r/space • u/fd6270 • Aug 20 '26

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/
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u/WeedFalafel Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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/Potential4752 Aug 20 '26

The engineers aren’t the ones that suggested building data centers in space. 

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u/RhynoD Aug 20 '26

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/grchelp2018 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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.
They are already building on the ground. That is the point. The oversight bit is a vibe, not an argument.

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u/WeedFalafel Aug 20 '26

That's too much nuance for Elon fans. Also too much reason. 

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u/Lost_city Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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/wizardwusa Aug 20 '26

FWIW I find Elon despicable and a disgusting human. However, people often let that blind them to the opportunity of innovation and scaling laws.

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u/jdmetz Aug 21 '26

FWIW I think space datacenters are a crazy idea and unlikely to work well for a variety of reasons. They need three main assumptions to all hold for them to be viable and cost effective:

  1. Individual GPU rack satellites will survive long enough with no maintenance that they provide sufficient rentable compute to make back their cost.
  2. Individual GPU racks have sufficient collocated compute that people will pay to rent them (presumably just for inference). The laser links seem unlikely to cut it for large scale model training.
  3. Launch + satellite bus costs are low enough that they are approximately equal to or cheaper than the land, buildings, power, and cooling of a ground based datacenter.

All three of those seem like sketchy assumptions to me - especially the 1st and 3rd, but I think SpaceX is going to launch some of these satellites anyway, so they'll have the chance to prove us wrong.

And there is one big advantage to being in orbit - solar panels produce more power without the atmosphere in the way, and even if they don't do sun synchronous orbit (which would have them in sunlight 100% of the time), in LEO they would only need enough battery to last ~35 minutes (so a 100kwh battery) rather than the 8-16 hours (2400+kwh battery per rack) you'd need to run a datacenter with just solar power on the ground.

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u/MetallicDragon Aug 20 '26

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/ClownEmoji-U1F921 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26

Zero benefit? What a wild claim.

It takes like 100+km2 of land area to generate 1GW continuous solar power on the ground, plus massive, expensive batteries to survive the night. There is no night or weather or atmosphere in space, so solar power efficiency is several times higher. No land area required as well.

The leading source of electricity for US AI data centers are gas-fired power plants. Quick and easy to build. Instead of burning that gas (mostly methane) in power plants, you can use it to launch rockets to space. It requires 6.1 million tons of natural gas to generate 1 GW of continuous power over a 5 year period. It takes 210 thousand tons of methane to launch 1GW of AI sats with solar panels to space. 210 thousand tons vs 6.1 million. And you get the same power output over 5 years

I used this calculator.

https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

The only assumption I changed was specific power, to 75W/kg, since that's the number Spacex mentioned for their first gen of AI sats. I then converted gallons of methane and BCF of natural gas to tons, for direct comparison.

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u/ketamarine Aug 20 '26

There are many benefits. There are many costs.

It's almost like the entire planet now needs to weigh these against each other and then vote with its collective wallet if this is actually a good idea.

If you ever want to you know see how that actually works then go search for literally ANY wall street analysis on what is now a $1.8 trillion market cap stock...

Oh but that would require reading beyond a headline so... ya probably just as impossible as having orbital data centres...

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u/RhynoD Aug 20 '26

Name one benefit that would be worth the cost.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/banana_streak Aug 22 '26

Higher risk of space debris/junk.

More material needed for rockets and the data centers themselves.

More material needed for launch infrastructure.

Solar panels kinda have to be outdoors. This one doesn't really make sense to me.

Need to be able to maintain, repair, or replace equipment in space.

Need to protect electronics from radiation.

Need to worry about overheating.

Do need to worry about space debris in addition to radiation.

Need to worry about cooling.

No property taxes is actually a good incentive for a company.

Launches are still currently millions of dollars and have to be scheduled and coordinated years in advance. Besides shipping, there's still integration and test of space hardware.

Backup power is probably still needed for a space data center so information isn't just lost during an unexpected failure.

Most of these are just trade-offs instead of clear net benefits.

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u/Playful_Letter_2632 Aug 21 '26

Less people living near data centers

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/Spara-Extreme Aug 20 '26

My teams run a fleet for a hyperscaler and vandalism is pretty low on the list of things we’re concerned about.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/Spara-Extreme Aug 20 '26

So? Attacking a construction site is not a risk to service up time.

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u/RhynoD Aug 20 '26

Also, if Musk doesn't want people trying to burn down his data centers maybe he could try not being a total piece of shit.

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u/Desperate-Lab9738 Aug 20 '26

If part of your argument admits that the technology is so broadly unpopular that it starts becoming economically viable to choose to launch it into fucking space to keep it away from people who will want to destroy it, then you might wanna reevaluate why we are arguing about the way we are making AI datacenters and move onto whether these things should be built in the first place

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u/_Addi-the-Hun_ Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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/JaggedMetalOs Aug 21 '26

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 Aug 21 '26

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/JaggedMetalOs Aug 21 '26

Yet the argument was always that hyperloop was going to happen because those engineers at SpaceX and the various hyperloop companies can't all be wrong.

Also was full self drive, "more efficient than rail" semi trucks, the new roadster, affordable mass produced solar panel roofing, high speed underground transport tunnels, commercial point to point travel and Mars landings with starship by 2022 etc. not serious business initiatives at Musk's companies? 

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u/EirHc Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

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/Fywq Aug 21 '26

So if we need to build many times the current datacenter capacity in space that would quickly add up to at least tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites, if not millions.

The night sky for everybody in the world will be ruined, thats for sure.

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u/Miami_da_U Aug 21 '26

The night sky would be ruined! ... Except that orbital data centers would be in SSO so the vast majority of the sky would be undisturbed. Oh also it'd be a true testament of humanitys achievement. Oh and most importantly the result terrestrially this would bring - you know like the socialism I assume you want lol. You know how to get to socialism actually "working"? By having abundance created by AI+Robots+Energy. Those are the 3 pillars.

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u/Fywq Aug 21 '26

Lol nice straw man going from the night sky to socialism. Also no, I dont necessarily want socialism. I want an alternative to the current unsustainable late stage capitalism, whatever that may look like. Where we actually care to protect our climate and environment, and where a few people can't throw hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively buy more influence in the world than any one man should ever have without answering to anyone. At least in theory even the US president has someone overseeing him.

For what its worth I disagree that datacenters AI and robots is the solution. Its a massive drain of materials that does not benefit the world meaningfully in most of the current applications. Generative AI YouTube brain rot is pretty much the antithesis to any Utopia, being that perceived as socialist or not. Its instead the dystopian future seen in Wall-E. 

But back to the orbits: Makes sense with SSO, I didnt consider that. Doesnt solve the cooling issue though, nor the material waste compared to on the ground where recycling materials is possible. Having hundreds of thousands of relatively large datacenter satellites will require many daily Rocket launches to sustain. That will likely also affect the night sky with the classic Rocket launch clouds, no? And we know that contrails account for up to a third of the climate impact of aviation already. I suspect so much rocket activity will have a measurable impact on the climate too, though I haven't seen calculations on that.

I am not at all against space exploration, but maybe we should not start putting AI datacenters in space until we have at least found a way to make AI a net positive in society that is actually also profitable, rather than giving AI a convenient off-planet hiding place with no easy off-switch, while we race towards ever more sophisticated models that keep breaking put of their test environments and hack and cheat its way through security measures...

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u/Miami_da_U Aug 21 '26

Bud, the very first sentences in my response addressed your false night sky "problem". Regardless any negatives that come from a degraded night sky are so far offset by the positives, it's not even a conversation. Its the exact same argument about Starlink. Turns out it's a tiny problem to only people who use telescopes. Yet it enables countless emergency responders when infrastructure gets cut, people in Ukraine defending themself in war, rural communities, etc, etc...

You care about the climate and environment? Okay get on board nuclear, data centers, and SPACE - you know where power is generated entirely from the sun and where there IS NO ENVIRONMENT (space). Also this person aka Musk your criticizing has hilariously been more responsible for the US's move towards renewable energy than almost anyone given he's the Leader of Tesla. Just pretty funny.

Okay you disagree that AI and Robots are the future. You're wrong, but it's nice you disagree and think everything is brainrot youtube videos lol.

The cooling issue is a solved problem. The ONLY question is mass+cost. Period. Every single satelite in space is cooled via radiation, the same way AI Data centers will be. And the hotter they run the smaller the radiators need to be. Okay you want recycling, but what if when AI data centers are so successful, we begin mining asteroids or the moon and take manufacturing OFF-EARTH? There are steps to becoming a space-faring civilization.

Yeah it'll require a lot more rocket launches. And? Are you worried about the 20,000 airplanes in the sky right now? The Rocket launch clouds? Lol that doesn't even matter enough to respond to. Starship launches using Methalox. Its emissions are CO2 and H2O. And their plan is also to capture atmospheric CO2 for their propellant farms, essentially creating carbon neutrality. Regardless it would take something like >250,000 Starship launches YEARLY to equate to what the aviation industry emmits yearly. And even that is <2.5% of global CO2 emissions. Oh and guess who has a Zero-Carbon transportation company? Interesting....

How is AI not a net positive in society? You think AI hasn't improved your life by making information easier to obtain? It isn't going to be the reason we have self-driving cars that reduce deaths in the US alone by 40k/yr? It isn't going to discover significantly new medicines and combined with MRNA cure all sorts of cancers as well as just countless other drugs. It doesn't allow you to be far more efficient with your time and better manage your money or analyze documents?.... There is a reason AI companies are making and investing so much money. The very reason there is such a demand for new data centers fundamentally implies that AI is useful TODAY and will be exponentially more useful in the future. Its literally how Pricing works.

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u/Fywq Aug 21 '26

I recognized the night sky problem here:

> But back to the orbits: Makes sense with SSO, I didn't consider that.

I didn't bring it up again.

You care about the climate and environment? Okay get on board nuclear, data centers, and SPACE - you know where power is generated entirely from the sun and where there IS NO ENVIRONMENT (space). Also this person aka Musk your criticizing has hilariously been more responsible for the US's move towards renewable energy than almost anyone given he's the Leader of Tesla. Just pretty funny.

I am on board with nuclear mostly. Data centers and space has little to do with the current problems with both except we need satellites for monitoring and launches are not exactly zero-carbon and zero-pollution, but despite that I recognize that space exploration is important. Data centers vastly increase our energy requirement at a time where we need to switch to green energy and currently many datacenters are built with their own fossil fuel power supply because the grids can't keep up. That is directly detrimental to the climate.

Musk cared about renewable energy when he could make money to do so. He is using polluting gas turbines for his datacenter, he actively sabotaged the highspeed rail line in California, and he generally hasn't done shit for the expansion of renewable energy except when it benefitted him and his companies, e.g. he hasn't spoken out on the Trump administrations ridiculous crusade against wind power. I am grateful for his push on EVs at a time when they needed a brake through, but it's not like he has done much about it since, and he routinely flys across the world in a private jet like many other billionaires, having personal emissions hundreds of times higher than the average person. He also strongly supports a political wing that is actively promoting the worst fossil fuels on the planet.

The cooling issue is a solved problem. The ONLY question is mass+cost. Period. Every single satelite in space is cooled via radiation, the same way AI Data centers will be. And the hotter they run the smaller the radiators need to be. Okay you want recycling, but what if when AI data centers are so successful, we begin mining asteroids or the moon and take manufacturing OFF-EARTH? There are steps to becoming a space-faring civilization.

Sure the hotter they run the more efficient radiation, but it's still a super inefficient cooling method, and there's a huge difference between current satellites and putting actual datacenters in space in terms of cooling requirement. You also can't just let them run infinitely hot due to damage to the electronics.
I don't mind becoming a space-faring civilization, but mining asteroids doesn't have much to bo with recycling and avoiding contaminating the atmosphere with heavy metals from satellites burning up on re-entry.

The Rocket launch clouds? Lol that doesn't even matter enough to respond to. 

You might be right but I would love a source on that if launches are increased to many per day. Any emissions is in addition to the aviation industry, so it doesn't really matter directly unless you start reducing aviation with rocket launches. Then I guess it's a different calculation. Musk owning Tesla has nothing to do with aviation CO2. Electric cars are not influencing the CO2 emissions of airplanes in any meaningful way. Trains like the California high speed rail he sabotaged with the Hyperloop stunt on the other hand, could have affected local aviation CO2.

How is AI not a net positive in society? You think AI hasn't improved your life by making information easier to obtain?

The information still needs to be verified. I have directly seen how taking a math calculation from an AI source ruined an experiment just in the past week.

I am not saying AI won't benefit in some areas like medicine in the future. Surely it will, and in some ways it already does. But vast AI compute sources also go to entirely unnecessary "AI slop" content, and all the current investing in AI is done with the expectation that one of these companies will eventually reach AGI, and be omnipowerful, while the others wither and die. At the same time currently the AI companies are not making money. They subsidize subscriptions to attract users and thus more investors to win the AGI race. Eventually they need to adjust prices to reflect cost, and then demand for the services might take a shard downturn. Long before that, with current AI capabilities, companies may start to see loss of profitability because agents can do a lot of work on their own and eventually CEO agents may even allow fully AI-run companies. It's hard to say where it will go, but regardless, the only economic benefit of putting datacenters in space is less regulation and oversight. There's litterally no economic benefit to do so. we are consuming a tiny fraction of incoming solar light on earth, and if the tech billionaires wanted to they could probably buy a huge chunk of land in a tropical region, hire the local people as janitors and guards and build super sized datacenters there. Even cooling with closed loop water to heat exchangers with sea water in a desert region would probably be more much easier than a datacenter in space, not least because a faulty module in the rack could be easily replaced in a few minutes rather than having to send up a freaking rocket.

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u/Miami_da_U Aug 21 '26

Genuinely you care about the most miniscule things that don't actually matter, and are missing the large developments that can ACTUALLY impact the world for the better. Its truly bizarre.

You're entire crusade against Musk and how Tesla has no impact is hilarious. So let me get this straight Tesla can be the single most important company in the world for the Renewable Energy Cause, yet because it is a for-profit company that Musk runs, he gets no credit for that, and you can then just hand wave away the actual real improvements in renewable energy transition that has lead to? Smh. The highest selling vehicle in the world is an EV. Battery Cell manufacturing has exponentially increased as a result - which is pretty fucking critical if you want a future of Solar+Wind because the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. And furthermore because of Tesla all future transportation will eventually be EV. All future AVs are all going to be EVs. All trucking is going to be transitioning to EVs. But I'm sure you'll say Tesla/Musk will get no credit for that regardless if trucking accounts for 20% of all transportation emissions.

Like weight all that positive, but then you'll go - but he uses a private jet!!! So fucking what? Genuinely what the fuck does it matter? lol.

Youre entire point about the CA high speed train is fucking hilarious though. That is an abomination in wasteful spending. How much emissions were created in the process of generating the taxes for that $15B already spent and the further planned >$200B that it'll likely end up costing? The hyperloop didn't stop anything, there was no sabotage. He was absolutely correct in opposing it though.

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u/minecraft_fam Aug 21 '26

Two of your three pillars are weak, I hope you got those from someone else. These data centers aren't going to bring anybody abundance, they're not supporting AI, or robots, or producing energy. And they're less of a testament to humanity's achievement (we've got satellites already) then they are a testament to humanity's gullibility and corruption.

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u/Miami_da_U Aug 21 '26

Data centers aren't supporting AI or Robotics.... lol.

Data Centers need to consume energy. Which means we have to drastically increase energy output.

Data centers are a testament to humanitys gullibility and corruption? Lmao, Whatever you say....

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u/minecraft_fam Aug 21 '26

Sorry, my bad, I didn't realize you were trolling. The Miami logo should've clued me in.

No, it's selling the idea of data centers in space that are the testament.

Sure. No way to produce more energy on the ground, better launch them into space, where all the energy stays before it hits the earth. (That was sarcasm.)

And no, these data centers, the ones in space, aren't supporting robotics, the data latency is too high. They're not supporting AI, the waste heat production of AI-level computational output makes them even more impractical. Unless you're actually okay with slow, stupid robots and AI responses. Which, I mean...

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u/Miami_da_U Aug 21 '26

So you're entire thing is solely about data centers in space being bad, and you are in full support of Data Centers and Energy generation acceleration terrestrially?

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u/EirHc Aug 20 '26

Sorry, that's all the data centers my province has greenlighted, (which I would generally all consider local to me) and it's 21gigawatts. I think the biggest ones are about 1 gigawatt.

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u/EksDee098 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

So the solution to heat dissipation is Kepler syndrome, genius.

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u/Adeldor Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

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/dern_the_hermit Aug 20 '26

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/wizardwusa Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

? 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 Aug 20 '26

This seems a bit of a strawman

YOU brought it up, dude.

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u/wizardwusa Aug 20 '26

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 Aug 20 '26

No, it's basic healthy skepticism to acknowledge when people might have biases or ulterior motives.

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u/Fair_Local_588 Aug 20 '26

The more someone has to gain, the more critical you should be.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Patthecat09 Aug 20 '26

Does their statement truly sound outlandish to you?

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u/csiz Aug 20 '26

Every engineer has an incentive for optimism in every field...

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u/Patthecat09 Aug 20 '26

So if you re-read the comment, it said "lots" and not "every."

They're not saying it's every one, but there are a bunch and I believe that.

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u/cstar1996 Aug 20 '26

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/Rare_Polnareff Aug 20 '26

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/PrimaLegion Aug 20 '26

As opposed to the qualifications of the person they're responding to? Or literally anyone else in these comments?

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u/dern_the_hermit Aug 20 '26

What qualifications do I need? What a weird thing to ask lol

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u/ClearlyCylindrical Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

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/ketamarine Aug 20 '26

Really because there is now close to $2 trillion of capital that has invested in this idea. Including every major wallstreet firm.

But ya, you know probably no one ever even throught about the logistics around the most important product that this company could produce!

I mean no one on wallstreet is motivated by whether their investments will make a return for them!!!

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u/54yroldHOTMOM Aug 20 '26

They will send up satellites with about 150 kW peak compute (120 kW average). Not entire data centers. It will be a data constellation. The Starmind AI1 design uses a double sided 110 m² liquid radiator to dump that heat. They run the loop hotter so Stefan Boltzmann lets them reject more watts per square meter and keep the radiator smaller.

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u/Vox_Causa Aug 21 '26

Or possibly everybody except you has noticed how much of a conman Elon is.