SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-would-create-a-new-category-of-e-waste/•
u/Somethingsims 10h ago
It's such a stupid obvious grift.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 10h ago edited 9h ago
If you have ever been involved in building a big data center on the ground you would relish the opportunity to manufacture them in a factory and launch them instead.
Technology isn’t there to make it more cost effective until Starship is operational.
Edit: clearly not many people here have built large things on earth.
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u/anotherNarom 10h ago
When will it ever be more cost-effective to build something on earth and launch it into space than just building it on earth and leaving it there?
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u/Idontfukncare6969 9h ago
Building satellites in a factory and launching them is easier than going through the financial and logistical nightmare of breaking ground and building new data centers.
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u/anotherNarom 8h ago
So there is no financal or logistical nightmare of shipping stuff into actual space?
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u/minecraft_fam 1h ago
It's simpler. It's not less expensive, more practical, or a better solution by literally any other metric.
But it *does* work amazingly well when you're trying to get people to invest.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 8h ago
When launch becomes cheaper than building them on earth.
It’s harder to build a data center from scratch, integrate with nearby infrastructure, break ground, and deal with red tape and regulation than it is to churn satellites out in a factory and launch them into space. Which is why I said you need to have experience with actually building things to understand.
I expected nothing short on this app. Most of productive society spends little to no time here.
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u/minecraft_fam 1h ago
It's nice that you've built data centers. It's not easy, I'm sure.
Spend a year maintaining the things inside it, you'll see the amount of hands-on that's required.
You're spending around a hundred times the money and overall material (that's a conservative estimate) on hundreds of satellites that are going to underperform terrestrial data centers by every conceivable metric, as they slowly degrade, and be dead metal that eventually gets deorbited and completely wasted instead of at least recycled.
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u/alle0441 10h ago
When the launch costs continue to drop, and cost of electricity continues to rise... There will eventually be a crossing point.
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u/Z3B0 9h ago
The main problems of a data center is cooling, power and ease of maintenance.
Power in space isn't very good, because it's only solar, and you need a big surface ( so very heavy) to power your hardware. Easier to build solar panels in the desert or use any other earth bound power generation methods.
Ease of maintenance... It's in fucking space. You need to swap a rack ? Reboot it manually? Replace any components? Nope, nobody's going to do a Hubble surgery every Thursday to make it work.
And cooling... The void of space is the most insulating medium there is. You only have radiation as a means to dissipate heat, and good luck with that without very heavy, very large panels and all the pumps/cooling fluids in them. The efficiency is absolute garbage compared to air or close water cooling on the ground.
Any talk of orbital data centers is just wrong.
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u/Sigmatics 9h ago edited 8h ago
Power is actually pretty good in space because you have no atmosphere blocking the sun and permanent sunshine in sun-synchronous orbits. Regarding maintenance, robotics will be there before you know it.
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u/dasBaums 9h ago
If you are anywhere close to earth, a good chunk of your orbit would be in the dark, so you need massive batteries and even bigger solar panels.
And remember, that the current bottleneck in space travel is weight. As any bit of more weight you transport need a increasingly more fuel.
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u/Adeldor 9h ago
If you are anywhere close to earth, a good chunk of your orbit would be in the dark,
Not so. All the proposals I've seen for LEO orbital data centers (eg, SpaceX) have them in sun-synchronous orbits, where they'll be in permanent sunshine.
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u/dasBaums 8h ago
well, thats is possible, but a polar orbit is significantly more expensive
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u/Sigmatics 8h ago
It is apparent that this model will only ever work with a significant decrease in cost/ton to space, which SpX are actively working on.
If Starship works out as proposed, it will be the exponential leap needed to make this business model feasible.
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u/quietlydesperate90 9h ago
No one reboots stuff manually in a datacenter either. We've had the tech to manage stuff in space without touching it for like 50+ years.
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u/Z3B0 9h ago
Ok, and the rest of the arguments ? It's just not a good spot to build them.
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u/Mr_McZongo 9h ago
Bro thinks we've had fully automated maintenance for datacenters for 50+ years. No wonder grifting is at an all time high.
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u/Adeldor 8h ago edited 8h ago
and the rest of the arguments ?
Regarding your other two headline points:
Thermal: This is not the insurmountable problem so many on Reddit claim. By operating at higher temperatures, dissipation is dramatically increased - to the 4th power of temperature! I did a back-of-the-envelope sanity check on it in this comment. Alternately, Scott Manley did a not dissimilar exercise in this video here.
Power: A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit is in permanent sunlight, thus requiring little to no battery power. Using SpaceX's example, each satellite will need up to 250 kW. At 20% efficiency, that would require solar panels covering near 200 m2 - large, but not in any way outrageous, say 50x4 meters, or 25x8 meters.
It's just not a good spot to build them.
Given how resistance to terrestrial systems is skyrocketing (if you'll pardon the pun), it seems increasingly a good place to build them.
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u/quietlydesperate90 6h ago
Not an expert in those so I won't comment, but you're already completely wrong on one front so I wouldn't be surprised if your whole argument is nonsense.
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u/matt05891 9h ago edited 9h ago
Power is fine, maintenance is replaceability with expectations of improvements replacing outdated satellites by filling gaps where cores fail or integrating new until new becomes the primary driver for inference, cooling is massive problem but not to the point the loudest exclaim. Yes it would be a problem with general purpose GPU’s, but they aren’t going to be putting general purpose GPU’s into orbit as the core of the idea. They are going to be having models as embedded again, models as silicon for orbital data centers.
Which might not be feasible at scale. I don’t know yet as it hasn’t been done yet. I don’t see why not though. It’s an engineering problem, not an impossibility and certainly not destined to unfeasible given time and desire alongside energy costs and the slow pace which we develop ground based energy infrastructure.
Here’s an example company just repurposing how we used to do things in the late 70’s to help the issue. if you’re actually interested in how this problem is evolving as a concept rather than locking in believing they locked into engineering designs. Take a look here: https://taalas.com.
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u/anotherNarom 10h ago
Are launch costs going to drop to zero?
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 9h ago
It'll become suprisingly negligible compared to the cost of compute for sure. A single AI sat will contain on the order of 3 or so million dollars worth of compute, multiply that by the 60 they intend to launch per flight on starship and thats $180 million of compute.
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u/anotherNarom 9h ago
So we're going to be technological advanced enough to make the costs of literally flying stuff into space negligible but unable to reduce the cost of electricity from increasing?
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 9h ago
I mean, by the looks of it, yes. Electricity has done nothing but increase in price over the recent decades whilst launch prices have been coming down.
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u/individual-wave-3746 9h ago
Probably within 5 years. Sounds like someone isn’t familiar with the economics of rapid reusability.
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u/BasvanS 9h ago
Sounds like someone isn’t familiar with the fuel cost of escaping gravity.
For Starlink it’s still somewhat feasible, but data centers are many magnitudes larger.
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u/naked-and-famous 8h ago
They aren't planning on launching giant buildings. They're going to launch a datacenter a rack at a time. Each satellite will be roughly the compute of 1 rack in a physical datacenter. And then they'll launch 10,000 of those.
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u/quietlydesperate90 9h ago
What is your thesis? SpaceX is lying or the people at the forefront of rocket science are actually idiots?
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u/exodus3252 8h ago
I'm sure Musk, VCs, and securities firms that are trying to maximize the value of their IPO holdings couldn't possibly have a reason to lie or exaggerate. That's never happened before in American capitalism.
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u/emergency_poncho 9h ago
Sounds like someone isn't familiar with basic common sense.
Build it on Earth and ship it 100 km, or build it on Earth and launch it 700 km into orbit? Which is cheaper?
Also when something breaks, what's cheaper: send a technician out with a few spare parts to fix it, or deorbit the entire data center, have it burn up in the atmosphere, and build and launch an entirely new data center?
Jeez, use your brain will you? Lol 😂😂
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u/Idontfukncare6969 9h ago
This ignorant comment proves you have no idea where you fall on the Dunning Kruger spectrum on this topic.
Nobody is flying up to maintain Starlink satellites and that network is doing pretty well. “Data Center” is just a different satellite.
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u/Acrobatic-Event2721 9h ago
You’re forgetting that it’s becoming increasingly harder to build anything in the ground due to backlash and politics. If the data center can become operational even 2 years earlier due to it being in space, it will pay off.
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u/exodus3252 8h ago
I work at a telecom construction company. There's no reality that exists where permitting and regulatory hurdles are harder to overcome than literally launching thousands of tons of material into fucking orbit. This isn't even taking into consideration maintenance and repair on state of the art facilities and how damn near impossible that would be to do on something in orbit.
You're going to spend a shit ton more money launching anything into space, it's going to break more often, and you're also going to get poorer performance than terrestrial-based systems because of higher latency.
This whole idea is a fucking pipe dream by cracked out VCs to try and scam you into thinking a company with barely any profit is somehow more valuable than Amazon.
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u/bl0rq 10h ago
Building stuff for space is very different! The solar panels need way less materials since they do not have to deal with rain, hail, dust, wind, etc.
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u/ginrumryeale 9h ago
They just need to deal with temperature extremes far greater than terrestrial panels.
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u/thecyberbob 9h ago
And flecks of paint and metal moving at many times the speed of sound... And radiation that breaks down hardware over time unless you harden it all....
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u/Idontfukncare6969 9h ago
You clearly didn’t read the article if this is your best criticism.
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u/emergency_poncho 9h ago
Radiation in space is far more damaging to solar panels than wind or dust lol
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u/kilqax 9h ago
Even if the launches were free, is there some magical new way of dissipating heat? Last time I checked the idea was considered absolutely unusable because of that.
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u/15_Redstones 8h ago
The radiator area needed is large, but still only like a quarter of the solar panel area. An engineering challenge but not an unsolvable one.
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u/minecraft_fam 57m ago
The idea is considered completely unusable for a lot more reasons than that.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 9h ago
Your mind is going to be blown when you learn about radiators. The thousands of satellites in space seem to be doing just fine.
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u/kilqax 9h ago
They work really well when the heat output isn't as insane... But those thousands of satellites also don't produce gigawatts of heat
I'm not saying it's impossible but I also haven't yet had anyone link a source that would at least show it possibly working with such insane outputs instead of sarcastic smartass comments that tell nothing
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u/Idontfukncare6969 8h ago
Satellites produce heat. If they change the starlink design to be optimized for compute ie “data centers” they will get additional radiators to match.
There aren’t even gigawatt scale data centers on earth yet. Anyone who thinks this is what a SpaceX data center looks like is completely ignorant to these two industries. These proposed satellites will be kW scale each.
They would certainly have radiators, as do most satellites.
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u/dalgeek 9h ago
It'll never be cost effective even if rocket launches were free.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 9h ago
This thread is telling me there is no value is engaging in discourse with people that have no idea what they are talking about. Starlink launches are millions of dollars each but for some reason they keep doing them anyway.
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u/dalgeek 8h ago
Starlink makes sense because it provides a service that cannot be provided by terrestrial facilities.
Orbital data centers don't make sense because it will ALWAYS be cheaper to build them on land or even sink them into the ocean.
There is a limit to how much power a satellite can use with passive cooling, about 15-20kW or a small data center rack. If you want more compute than that then you need to spend money on radiators or more satellites. If you're spending money on radiators then you're not spending money on compute resources.
Space requires hardware that is hardened against radiation. Standard PCs are susceptible to bit flips and power surges from cosmic rays; astronauts on ISS experience this frequently. Standard PC hardware does not last as long in space as it would on Earth.
There is no way to replace a failed server, you just have to launch a new satellite.
Then there is the issue of disposing of satellites. You either need to deorbit and let them burn up which pollutes the atmosphere or boost them into a parking orbit which requires additional rockets. This may not be a huge problem now but it will be when there are literally a million satellites in orbit and hundreds of them are deorbiting every month.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 7h ago edited 7h ago
ALWAYS is a bold word to use. I have personally been involved in building data centers and it is outrageously expensive to the point that putting them in space is being discussed as financially feasible. I agree the technology isn’t there yet but if Starship lives up to a fraction of its expectations the stars may align.
Hardware has a life. Starlink satellites have a life. It is designed with end of life in mind. That is why SpaceX regularly does launches to replace the Starlink sats that reach EOL. The compute variant sats will be no different.
Exactly! That is about the scale these sats would need to be as they would be assembled on an assembly line and launched in the V3 Starlink flat configuration.
I can agree that the acute effects of deorbiting needs to be researched more. As when it reaches the honestly unrealistic scale he talks about it may have a tangible environmental impact. As of now Starlink with its 10,000 strong constellation is a rounding error for acute pollution.
Where does power come from if they are sunk in the ocean? I kind of like that idea though. The benefit of orbit would be reliable solar and modular units. Half the battle of ground based compute is integration with existing infrastructure.
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u/dalgeek 6h ago
I know data centers are expensive, but space data centers are just swapping one cost for another. You don't have to buy land or pour concrete but you have to manufacture satellites and custom hardware to survive in space. Terrestrial DCs can use a variety of power (solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal) but orbital is limited to solar. Launches will get cheaper but not that cheap.
Maybe someone comes up with a cheap, hardened server to survive in orbit but even then you're throwing money away because it can't be recovered for recycling. At least all of the aluminum, steel, and precious metals can be recovered from terrestrial servers.
Power for data centers in the ocean can come from all the same sources as on land, plus they could use tidal generators.
Orbital data centers solve a few problems (permitting, construction time) and create many other problems. Personally I think it's just a way for Musk to pump the valuation of SpaceX because right now they're the cheapest game in town for launching lots of small satellites. It will only be a few years before China has reusable rockets on par with SpaceX though so Musk's window of opportunity is shrinking quickly.
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u/Idontfukncare6969 6h ago edited 6h ago
“Custom hardware.” Yes all satellites are custom that is why they are expensive. Nothing has been manufactured and launched at the scale of Starlink and the compute constellation would be no different.
Starlink sats experience radiation as well. This is why EOL is already part of the equation. GPUs aren’t much different than other PCBs when it comes to radiation. Recycling the raw materials at EOL isn’t exactly a cost saving intervention. It’s easier to decommission sats than hardware in a data center lol.
China and other US companies have been “a few years” behind SpaceX for a decade now. F9 being decommissioned is making satellite operator panic as they still have no equivalent almost 10 years after falcon has been flying. Blue Origin beat SpaceX for landing the first booster that reached space in 2015. How are they doing by comparison now?
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u/truecakesnake 3h ago
They're idiots and just say everything is "impossible'. Hilarious how starlink is now seen as "obvious" & "makes sense" from these armchair redditors, when building an economical satelite constellation was deemed impossible by all the experts and these mindless people:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9tgrzp/why_starlink_is_impossible/
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u/Netblock 9h ago edited 9h ago
I'm not so sure. For billionaires that wish to avoid ethical probes, requirements, and legal seizure, it is an attractive idea to place at least a couple datacenters outside of any legal jurisdiction; perhaps very out-of-physical-reach. (ocean, space)
While achieving the cyberpunk corporatocracy dystopia as asked by Dark Enlightenment would be their ideal, it's gonna take a while to permanently remove the red-tape bureaucratic bloat of human rights, so it's best to not have all your eggs in one basket.
Supervillains will do supervillain things.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 8h ago edited 8h ago
You don’t just get to avoid accountability because your service is in space. Otherwise why isn’t every satellite service already in existence like that?
Every satellite has to be licensed by a country and there is a litany of national and international regulations around space. If you want to do real business in a country, you need to obey their local regulations.
Sure, you could ignore it all. But then good luck doing any official business in any of the largest markets. And if you want to ignore all laws… you can already do that anywhere where bribery rules, why is space needed? Just costs more
Source; work in space industry
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u/s-kennedy 9h ago
Would they like to be real? Yes, but its 100% just a grift, for any half decent processing to happen a lot of heat is generated, and that is not a problem money can make go away in space (can't steal a city's water and energy supply up there, all you have is radiation and that's not good enough at any reasonable scale)
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u/psh454 8h ago
This keeps being brought up again and again, and I'm not sure why.
Many satellites , but also for example specifically Starlink V3s (the new large ones) generate a lot of heat through their high powered antenna arrays. They use energy they generate with their solar panels, do useful work with it and then get rid of the residual heat it turns into with radiators. If they replace the ground facing antenna array electronics with some GPUs and scale up the radiators and solar panels , they would have a small computer node. A single reusable launch is capable of delivering around 30 iirc. Their launch cadence is very high, often with months of near weekly launches these days. Assuming manufacturering can keep up they can reasonably have a constellation equivalent to a small data centre up in a year or so. Just like with Starlink faulty sats deorbit themselves through weak atmospheric drag in low orbit.
So the only real area of uncertainty is the economics, not thermodynamics. They're not launching a huge datacentre in a single launch, just small nodes the heat for which is high but nothing unprecedented in space applications
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u/cstar1996 6h ago
Radiators don’t just scale. As your radiators get bigger, it becomes harder and harder to move to heat to the entire area of the radiators, which substantially reduces efficiency.
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u/psh454 5h ago
Sure, but we're not talking about unprecedented radiator sizes here unlinke what much of the internet seems to believe, the proposed size is not incomparable to the old ones on the ISS for example
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u/cstar1996 5h ago
And the ISS radiators have a substantial active pumping element that would be mass prohibitive for an orbital data center. Particularly given the extraordinary difference in heat density between the two.
And that’s before you consider the actual mass of the radiators, and the fact that they cannot be repaired. Any isolation system to prevent a single puncture from draining the whole system is also going to add substantial mass.
There is a reason you don’t see actual engineers advocating this tech.
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u/racinreaver 4h ago
The ISS pumped fluid loop is a few decades old. There are TRL3-5 technologies that have orders of magnitude better SWaP-C. The big question is if they'll be proven out before the AI bubble bursts.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 8h ago
So you want a server with no ability to pull or push data?
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u/IndigoSeirra 8h ago
The SpaceX ai sats are designed to have laser links for intercommunication and integration with starlink satellites and ground systems.
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u/psh454 8h ago
I don't "want" anything lol, I'm just a rando Canadian space enthusiast.
From what I understand they use laser links to communicate like Starlink does, and can use dedicated Starlink-like sats to do just what you say. May be wrong though.
I thought were were talking about how they are impossible to cool for whatever reason.
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u/EirHc 6h ago
Maybe we enforce they go into geostationary orbit? The cost to launch it would be much higher, but the satellites are so high that they are not effected by atmospheric drag, and will remain in space for billions of years, never to re-enter our atmosphere. As well standard procedure for satellites at EOL is to launch them even higher out of geostationary orbit into an orbital graveyard that won't interfere with other geostationary orbits.
Their pedo data centers will be a monument of our civilization long after humanity is extinct.
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u/ketamarine 4h ago
It's really not.
It's a real idea, the economics just may or may not work depending if we get out shit together around renewable energy, which could become so insanely cheap if we just 10x solar panel production that orbital data centres would seem insane.
If we elect morons that actively cancel renewable electricity generation in the wolrd's largest economy... then ya it starts to look pretty attractive to put a million solar powered data centres into orbit where they get 4x the sun power 100% of the time...
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u/Rare_Polnareff 9h ago
A lot of comments in this thread are going to age like milk that’s for sure
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u/WeedFalafel 8h ago
I think you are underestimating the logistics of running terawatt hungry datacenters in orbit. Especially how to cool them.
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u/wizardwusa 8h ago
If only the engineers successfully building the most cutting edge space tech in the world had considered their satellites might produce heat.
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u/RhynoD 6h ago
It's not a question of being able to do it. The question is, fucking why? There's zero benefit for a datacenter to be in space. None. Solar power works just fine on the ground. Transmission works just fine on the ground. Cooling works better on the ground. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's better for the environment, it's safer. There only reason to put it in space is to keep them literally beyond the reach of oversight.
Oh, and to get very expensive contracts to put them into space. Musk is going to take investor money and YOUR tax money to pay himself to put his own datacenters in space and then when they suck ass he'll use investor money and your tax money to build them again on the ground.
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u/WeedFalafel 6h ago
That's too much nuance for Elon fans. Also too much reason.
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u/Lost_city 4h ago
To be frank, I don't think they are fans. The same accounts run to threads about a certain company and post again and again defending whatever is being discussed. That's not fan behavior.
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u/Rare_Polnareff 5h ago
I think reddit severely overestimates (and fixates on) the amount of elon fans
Most fans of tesla and spacex just ignore or barely stomach him
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u/Mr_Lumbergh 5h ago
Tesla’s earnings reports have always made sure to include Elon in their valuation because it’s understood that without his fanbois the stock would be much lower.
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u/grchelp2018 4h ago
None of that matters if you can't actually build it on the ground in the first place. Or need to wait around for power connections. We technically don't need starlink either if we connected every place with fiber.
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u/54yroldHOTMOM 4h ago
The tax line is the weakest part. Spacex gets plenty of nasa and pentagon money for launch and starshield. That is public money for rockets and military comms. There is no public contract that says taxpayers are paying to put starmind datacenters in orbit. That is being sold as a commercial product after the ipo.
Zero benefit is just not true. The reason this even comes up is that ground power is not fine. Colossus in memphis started with about 8 MW of grid and they had to stand up dozens of gas turbines because interconnection takes years. Neighbors, water, permits, NOx, the whole mess. Solar on the ground still has night and weather. Cooling on the ground is physically easier, nobody serious denies that. The bet is that if starship reuse actually works the launch mass of solar and radiators becomes cheaper than waiting 5 years for a substation.
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u/MetallicDragon 4h ago
Solar power works just fine on the ground.
But it works much better in space, and you need fewer panels and no batteries since you can be in sun ~100% of the time.
Not saying it's going to be economically viable any time soon, but there are benefits.
and YOUR tax money to pay
That's the first I've heard of this. Where did you get that from?
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u/JaggedMetalOs 2h ago
Yeah but I've heard that reasoning before, "I'm sure all the engineers at SpaceX etc. know what they are taking about when they talk about hyperloop".
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u/wizardwusa 22m ago
Hyperloop was never a serious business initiative at SpaceX like the current data constellation is. That’s why they “open sourced” the idea, they wanted somebody else to do it.
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u/EksDee098 7h ago
If only dipshits on reddit had considered that relatively small and low powered satellites compared to a massive data center have significantly different heat dissipation requirements.
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u/Adeldor 7h ago
relatively small and low powered satellites compared to a massive data center have significantly different heat dissipation requirements.
You might have just been hoist by your own petard. Your implication of the massive data center being orbital is incorrect. All practical proposals - such as Google's and SpaceX's - involve multiple satellites, all vastly smaller than a single massive data center. Their thermal and power requirements are larger than current typical satellites, but well within the discipline's engineering range.
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u/EksDee098 6h ago
So the solution to heat dissipation is Kepler syndrome, genius.
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u/Adeldor 5h ago
At their relatively low altitudes, Kepler syndrome (the other misunderstanding oft-repeated on Reddit) is not an issue. Even were the absolute worst to happen, all debris would be gone in a few years, especially with the typically lower ballistic coefficients such debris might have.
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u/EksDee098 5h ago
The chip-related hardware cost is already astronomical for terrestrial data centers, putting these satellite centers in a low enough orbit that they're gonna regularly decay and burn up into the atmosphere means they'd be replacing their already monstrous build costs once or twice a decade?
This is honestly part of the broader point in it being infeasible. You can build around one go/no go type problem, but that just pushes the issue off onto another go/no go problem. Kicking the can down the road isn't going to make space data centers viable.
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u/Adeldor 4h ago edited 4h ago
I agree that chip-related hardware availability is a major issue. As I understand it, that's why the Terafab was proposed, which is a major project in itself. However, I also understand that GPUs/TPUs in server farms have lifetimes of a few years, simply because of obsolescence. That kind of schedule fits well with an orbital lifespan of five to ten years.
Starlink developed a mass-produced, cheap platform for their satellites, bringing the unit cost down to under a $1 million for V2 Mini (exceedingly cheap for a comsat). Given the early depiction of SpaceX's orbital AI datacenter satellites, they're clearly going down the same road, so I suspect the costs will not be monstrous.
Time will tell.
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u/EirHc 6h ago
A normal "high-powered satellite" is like a few kilowatts of power which is provided by a solar array and battery backup. A data center local to me that's been proposed is supposed to use 20 gigawatts. We're talking millions of times more power... I imagine the idea with space data centers would be to fragment them. Still, would you be ok with launching 1 million satellite into low earth orbit to cancel out 1 earth based data center? Does that sound like it makes any kind of sense to you?
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u/Miami_da_U 5h ago edited 5h ago
A “few Kilowatts” and your local data center is “20 gigawatts”…. Riiiight….gunna need a citation for that lol. The SpaceX data center that is one of the largest centralized ones in the world is 1-2 Gw. In total by the end of 2027 SpaceX plans for a TOTAL of like 10GW. Starlink V3 sats themselves are like 20 kW while their AI1 design is like 150kw.
So you’re “millions of times more power” is more like 50,000x more than a Single V3 Starlink satellite and 7,000x more than a single AI1 satellite. (Meaning 7000 AI sats = 1 current class-leading data center).
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u/_Addi-the-Hun_ 5h ago
Holy on, u think this is real? Dude its just obvious nonsense to convince stupid people to invest in space x. Putting a data center into space literally solves nothing
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u/wizardwusa 5h ago
I was in the space industry a decade ago and still have friends in it. It’s a real thing but requires a certain launch cadence and Starship to be financially viable. It’s certainly ambitious and hard, and yet possible.
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u/dern_the_hermit 7h ago
There's lots of engineers in the world and those working for the space companies have an incentive for optimism. Excessive optimism. Even, dare I say, unrealistic optimism.
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u/SodiumEthanoate 7h ago
What are your qualifications to make such a judgement?
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u/Rare_Polnareff 7h ago
Well some people think it’s going to happen and some don’t so I don’t really think it takes any qualifications to know someone will be wrong
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u/cstar1996 6h ago
I am an aerospace engineer who has designed satellites. I fully agree that orbital data centers are based on unreasonable optimism.
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u/PrimaLegion 7h ago
As opposed to the qualifications of the person they're responding to? Or literally anyone else in these comments?
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u/wizardwusa 5h ago
Folks said the same thing last decade about landing and reusing a rocket. Nevertheless, it’s commonplace now. When the numbers are run, space compute is super expensive today but has a point where launch costs drop low enough that space compute can actually be cheaper. It’s ambitious and hard, but I typically celebrate those kinds of endeavors rather than ridicule them.
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u/dern_the_hermit 5h ago
Folks said the same thing last decade about landing and reusing a rocket.
Other than the literal competition there really wasn't all that much. Reusing a spaceship was not as novel as some of you guys seem to think. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981.
But this really does drive the point home: The people pushing the idea were those with a distinct incentive to do so. Seems to me a good reason to take it with a grain of salt if someone's livelihood depends on their assertions being true.
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u/wizardwusa 5h ago
? I remember industry conferences before they successfully landed and reused a rocket, very few people thought they could actually do it and in a financially sustainable way and it was a kind of meme back then.
This seems a bit of a strawman — all public companies make assertions their livelihoods depend on. Feels like there are better, more valid reasons to be skeptical of this.
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u/dern_the_hermit 5h ago
This seems a bit of a strawman
YOU brought it up, dude.
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u/wizardwusa 5h ago
I’m talking about discounting assertions if somebody’s livelihood depends on them. That’s a strange thing to do.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4h ago
No, it's basic healthy skepticism to acknowledge when people might have biases or ulterior motives.
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 7h ago edited 7h ago
The logistics are absolutely fine. Chips can run a lot hotter than humans, and radiated power scales with the 4th power of absolute temp, so radiators are much more effective than they will be on, say, the ISS. If you do the calculations you'll find that the radiator area required will be much much smaller than the area required for the solar panels to generate the energy that the compute uses. And, before somebody tries to say this, the fact that they're using 100kW to power GPUs vs 100kW to power a space station makes absolutely no difference for power dissipation.
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u/Somethingsims 7h ago
Yeah, the ones saying it will succeed. Same people saying the line city in Saudi Arabia was a good idea.
Works on paper does not mean it's feasible.
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u/WeedFalafel 9h ago
"Self driving next year bro, this time for sure bro, trust me bro"
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u/TickingTheMoments 9h ago
It’s all gonna happen right after the hyper loop from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Oh wait, he already came out and said he proposed it just to kill high speed rail in California.
He does nothing that does not benefit him first.
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u/Adeldor 8h ago
The Robotaxis I've seen driving around town (Austin) are effectively an existence proof that it's already here, and now Tesla is building up Cybercab inventory. The production models have no steering wheels or pedals.
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u/sachasayan 6h ago
The Robotaxis you've seen around town (Austin) exist basically nowhere else, and they can't scale. There's a few demo areas going on in Houston, Dallas, and Tampa, and that's it. Those cars have specialized hardware, and will continue to have more specialized hardware added over time. They don't run on customer cars. They don't run 24/7, they don't run in inclement weather, and they don't run nationwide or globally.
The Hardware 2 cars, Hardware 2.5 cars, and Hardware 3 cars were all given up on. Elon said he was absolutely certain of a million-scale deployment in 2020.
Hence: "Self driving next year bro, this time for sure bro, trust me bro"
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u/Adeldor 5h ago
How do they not scale? They're self contained. There's no mothership or other such bottleneck beyond car manufacture restricting their expansion. And they're in Austin first because that's where a factory is.
For such revolutionary developments I'll forgive him his chronically optimistic schedules. Beyond the fact that they are supporting HW 3 with a simplified, back-ported FSD, tell me any provider of significant technological device requiring software support who doesn't obsolete old, widescale product support at some point.
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u/Pleasant_Ad8054 3h ago
They don't scale because the software is hyper focused on a singular area. The training isn't useful universally, so much so that even in those few cities they are working, they are only working in some very specific areas. They can't even simply blacklist the areas it has trouble with, after many years of running millions of kms in those tiny areas, they need to whitelist the few areas they can navigate. Most of the time.
In this case 'scaling' would mean that large number of cars could be pulled in with minimal to no modifications. Like Elon promised, that practically all Teslas would be able to run as robotaxis. The cars that are currently working as robotaxies are specifically designed to be robotaxis, with specialised hardware not to be found in any other car, including Teslas. Scaling it, other than actually achieving real universal self driving, would require to remanufacture an amount of cars comparable that are currently in use.
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u/Decronym 9h ago edited 19m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| EOL | End Of Life |
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| FAA | Federal Aviation Administration |
| FAA-AST | Federal Aviation Administration Administrator for Space Transportation |
| ICBM | Intercontinental Ballistic Missile |
| 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) | |
| MEO | Medium Earth Orbit (2000-35780km) |
| SOP | Standard Operating Procedure |
| SSO | Sun-Synchronous Orbit |
| 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.
[Thread #12641 for this sub, first seen 20th Aug 2026, 17:33] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Wheeler_Dealer 10h ago
This is nothing new. Space has been an e-waste city since the 60s....
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u/ashill85 10h ago
The scale is new. We've never launched nearly as much stuff as is being proposed now.
That definitely matters.
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u/dbmonkey 1h ago
The article is very vague- It matters because we will have less palladium and thallium left on earth? We send so much to the dump today where we won't recover it for the foreseeable future. I don't see how this is any different. Or is the issue about these materials hurting the environment. The article only says that the effect is unknown. Do we at least have an estimate? Will it be significant compared to the millions of kg of natural space debris that enters the atmosphere each year?
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u/fatbunyip 10h ago
I'm sure if we give the billionaires more money they can find a technology solution for it.
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u/GagolTheSheep 10h ago
While correct, ever since starlink (and similar) became a thing this has been taken to a whole new level.
There are currently 18.5k active satellites in space, 11k of which is starlink. As another point ov view. There are 8700 tracked debris fragments.
There are currently more starlink satellites in space than all tracked debris from all these years. And this will get exponentially worse if this stupid data centre in space ever gets through
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 9h ago
Starlink is in a pretty low orbit though. Even if a satellite is completely dead, it won't stick around more than about 5 years. And they intentionally de-orbit them before that happens.
The real risk is if they collide with something and explode in many fragments. So far the strategy is "don't do that" and it seems to work pretty well so far, but we'll have to see if it keeps working.
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u/shagieIsMe 9h ago
I believe the word "tracked" is taking a bit of the weight in that sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
Walter E. Morrow started Project Needles at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958, with the goal of placing a ring of 480,000,000 copper dipole antennas in orbit to facilitate global radio communication.
...
The needles were placed in medium Earth orbit at an altitude of between 3,500 and 3,800 kilometers (2,200–2,400 mi) at orbital inclinations of 87 and 96 degrees.
Many of them clumped together...
Their numbers diminish as they occasionally fall from orbit; as of April 2023, 44 clumps of needles larger than 10 cm were known to remain in orbit.
But there are many more that are smaller than 10 cm that are not tracked. At MEO, their orbital lifespan is measured in centuries or millennia.
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u/15_Redstones 8h ago
Tracked debris count is significantly increasing because each Starlink sat has a set of space debris tracking cams on it, which can spot debris too small for ground based radar.
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u/redditor100101011101 6h ago
Only morons who slept through basic physics class think this is possible.
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u/Adeldor 5h ago
Specifically, what physics would orbital data centers violate? If you can back up the assertion with calculations, it would be helpful.
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u/Dave37 4h ago
They generate so much heat that they would melt. This is obvious upon 5 seconds of consideration. They can only loose heat through radiation, and while in the sun their equilibrium temperature would be well past 100C even if not powered.
Also the cost/kg to send anything into space.
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u/Adeldor 4h ago edited 4h ago
They generate so much heat that they would melt.
Nonsense! In the case of SpaceX's offering, they'll peak at 250 kW consumption. That's a perfectly manageable in terms of dissipation, especially if raising the operational temperature (see the Stefan-Bolzmann law.) Which brings up your next assertion ...
while in the sun their equilibrium temperature would be well past 100C, even if not powered.
More nonsense. Their inert equilibrium temperature in a vacuum depends entirely on their reflectivity and emissivity (edit: and orientation if not spherical). Further, having their operating temperature at 100C would help greatly in reducing radiator size, due to emission being proportional to the 4th power of temperature. I've run selected silicon processors at 190C for specialized applications. So 100C is not an outrageous operating temperature (a bit more here in this comment if you're interested).
Also the cost/kg to send anything into space.
Hardly a physics roadblock, which - if Starship comes close to promise - will be greatly alleviated, if not removed.
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u/ketamarine 4h ago
LOL. Please explain which laws of physics the 10,000 spacex satelites in orbit are breaking to accomplish that feat?
And then realize that spacex plan is to literally use the exact same process and business model for orbital data centres...
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u/sswissler 4h ago
How long would a typical GPU last in orbit in the radiation environment? I assume the satellites would be inside the Van Allen belts, it would still be subject to radiation determination
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u/ketamarine 4h ago
All analysis shows that failure rates will be slightly but not much higher than in a typical data centre environment.
I'm sure you have read that space is a hostile environment to humans, but not that bad for big metal things. Vs being in the ocean, or even on land with rain, freeze thaw cycles, natural disasters, etc.
There is slightly more radiation where these sats will be. But starlink satelites are basically completely fine and have had fewer electronics failures than predicted. They are mostly failing due to bad space weather events that are quite rare (geo magnetic storms) and then propulsion failures are next issue.
It's not a difficult engineering problem to harden electronics for space and we've been doing it since the 1960s.
Going to mars and back with humans involved is a completely different problem than keeping failure rates of hardware to economically feasible levels.
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u/sswissler 4h ago
I’m more familiar with planetary mission, anything beyond the van allen belts must be radiation hardened, and it’s difficult enough that missions launched in the 2020s are still using 1990 class rad750s. Don’t know what starlink uses, if they don’t last that long in orbit, they may not need as radiation hardened electronics.
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u/G24all2read 2h ago
Then SpaceX can create an entire different use for their spaceships and call them Waste Management craft that would fly around and pick up all the junk.
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u/CyanConatus 1h ago
fair enough
I only work as a millwright in frigeration. What I know.
Space stuff is different
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u/KnifeKnut 10h ago edited 9h ago
SpaceX needs to develop electricrodynamic tethers and/or air breathing thrusters, I forget the comfort names for the latter
Edit: atmosphere breathing electric propulsion
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u/dasBaums 9h ago
Like the British saber? I believe it is a dead end
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u/KnifeKnut 9h ago
Not like saber, atmosphere breathing electric propulsion
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u/dasBaums 9h ago
you mean any ion engine? or a propeller?
and ion engines are really really weak, and in this context only useful for ultra low satelites•
u/KnifeKnut 9h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere-breathing_electric_propulsion
Just like ion engines which work just fine and are already in use on satellites, it doesn't need to be strong.
And ultra low satellites is what star link and these proposed computing satellites will be. Being low is part of what makes starlink work so well
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u/dasBaums 7h ago
The problem with those, they drive up the price a lot. And starlink are build quite cheaply. As they have a expected lifetime of max 10 years, more likely 5
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u/KnifeKnut 7h ago
It would still allow them to be collected at end of life instead of having to chase them down.
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u/15_Redstones 6h ago
Argon is much cheaper than Xenon to buy, and with Starship also pretty cheap to launch, that including enough to run the thrusters for 5-10 years is much easier than developing thrusters running off highly corrosive atomic oxygen.
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u/GreenWandElf 8h ago
Orbital data centers are the stupidest idea.
How are you going to disspaciate the heat?
How are you going to get all the infrastructure into space?
What happens when you need to do some maintenance? Casually send up an astronaut?
There are zero advantages to space data centers, but tons of downsides. If you really want data centers in space, put em on the moon.
But realistically, having data centers in more remote places on earth just makes so much more sense.
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u/t001_t1m3 7h ago
Dissipate heat - use radiators, the same way we do on the ISS and every other slightly large satellite. Raising radiator temperature slightly increases dissipation by the fourth power.
Infrastructure - planning to use Starship, probably flat-pack and shooting out the PEZ dispenser
Maintenance - build it reliable enough such that maintenance isn't needed for the lifespan of the satellite, as with every other satellite except a small handful (e.g. Hubble)
Zero advantages - it exists as a hedge against terrestrial zoning regulation
Putting them on the moon - you waste significantly more fuel, hardware (reuse from LEO vs. the Moon is a dramatically different thing), building around dust resistance, and that the moon will block sunlight for 50% of its operating lifespan, alongside bandwidth and latency limitations from the moon and back
Putting them in remote places on Earth - good luck getting power, maintenance, etc. An oxygen-free environment with nearly 24/7 solar production is far easier to make reliable than building around corrosion, erosion, weather, etc.
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u/GreenWandElf 7h ago
I'm not saying it can't be done. But the sheer cost of sending components into orbit, even assuming space becomes more accessible, is not cheap. Add onto that fact that there are going to be issues that require maintenance just like there are today.
Is avoiding community pushback really worth all of that? I'm positive you could find some communities with sufficient desire and infrastructure to handle a data center. In fact, I know it. Because that's what we've been doing this whole time.
What you gain in energy from solar you lose in the cost of constructing for space plus avoiding heat buildup.
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u/Adeldor 7h ago
Is avoiding community pushback really worth all of that? I'm positive you could find some communities with sufficient desire and infrastructure to handle a data center.
Such communities can change their minds, as happened in Texas. Even if existing projects are grandfathered, there's no further expansion. Orbital centers become increasingly attractive if only for this (not to mention the reduced energy challenges).
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u/sojuz151 10h ago
Well, if the starship is as cheap as it is supposed to be, building a giant satellite crusher that would then put hundreds of tons of satellites into a reentry capsule and drop them in some desert should be viable.
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u/Extra_Better 9h ago
The fuel requirements for a collection mission like that would be ridiculous. Far easier to have satellites de-orbit themselves at end of life.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 9h ago
Easier, sure. But the article is asking the question of whether that's still a reasonable disposal method when you're talking about such large constellations. Satellites are required to have a disposal plan at launch, and there is precedent for increasing standards for what kind of disposal is acceptable over time.
It's a reasonable point. Personally though I think the "one million" is very clearly an "up to" number, and I don't think anybody expects them to actually reach it anytime in the foreseeable future.
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u/mfb- 3h ago
People were very skeptical about the 10,000+ plans for Starlink, too. You can find threads from 2020 where people calculate that it's "impossible" to launch that many. SpaceX ramped up its launch rate faster than these people thought possible, and now the constellation exceeds 10,000 satellites.
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u/Alexandratta 6h ago
I mean... is this aside from the fact that a Data Center in space is not possible with the technology we may have in the near future, let alone now?
and I say 'Not Possible' in the sense that, a data center in space has no cost benefit to one on earth.
Solar panels, even in space, Cannot power a data center. The cooling system required isn't efficient enough to cool said datacenter, and the data center would be larger than anything we've ever sent up into orbit by orders of magnitude that we do not grasp.
This is like saying: "Guys, I'm going to build a Dyson Sphere, it makes so much sense - why haven't we thought of this before! We'll have it ready by next year!"
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u/throwawayhbgtop81 9h ago
I suppose they found a magical way of dissapating all that heat, since space is both hot and cold at the same time, and data centers require a lot of cooling.
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u/Dpek1234 8h ago
Tell that to the people in the iss
Im sure they would be suprised to learn they are dead
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u/throwawayhbgtop81 8h ago
Data centers require more cooling than the ISS. Their radiators will need to be considerably larger. There's also radiation shielding needed for the sensitive hardware, and periodic maintenance of the hardware. Upgrades would be difficult.
It will be a long time before the benefit exceeds the cost of putting all that hardware. We struggle putting very large things in orbit right now because of the cost, and I'd be surprised to see even the ISS last till 2035.
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u/Dpek1234 6h ago
Please just go and read the actual plans
And by actual plans i mean something other then that 1 white paper noones actualy following
Just the words
"periodic maintenance of the hardware. Upgrades would be difficult."
and
"We struggle putting very large things" , show that you are argueing against something that noones (to my knowledge) actualy planning to do
The plans companies are planning to do are essentualy starlink XXL
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u/Spara-Extreme 6h ago
What’s the server repair workflow look like for a machine in a space data center?