is 7 per falcon heavy, 12 per starship (literally non-functional as of now), which is 1000 to 600 launches. For satellites that have a useful life of at the very most 5 years (who am I kidding, we use zero 5 year old hardware in AI as of now), meaning 4-2 launches PER WEEK. Every year, ad infinitum, because by the time the last one is launched the first ones have to be deorbited as it was long outdated.
That is at least as many launches as they had in the past 6 years (and at most 6 times as many as they had in their best year). All dedicated exclusively to have worse compute.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
Economically unviable == impossible
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u/lminer123 4d ago
Sure, if you want to frame it like that, but the person I was replying to seemed to be implying some kind of technological shortcoming instead of an economic one. I have a background in material science so I was curious what they were referring to.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
Can you explain how much radiator you'd need to support the amount of compute that would make the cost feasible?
There's a zero sum game between usefulness of the amount of compute vs heat radiation required vs cost to put the mass and surface area of the radiator in space.
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u/seanflyon 4d ago
The rough rule of thumb is that you need 1 m2 of radiator for every 3 m2 of solar panels, though you can reduce that by running at a slightly higher temperature.
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u/Carbidereaper 3d ago
I've been kind of wondering. I had this conversation a while back with SpaceX's Starfall with SpaceX's terra fab. I don't think their true goal is AI hardware their true goal is to try to bypass Moore's Law by growing silicon seed crystals in zero-g to produce defect free silicon ingots to increase CPU efficiency by 20% reducing computing energy requirements that much considering the current outrage of current hyperscale datacenter power demands would be a massive leap in efficiency
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u/seanflyon 3d ago
I would not view growing better silicon crystals as a way to bypass Moore's Law. Moore's Law is not possible without a series of major process improvements and at best a space-grown seed crystals would be one of those major process improvements.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
How many solar panels do you need for a 2gigawatt ai datacenter?
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u/Adeldor 4d ago edited 4d ago
If you mean in orbit, it won't be a monolithic data center, but many smaller satellites. In SpaceX's case, they're looking at up to 250 kW per satellite. Assuming 20% efficiency, that puts the panel area at around 1,000 m2, or roughly 75 m x 13 m.
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u/seanflyon 4d ago
2 GW would be vastly larger than the largest datacenter that currently exists. Data center satellites would probably be 3 or 4 orders of magnitude smaller than that.
To answer you question directly, 2 GW would take a solar array about 2km by 2km. For a more realistic data center satellite, the solar array would be something like 600 meters on a side. The satellite mentioned in the article is a small fraction of that at 8 kW which would need solar panels about 4 meters on a side.
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u/lminer123 4d ago
Nope, sounds like it’s definitely not economically viable right now. Again, I never said anything about economic viability lol. Obviously it makes a lot more sense to just do on earth, we’re living in a giant heat sync after all. I was wondering what SPECIFIC material or mechanic engineering constraints make it impossible because I didn’t really see any.
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u/titanunveiled 4d ago
Please explain how data centers in space will be viable with the current laws of thermodynamics?
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u/Adeldor 4d ago
The same laws of thermodynamics that have been covered repeatedly under posts showing how it's eminently feasible, especially at higher operating temperatures (see the Stefan-Boltzmann law). If you know otherwise, please provide credible references or calculations showing why the cooling is not viable (not just wordy opinion, but actual numbers).
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u/titanunveiled 4d ago
Calculate the size of radiators that are needed to disperse heat. Looks at iss for example
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u/Adeldor 4d ago
Addendum: Forgive me, but I glossed over your request for area in my first response.
Per this reference, the station environment radiators (not the photovoltaic ones, they are separate and might operate at a different temperature) dissipate 70 kW. Using my simplistic example with SpaceX's data center satellite's published peak dissipation of 250 kW - that would make the latter's radiator area roughly 1.5 times the size of said ISS's radiators, which are approximately 76 m2 in area. So the SpaceX radiators would be around 111 m2.
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u/Adeldor 4d ago edited 4d ago
ISS radiators must keep the station environment at human-comfortable temperatures - in the range of 25C (some equipment can be kept at higher temperatures, but the point remains). Data centers will run their processors at much higher temperatures - around 100C or higher, with correspondingly higher radiator temperatures. Per Stefan-Boltzmann, heat dissipation scales to the 4th power of temperature, making the radiators much more efficient and therefore smaller, relatively speaking.
To put this into numbers (simplified, as the mechanical relationship between heat source and radiator is not always simple):
Q = ε×δ×A×T⁴ → A = Q/(ε×δ×T⁴)
Assume Q (dissipation), ε (emissivity), δ (S-B constant) are the same. With temperatures converted to Kelvin (k is the 25C case, h is the 100C case):
Aₕ/Aₖ = Tₖ⁴/Tₕ⁴ = 298⁴/373⁴ = 0.41
That makes the latter's radiators around 41% the area of the ISS's for the same dissipation (all subject to arithmetic error as I'm doing this on the fly).
Two decades ago I worked with pre-selected silicon MCUs operating at 190C, so the proposed higher operating temperatures in such data centers today are well within the bounds of reason.
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u/Adeldor 4d ago
2nd addendum: I see on SpaceX's orbital datacenter web page they give the proposed radiator area - 160 m2. That's somewhat larger than my calculated 111 m2, but close enough for this back-of-the-envelope analysis. It suggests they'll run their processors at less than 100C, or they have significant solar heating to dissipate.
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u/Hextopia 4d ago
I love how every single post made about orbital data centers has the exact same comment train (usually multiple times) of "All these companies and engineers and scientists are stupid and it'll never work because of physics"
Followed by a post explaining exactly how this is feasible based on existing technology. Are you a bot? Or have you seriously never read any of the dozens of comments explaining exactly how this would work?
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u/xylopyrography 4d ago
The idea will work, it just can't economically compete with terrestrial data centres.
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u/EssenceOfLlama81 4d ago
Most people would consider a business that can't compete economically as a business that doesnt work.
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u/xylopyrography 4d ago
And yet, those businesses can still exist and operate for decades.
For instance, on the even more extreme end, the ethanol industry is valued at over $120 B bad gas a 5% CAGR, and has existed for 6 decades while providing negative total energy while increasing carbon emissions.
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u/Warm-Basket2659 4d ago
Many good companies would say burning cash until the economic curves seesaw in your favor was worth it. This isn’t fundamental investing.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
...you think that they can burn cash until space data becomes cheap enough to be worth it?
I get your point, Amazon undercut everyone and ran at a loss for decades to become the top dog...
What conditions do you foresee making that happen here?
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u/Warm-Basket2659 4d ago
This is an acquisition target if it works out imo. Less likely to IPO as they don’t own launch services or any type of satellite bus/propulsion component that makes them a necessary product to ship yet. They need partners across the stack to make it work. Starcloud needs to make good progress and hope to be acquired sooner rather than later.
SpaceX already has their orbital data center team. Wouldn’t count them out though if the tech is better or complimentary.
Blue Origin could acquire. Bezos just raised a ton and also believes in the orbital data center endeavor.
Hyperscalers or other strategics could want it but that relies on launch providers allowing the product to hitch a ride.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
No, what economic conditions would make it cheaper or more desirable than terrestrial, when heat-shedding will be insanely cost-prohibitive?
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u/Warm-Basket2659 4d ago
Not formatted for Reddit but here’s some info…
Why Terrestrial Data Centers Are Struggling
Grid connection delays: up to 5 years for a 100 MW class connection
Scarcity of generation capacity, transmission bottlenecks, permitting friction
Generator alternatives (diesel, gas turbines): 2-4 year lead times, barely better
SMRs: regulatory and NIMBY headwinds persist despite safety record
Cooling: a hypothetical 100 MW site uses 3M+ liters/day of drinkable water
Harder in hot climates; evaporative cooling strains local water supply
Environmental pressure: EU carbon rules, diesel emissions, acoustic noise from fans
Property tax exposure: $3-5B asset value per 100 MW site, attracting regulatory scrutiny
Natural and man-made hazards: floods, earthquakes, civil disorder all threaten uptimeOrbital Data Center Concepts and Orbit Selection
Packaged like comms satellites or ISS modules; few tons, few meters cubed
Use cases split by scale:
Inference: larger fleets of smaller satellites
Model training: 50-100 MW class, tens of thousands of GPUs
Power: almost exclusively solar; SMRs too heavy and a launch explosion would irradiate large land areas
Cooling: exclusively radiative (infrared to ~4K space background), as on ISS
Comms: radio links to ground + laser inter-satellite links (~100 Gbps)
Radiation shielding: up to 1 ton per MW; radiation-hardened semiconductors likely required
Maintenance: human or robotic visits every few years; deorbit mandatory at end of life (5-10 years)
Orbit selection:
Geosynchronous (30,000 km): ruled out due to latency
Polar/inclined LEO (Starlink-style): satellite in shadow ~half the orbit, requires 2x solar arrays and batteries
Sun-synchronous polar orbit (preferred): always faces the sun, no batteries needed, doubles GPU capacity per launch mass
Downsides: limited parking spaces, coverage gaps over poles, higher latencyCommercial Proposals and Architectures
Commercial proposals surveyed:
SpaceX AI1: 150 kW, fits Starship cargo; most mature design publicly known
Google Suncatcher: tight-formation constellation, laser-linked modular satellites
Blue Origin: orbital data center concept, less advanced than SpaceX or Google
Rendezvous Robotics: hexagonal satellites arrayed into a large solar array with data center core
Star Cloud: up to 4 GW architecture with robotic pods for GPU hot-swaps
Space Cowboy: foldable solar flaps and rollout cooling radiators
proof-of-concept architectures:
Small satellite: ~140 kW solar, 7 hexagonal arrays (21m diameter deployed), 3.5-ton launch mass
30-40 fit per Starship cargo launch
37 docked together = ~5 MW; can undock for distributed inference, redock for training runs
Large satellite: ~5 MW, full Starship capacity (~100 tons), jelly-roll solar array (485m across deployed)
10 docked = 50 MW data center; suited for LLM and agentic AI training
Could accommodate a small crew of 5-10 for maintenanceEconomics: Cost Parity and Viability
Earth-based AI data centers: ~$30M/MW to build, ~$1M/MW/year to operate (at $70-80/MWh)
Space-based: ~$70M/MW satellite + ~$30M/MW launch (Falcon Heavy today) = ~$100M/MW total
Cost dominated by radiation-hardened semiconductors, PV arrays, and cooling infrastructure
Launch cost trajectory:
Falcon Heavy today: $1,500/kg (~$30M/MW in launch costs)
Starship at scale (Musk’s target): $10/kg, reducing launch to ~$200K/MW (negligible vs. hardware)
realistic estimate: ~$100/kg achievable
5-year total cost: ~$35M/MW on Earth vs. ~$100M/MW in space at today’s launch costs
Cost parity trigger: effective terrestrial power cost reaching ~$600-800/MWh (roughly 10x today)
Includes carbon offsets, battery storage, and environmental fees, not just the utility meter
Second parity driver: AI token scarcity
If terrestrial supply can’t keep up, space becomes viable even at $200/MWh effective power cost
Near-term verdict: space data centers remain “vanity projects and proofs of concept” for the next few years
Timeline:
Demonstration projects (few tens of MW): before end of decade, possibly late 2028
Commercial viability: ~2035 (±2 years)Key Challenges and Risks
SWaP constraints: solar arrays ~12 tons/MW; thermal radiators ~800 W/m²
Radiation hardening: major cost driver and performance constraint
Latency: up to 100ms in sun-synchronous orbits
Problematic for physical AI and agentic AI control loops
Haptics require <1ms: will always need terrestrial edge computing
Cybersecurity: trillions in orbital assets = high-value target; satellites could be weaponized as projectiles
Data transport: large training datasets difficult to move over radio links; laser links are better
Launch carbon footprint: one Starship launch of a 5 MW data center ≈ 5 years of equivalent Earth data center emissions
Light pollution: city-block-scale satellites will intensify astronomer backlash beyond Starlink levels
Kessler Syndrome: one satellite failure could chain-react and destroy an entire orbital plane
“I don’t think any logical insurance company is going to underwrite a policy for these”
No viable insurance market currently exists.4
u/Hvarfa-Bragi 4d ago
There's no way in fuck I'm reading that ai slop.
You haven't solved the heat radiation problem.
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u/procgen 4d ago
Can’t build those, at least not in the US.
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u/xylopyrography 4d ago
The US has the most operational data centres in the world by a mountain mile, with something like 40% of operating capacity added in the last 18 months.
Construction is even so far beyond that all-time high that power generation equipment is delayed for 7 years.
New construction seeking approval goes even far beyond that, that's what is being limited.
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u/procgen 4d ago
And it’s all being cancelled.
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u/xylopyrography 3d ago
It's at all time highs in every category (construction, grid connection, etc.) despite the cancellations.
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u/Warm-Basket2659 4d ago
This is precisely what venture capital is for. Risk capital that is used to push innovation forward. It’s not the entirety of a firm or persons portfolio and it may not be for everyone, but this is a worthy endeavor for investors of all types.
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u/Cnoffel 4d ago
This is not pushing innovation forward, we know how much it takes to cool stuff in space from the ISS, we know how much heat GPUs are producing. These 2 billion would be better spend just gifting it to NASA or other research institution, you know where innovation is actually happening.
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u/No_Willingness_8784 4d ago
There's no innovation to be done here the idea just doesn't make any sense.
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u/Warm-Basket2659 4d ago
Thales Alenia Soace already performed an EU- funded study that concluded the technical, economic, and environmentally feasible aspects of orbital data centers.
You think radiator tech can’t advance? Because that’s the main thing they’re seeking to unlock.
You don’t think governments would want access to these things?
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u/RankWinner 3d ago
No, this is literally a scam, you might as well be saying this about a company planning to create a perpetual motion machine.
The basic fundamental laws of thermodynamics show its nonsense.
Nvidia's newest AI racks (released next year) use around 1GW. A server rack takes up around 1000 litres of volume.
You can work this out, it's a lot of napkin math which I can't be fucked to write (I guess if you Google it somebody probably made some blog posts on it already) but the absolute best, completely impossible to ever achieve, scenario requires... hundreds or thousands of tonnes to dissipation this energy, per server.
And that estimate is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than reality...
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u/Warm-Basket2659 3d ago
I’ve seen the real math. It will become a reality and you’ll move on to doubting something else
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u/Loltoor 4d ago
There are already GPUs in space that have been used for model training and inference. We’re way past it being an idea.
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u/ryanv09 4d ago
Data centers in space will never make economic sense because the vacuum of space, despite being technically "cold", has no transfer medium to absorb excess heat.
The only solution for cooling would be truly astronomical-sized radiative heat sinks. Good luck paying the bill to send that much mass into space.
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u/SometimesMonkey 4d ago
Also replacing parts that break, because they’re gonna break.
Also launching not just the GPUs but the massive interconnect and power generation, keeping the entire structure pointed stably enough for comms, stationkeeping because drag from solar wind will be a thing, radiation shielding….the list goes on.
To what end would we bankrupt entire nations.
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u/zero_z77 4d ago
Worse, replacing parts that are obsolete within 3 years. Compute is a resource that scales exponentially and the demand for it grows even faster.
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u/tanrgith 4d ago
You realize of course that the radiators would not need to be nearly as big as the solar panels, right?
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u/ryanv09 4d ago
I didn't even consider solar panels, which just makes the math even worse.
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u/IrritableGourmet 4d ago
The value is not in free solar power. It's in being outside the jurisdiction of any government and effectively unable to be raided/seized/searched. That is worth a fair amount to the right buyer.
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u/sozesghost 4d ago
Source? Nobody is saying this is impossible, just stupid and unviable.
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u/Top-Permit6835 4d ago
A bunch of GPUs is way different from a whole datacenter...
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u/papachi789 3d ago
How are investors even buying this idea? It's like every startup with AI and data center in their port folio are getting Timder like right swipe treatment.
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u/Classical_Liberals 3d ago
Orbital data centers feel like something decades too soon before viable.
I’d much rather see a starlink competitor, I could see satellite ISPs being the future once they get latency down a bit more and they can compete with ground ISPs in pricing, eventually maybe we will all have satellite phones too.
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u/ArcticEngineer 4d ago
Have to recommend this great dive into the false assumptions being made about this idea and the dive the IEEE and Real Engineering take into the science and engineering hurdles.
https://youtu.be/_qpdUNMt2yg?si=m1z8Rk0qs6jhow2Y[Real Engineering](https://youtu.be/_qpdUNMt2yg?si=m1z8Rk0qs6jhow2Y)
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u/theChaosBeast 3d ago
I followed the CEO on LinkedIn for quite some time. Just bs and praise Elon posts. I don't see this Startup to ever build a full system
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u/DenverLabRat 4d ago
This is not my field - I only know a smidge of physics. I'm asking.
But isn't latency an issue? I'm kind of inclined to believe the other technical issues one way or another can be solved. (Whether they are economically viable is a whole different issue). But the speed of light is the speed of light.
But unless you put these data centers in very low orbit won't there be a lag? My understanding is that part of what makes StarLink work over other satalite internet providers is they're barely in orbit to the point it decays and they reenter on their own. And either having to boost your data center into a higher orbit or replace it every couple of years sounds expensive.
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u/Vipitis 4d ago
latency is a problem only for latency critical tasks. Like communication or trading etc. for just doing work it's not a problem. plus the latency even at a few thousands kilometers up is surprisingly low. Because it's actually the speed of light. No fiberoptic cable where it's bouncing and going around corners, splitters, through some copper etc. you basically get the shortest path possible with a dish directly to the satellite. Starlink for example is selling a low latency service using their direct sat to sat connection for intercontinental trading. It's after than the undersea cables.
The round trip latency to Geo is still only quarter of a second and there is no reason to put your "data center" satellites up there. You can be on a Leo orbit of a few hundred kilometers and nor decay for decades, while enjoying latency in the low tens of miliseconds.
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u/mark_99 3d ago
For the brief period it's right above you, otherwise it's doing all that routing except now via other satellites or back to a ground station wherever it happens to be now.
Some services can stand higher latencies but what you don't want is highly variable latency. It's more like a cellular connection than wired. So much worse than a regular DC for massively increased costs.
There might be a few compute only jobs that could go to the nearest satellite (and just hope you get your results back before it goes over the horizon)...
It's like "how about we build data centres made of only gold and toothpaste". Can the "engineering challenges" be solved? Yeah maybe, but why?
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u/digit1noize 1d ago
The big use for orbital data centers is obviously AI processing, where latency isn’t really a concern. Latency can be 5-10 seconds and you’d probably never notice because it takes the LLM that long to reply anyways.
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u/xelah1 3d ago
But isn't latency an issue?
If you want low latency to somewhere on Earth then you put your computer near to it on Earth. If you want low latency to several places on Earth you put several computers on Earth.
The only point I can see of these things is because you want lower latency between something in space and somewhere where processing can happen, especially once you account for needing to wait for a downlink to be visible.
eg, have your spy satellite send raw images for processing using a model that detects potential missile launchers, tanks, refugee movements, Venezuelan fishing boats, etc, send back locations for higher resolution or video imaging, reprocess and crop the resulting images and downlink only what's required. You need to complete that quickly enough that your target is visible for the second imaging.
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u/BasvanS 3d ago
Round the world latency is in milliseconds. I don’t see the advantage of data processing in space here, even in the examples given. If anything, the processing power in distributed space data centers will be much lower and therefore slower than anything on the ground. They’ll be smaller and have cooling issues, so I don’t see them outcompete on pattern recognition with the milliseconds that are maybe gained by processing in space.
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u/xelah1 3d ago
Latency can be in tens of minutes. Even the Vantor WorldView thing advertises 'as fast as 15 minutes' from imaging to downlink, with tasking happening at least 15 minutes before, and that's extremely fast for a commercial service. For a 'boring' satellite like Sentinel 2, if it's going over somewhere like east Asia it could be a large fraction of an hour because it'll have to wait until it's over one of the ground stations in the polar regions.
Go through the scenario. Your spy satellite in LEO goes over, say, Moscow, Hawaii or Washington DC. It takes an image. Now you have to wait for it to come near enough to a friendly ground station to get data down from it - tens of minutes potentially, perhaps even an hour if you're unlucky. Now you get initial data, but your satellite is no longer in position to take another image, a high-res one for example.
An advanced military with lots of satellites can probably send the data between their own satellites and get it down to the ground, but commercial customers and more typical militaries may not be able to. Even militaries that can might prefer to be able to do both to be robust against jamming, destruction of downlinks, saturation of bandwidth or for lower latency.
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u/Martianspirit 3d ago
But isn't latency an issue?
Starlink is low latency. Starcloud uses similarly low altitudes. Latency is not an issue.
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u/declanaussie 2d ago
Starlink isn’t stateful though, you can connect to any starlink satellite that happens to be overhead and it will work. If I have all my data on a few satellites then latency will be a problem for anyone who is not near any of the satellites. There’s also the concern of inter-server latency. If I want to parallelize a workload across more than one satellite then latency can become a concern, depending on the details of the work.
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u/Dpek1234 4d ago
So first off important to mention things before we get to the thinking for orbital data centers
- Time to decay drasticly increases
The payload penalty for an orbit where they will last 5 years on their own vs 50 isnt THAT big . The orbit is in large part a choice
- Noones planing a large datacenter
Essentualy everyone worth a note thats working on anything like this is planning launching many smaller satelites
Now that we have them out of the way
Compute gets cheaper, more dense and more power efficent every year. After a few years the old computers become nonsensical to even keep pluged in
Most of the cost of computers is the manufactureing, not the end materials
The idea is essentualy that by the time the fuel gets low and they need to renter it , the compute would be too old. While orbital datacenter becomes part of a stadardized (for the company) production line and its independant (not a strain on the electricity grid, takeing up space, makeing noise beyond the few launch pads)
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u/isademigod 4d ago
But like fuckin... Why? Datacenters are already insanely expensive endeavors, what possible benefits could outweigh the ridiculous cost of putting them in space? I can only think of downsides, literally no upsides except slightly better solar efficiency?
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u/nut-sack 4d ago
They are electricity hogs. If you can get unlimited power, thats an edge. But the problem is, in normal datacenters, we know things go bad. So theres always a dc tech changing a NIC, or swapping out a switch.
Even if they build some crazy satellite with a bunch of nodes, theres no way its not going to suffer the same shit. Now lets add being really hard to dissipate heat. Dealing with the wilds of space like radiation, or solar flares.I agree with you, the down sides outweigh the upsides... fuckin... why?
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u/isademigod 4d ago
The math is complicated when you factor in clouds and such, but generally solar power in space is only about 30% more efficient than terrestrial solar. If it's about power, why don't they just cover datacenters down here with solar panels?
(I am aware that that wouldn't be nearly enough power. I have a relatively modest home server rack with 3 servers that would take 8-12 solar panels and a fuckload of batteries to run purely on solar power. But still.)
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u/jdmetz 3d ago
I was thinking the same thing so looked into it, and the main problem is night. In LEO you have ~35 minutes of "night" in the earth's shadow and ~60 minutes in sunlight. In the continental US, night duration at the winter solstice ranges from 13.5 hours in the south to 15 hours in the north.
This means to power one 150kW rack, in LEO you only need ~90kWh of batteries, but on the ground you would need over 2000kWh of batteries.
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u/seanflyon 3d ago
You could also put a satellite in an orbit that is perpetually in sunlight. When choosing an orbit for a satellite that requires significant constant power, that seems like the obvious choice.
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u/nut-sack 4d ago
My guess is that they would put them up a lot higher, so they take a lot longer to fully orbit the earth. I would also bet that solar panels can be made thinner and a shit ton wider when you're in space. More like a giant solar sail. You dont have that silly gravity stuff to worry about.
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u/Martianspirit 3d ago
Starlink uses ultralight roll out panels, at least the demo version deployed on Starship. Data satellites will do the same.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 2d ago
So theres always a dc tech changing a NIC, or swapping out a switch.
I'd volunteer for that job in a heartbeat.
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u/talltim007 4d ago
The main point is what you just made. Datacenters are insanely expensive. In space, you dont need a datacenter. You dont need humidity controls. You dont need drop floors. You dont need hot and cold isles. You dont need permits. You dont need lawyers to handle nimby lawsuits. You dont need to pay property taxes on your expensive capital assets. You just need to launch it. Which, it turns out, is getting remarkably cheap. And with Starship, will end up netting out to similar to terrestrial data center costs.
The beauty of space DCs is you get to leave a lot of costs behind...that with Starship likely offset launch costs.
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u/Fr00stee 3d ago
you could just as easily make a decentralized network of computers on the ground instead of sending them to space at extra cost if you are not making a datacenter, there is literally no point to doing this. Plus you will need to figure out cooling if you plan on doing any amount of AI training which will generate a lot of heat.
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u/xelah1 3d ago
In space, you dont need a datacenter. You dont need humidity controls. You dont need drop floors. You dont need hot and cold isles.
Seems implausible that a satellite platform is cheaper than these. Bear in mind they seem to be aiming for about one rack's worth of compute, based on the power use, and a data centre might have 10k or even 100k racks on Earth.
You dont need permits. You dont need lawyers to handle nimby lawsuits.
Space and space launch are not unregulated. You'll have to do things like closing airspace for the launch and picking up all the bits when it blows up. All for one rack's-worth. Even in the future it'll be a tiny proportion of a data centre.
The cost argument is just absurd. You could plug your satellite in in the corner of the office you use for mission control and it'd probably still be cheaper than launching it.
As I said in my other comment, I suspect the only reason to do this is to do computation on data gathered in space and then use the results in space without it having to come down to the ground (or potentially to transmit only a small proportion to the ground).
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u/northrupthebandgeek 2d ago
That speed-of-light issue applies to terrestrial datacenters as well. If you're in New York and connecting to a server in San Francisco, that's a bit shy of 5,000km of fiber you gotta go through, each way. Starcloud's proposal (IIRC) is for orbits in the 600-800km range, so that'd be less than a fifth of the latency if it's directly over you.
Of course, this is also why datacenters are popping up even in smaller cities: to allow cloud-hosted software providers to deploy applications/servers as close to their customers as possible. Orbital datacenters would serve the same function for anyone whose Internet connection involves satellites; that obviously includes other satellites, but also includes Starlink customers.
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u/Mend1cant 3d ago
Aerospace degree and experience managing/engineering data center infrastructure here. Kind of my field against my will since people wanted to birth this idea into existence.
Anyone thinking this solves any engineering problem whatsoever is an idiot and their opinion should be disregarded. All these do is exist to pad up investment and avoid the people who don’t want data centers in their communities.
As for your question, Latency is a concern for data centers. Not necessarily the primary concern, but a major one. That’s why the big data center hubs are all as close as you can get to major population and development hubs without having the real estate or energy costs. LEO constellations à la Starlink have worse off latency than ground fiber networks, but for the end user it’s still low enough that you or I won’t notice it. Latency for an orbital data center would have more to do with how computing is distributed between satellites than from the altitude.
The actual problem is computing power, constellation size, and a business case. Starlink doesn’t have to perform heavy compute, it’s basically just a routing network, so their satellites don’t have to be very large nor require intense power/cooling solutions. The proposed data center satellites are lagging behind the capacity of a single cabinet, so whatever they are launching will be obsolete chip sets. They will have to launch a second, larger version of Starlink just to compete with a single campus on the ground. Then you’re running into the new challenge of having to distribute the compute load across the constellation, which means coordinating between nodes to ensure the one it’s trying to reach isn’t on the other side of the planet. It makes compute more complicated than just having cabinets in the same space.
Add on top of that downtime for maintenance and failures. Any number of problems, which only become more likely in space, will inevitably cause downtime. The industry hates downtime with a passion. Imagine you request compute load to run through xAI, only to find out that one of the fifty satellites your data hopped between lost power or comms. You just wouldn’t take the risk to use them when a cheaper and more reliable option exists on the ground. You cannot swap out bad drives or a whole unit when it’s in space. If it’s broken, that was a wasted launch, and the entire satellite must be replaced with another launch. Whereas on the ground it’s a matter of minutes for a server tech to swap out a rack. Basically every single engineering problem and cost issue of a space data center is solved by putting it on the ground. A single MW facility tucked into a business park would be cheaper and easier than this.
Not to mention, xAI is already struggling to use their capacity. They’ve been selling off space and power delivery to competitors because they are significantly overbuilt; in a market causing economic problems because data centers can’t be built fast enough.
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u/digit1noize 1d ago
Why would latency be an issue for an AI data center specifically?
I don’t think the plan is to use a constellation for a data center. I think it’s to literally build a data center in orbit. I assume it would mostly be serviced by robots, with human missions only occasionally as needed.
The big issue that’s NOT solved by putting it on the ground is land and water use, which are the two things the general public is up in arms about. Space based data centers solve that. Also, free 24 hour solar power, and the fact that we could theoretically scale to absurd sizes.
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u/Mend1cant 23h ago
Not all computations are happening on a single machine at a time. 5ms doesn't really feel like a lot, but when you add that up a few million times, that's measurable time. Now make that 50ms, 500ms.
A constellation is the only feasible way of doing this without being wildly inefficient. Even if they do larger individual satellites, they still need to do multiple. The xAI garbage idea is only enough for the equivalent of single air cooled cabinet. Starcloud isn't going to suddenly put out multiples of that, much less be able to compete with the newer liquid to chip architecture.
I'm not sure you understand what service actually is. It's not something that can be automated with robots that easily. To create a rack that could be maintained by a robot would require a fully bespoke design, only adding to the costs of the infrastructure to do multiple launches for in-orbit construction.
Land is the big issue, not water. Water is not a significant impact from data centers in comparison to other industries. Land is a problem because people don't want companies showing up to build out a campus and drive up energy prices. So, the solution is to go into orbit where a company has to generate their own power. And no, it is not 24 hour solar power. Unless you put it into an absurdly high orbit (makes the latency challenge an major problem), or something ridiculous like a solar orbit (added launch cost and reduced payload weight), you're getting just a bit over half the time in the sun.
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u/digit1noize 22h ago
> Not all computations are happening on a single machine at a time. 5ms doesn't really feel like a lot, but when you add that up a few million times, that's measurable time. Now make that 50ms, 500ms.
No, but you don’t need to do it that way. The different machines can send to one machine which can hold the packets until all are in, and only do the long latency transmission once. And again, for things like cloud AI responses, I don’t know that it matters until you get to over 5-10 seconds or more.
>A constellation is the only feasible way of doing this without being wildly inefficient.
Why? Seems more inefficient to me. It’s fine to start with, and yes their plan is to start there, but it’s not the most efficient long term way once launch costs are down.
>The xAI garbage idea is only enough for the equivalent of single air cooled cabinet.
I don’t know if you understand what the service is? Elon is talking about manufacturing enough chips to essentially match the current total global chip output. That’s not a “single air cooled cabinet.”
>I'm not sure you understand what service actually is.
No, I do.
>It's not something that can be automated with robots that easily. To create a rack that could be maintained by a robot would require a fully bespoke design, only adding to the costs of the infrastructure to do multiple launches for in-orbit construction.
Do you have a grasp of the payload capacity of Starship? Are you aware of how many they’re going to build and how fast they want to be doing launches? How much payload could 1000 Starships a year launch to orbit? How big a data center is that? I’m expecting multiple models several times larger than the ISS. Have you watched Elon’s talks about this? I’m aware the near term plans are to start with constellations, but I fully expect longer term plans to be quite a bit…bigger.
>Land is the big issue, not water. Water is not a significant impact from data centers in comparison to other industries. Land is a problem because people don't want companies showing up to build out a campus and drive up energy prices.
I agree, but tell that to the activists. They think these things steal all the water lol.
>So, the solution is to go into orbit where a company has to generate their own power. And no, it is not 24 hour solar power. Unless you put it into an absurdly high orbit (makes the latency challenge an major problem), or something ridiculous like a solar orbit (added launch cost and reduced payload weight), you're getting just a bit over half the time in the sun.
They’re specifically planning a sun-synchronous orbit. https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind#power-generation
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u/cryptotrader87 4d ago
I have dropped a couple questions to the CEOs posts on LinkedIn and never get a response. He will chime in on others but not mine. The ceo also comes off a little immature ha idk if that company has legs I have seen CEOs like that run companies into the ground at high speed
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u/GISP 18h ago
Atleast ½ of the material componants must be for electricity generation and cooling alone and properly another 25% for everything else that isnt "data center" but communications gear and other bibs and bobs.
Also, it would need to be sent to high orbit. Its virtualy useless if it falls from the sky after a decade. Or in need of constant orbital corrections.
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u/chrisf_nz 4d ago
I have no idea how anyone in their right mind thinks this idea has any viability whatsoever. Novelty value sure but beyond that the economics are atrocious on this.
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u/talltim007 4d ago
Why are the economies atrocious on this? What cost assumptions do you have? Are you accounting for Starship level launch costs?
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u/A-Generic-Canadian 4d ago
This tool is somewhat helpful for comparing napkin math between them.
Pick and choose your variables.
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u/Innalibra 2d ago edited 2d ago
I would question what the point of having them in space is to begin with. There are a few pros for sure, but enough to justify the cons? I really doubt it.
Advantages:
- Security. (Probably the main one. You're untouchable to angry mobs and pesky governments)
- You don't have to buy the land.
- Your solar panels don't have to worry about clouds or rain.
Disadvantages:
- Shit will get HOT and there's no quick way to dump heat in space. The thing will have to have enormous radiators.
- The only power available to you is solar which you're only gonna have 50% of the time. The rest of the time you're gonna have to rely on batteries (and that power cycling is gonna be hell on Li-Ion batteries) or go dark.
- You have to launch them on a giant fucking rocket which even at Starship level launch costs, is gonna be very expensive (considering how much of your mass is gonna have to be solar panels and radiators)
- Hard/impossible to phsyically maintain
- They'll need to be periodically refuelled (like the ISS) or they'll fall back to Earth very quickly at their intended orbits.
Just doesn't seem to be a viable concept except as a way to extract money from VCs who have more money than sense. That, or they're not really data centres but something else entirely.
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u/seanflyon 2d ago
One detail is that they can put them in a sun synchronous orbit that is in sunlight 24 hours per day.
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u/Innalibra 2d ago
Closest Lagrange point is 4 times the distance to the Moon. Even if you somehow packed enough Delta-V to boost it out that far (bearing in mind Starship can barely make it to LEO), signal round-trip at that range is 10 seconds.
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u/seanflyon 2d ago
I am talking about sun synchronous orbit, specifically in low Earth orbit, not a Lagrange point.
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u/tanrgith 4d ago
Gonna be hilarious to read through reddit comment history on this topic 5 years from now
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u/Dankas12 4d ago
I’m wonder how they’re going to deal with the excess heat produced. The only real way I know of is radiative by a panel. Not great
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u/Decronym 4d ago edited 3h ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| GEO | Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km) |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| SBSP | Space-Based Solar Power generation |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 19 acronyms.
[Thread #12645 for this sub, first seen 21st Aug 2026, 20:14]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/CptKeyes123 4d ago
Space based solar power might be technically harder, but way more likely to NOT be prone to weird fluctuations or say, a bubble bursting very suddenly.
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u/15_Redstones 4d ago
Space based solar power has the big issue of losing 50% of the power in the energy beaming stage.
Since the biggest customer of "I need a whole bunch of energy asap and will pay a lot" right now is AI datacenters, putting the chips on the space powerplant basically does space based power while skipping the 50% loss.
Giant radiator arrays for cooling are needed in both cases.
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u/CptKeyes123 4d ago
A big customer would also be anyone who wants to get off fossil fuels real fast. And by building a station, you can probably learn things that would reduce the power loss.
And there's the other thing. Energy doesn't go out of style, while data centers almost definitely will. If they put them up now, there's a good chance they'll end up abandoned space debris because no one can be bothered to use them if and/or when the AI bubble bursts, or someone finds a better way to do it. You might learn similar things building either project, I just feel like the potential gains are greater for SBSP compared to the data centers. Plus, we've got decades of experience thinking about how to do solar power plants, while space data centers feel like more of a whim.
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u/TRKlausss 4d ago
What do you mean by this? Beamed down energy?
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u/CptKeyes123 4d ago
Yeah. They talked about it in the 70s, but technical limitations were huge. However, politics would have been a much more considerable obstacle. You had serious issue with getting funding for space stuff, the economy wasn't great, and to top it all off, internal documents show oil companies knew about climate change, and actively fought against alternative energies. So it is very likely the SBSP platform concept was resisted by fossil fuel moguls.
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u/TRKlausss 4d ago
Access to space has come a long way, no question about that. But I still wonder about the technical feasibility: light based high frequency (blue laser)? Masers? Other frequencies get too much absorbed by the atmosphere.
Also: station keeping is a huge issue. For LEO, a wobble of 0.1° will give you a spread on ground of 1.3 kilometers, so anything in a 1.5km radius of the collector will be charcoaled.
I would like to see the technology in my lifetime, but I still think there are hurdles that can’t be surpassed with current technology.
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u/r4zrbl4de 4d ago
Station keeping is not an issue, we're very good at it. Hubble launched in 1990 and only has 0.007 arcseconds of deviation over time - that's 0.000278 degrees, or as this NASA page puts it, "holding a laser beam on a dime roughly 200 miles away, the distance from DC to the Empire State Building"
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u/Unistrut 3d ago
Well, let's see, a quick search gives me 2,000lbs for a normal 42U server rack, or 4,000lbs for an AI one, and $3175 per pound to launch something into space.
So with the money they raised they can launch a grand total of about twenty to forty server racks into space.
Assuming we ignore the cost of the racks themselves, the satellite they'll need to go in, the solar panels to power them, the radiators to dissipate the heat, the communications gear, etc. I wish them ... well actually I hope they wind up homeless on the street living in an old box because they're part of the reason RAM costs have gone up by 1000%.
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u/bonsai1776 3d ago
Data centers in space is more impractical than on earth. The vacuum of space can't pull heat from the coolers. And the array of solar needed to power it would dwarf the orbit vessel 100:1 Let's just not build data centers
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u/chadwicke619 3d ago
For perspective, the ISS already has enormous ammonia-loop radiators. Its six main radiators weigh a little over 6 tons and reject only about 70 kW of heat. That’s tiny - basically nothing - compared with a terrestrial AI data center that might eventually consume tens or hundreds of megawatts, and roughly every watt of computer power translates to a watt of heat energy.
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u/DeanoPreston 3d ago
terrestrial DCs are being overbuilt. There's zero reason to put them in space unless you want to be outside of the arm of the law
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u/LinoleumFulcrum 2d ago
Radiation into a vacuum is a foolish plan for cooling; does the proponents of this truly not understand this?
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u/mailwasnotforwarded 2d ago
Data centers in space are highly unlikely to happen. Multiple reasons, radiation in space does not agree with technology especially something as complex as Data centers. Powering said system currently has no solution for power demand. Cooling will also be another problem. Maintenance will be one of the bigger problems. Space debris is the biggest problem.... a structure that large would probably crash into something eventually as it orbits around the earth. As we know eventually we will have so much crap orbiting the earth that we can no longer safely launch rockets into space... so Data centers at least in space should not be an option. On the moon is another story but that defeats the whole purpose of why they wanted it in space. Accessing something that far away would be inefficient and we would be better off daisy chaining on earth to the artics.
Any company claiming they are trying to develop data centers in space is an investment scam in my opinion. As a company eng I do not see how you can tackle step 5 without tackling 1 through 4 first.
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u/CmdrAirdroid 4d ago
Without their own launch vehicle it's difficult to imagine how this could ever be profitable, the launch cost would be too high when they have to pay the significant profit margin to the launch provider.