However, the amount of available land is fixed and the demand for its use is growing. Solar isn't the only buyer in this real estate market.
Availability of land for solar production isn't remotely a real problem in the near term.
https://inhabitat.com/worlds-largest-solar-project-sahara-de...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/nov/01/solar-power...
(and a retrospective from 2023 - https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ )
Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.
When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.
But yeah, I didn't include that delivering all that stuff by truck (including all the personnel) to a terrestrial PV site isn't free either.
Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
Like this argument just gets absurd: you're claiming building a data center on earth will be harder from a permitting perspective than FAA flight approval for multiple heavy lift rocket launch and landing cycles.
Mining companies routinely open and close enormous surface area mines all over the world and manage permitting for that just fine.
There's plenty of land no one will care if your build anything on, and being remote with maybe poor access roads is still going to be enormously cheaper then launching a state of the art heavy lift rocket which doesn't actually exist yet.
I wonder if this is actually true.
And permitting is challenging in part because it’s so different from place to place. Their permitting process with the FAA seems pretty streamlined.
I’m not saying this is a good idea. I’ve got a lot of SpaceX stock, and I wasn’t really happy to hear the news, this is mostly me trying to understand why they might think this is a good idea, and brainstorming out loud, with a dash of coping. Seems most here think that it’s just stupid, but then, most commenters thought Starlink was stupid, iirc, and that turned out to be wildly wrong. But it might also just be stupid this time.
Right? So if that's the case why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?
Maybe there's a concentration in VA because there's a set of deals/procedures in place with infra providers there that make it easy to scale up, similar to how DE has well developed corporate infrastructure, so everyone incorporates there. But that stops when the area hits its limit in power provision (which seems to be happening right now). In which case, being able to do this yourself end to end by putting this stuff in space with your own power generation makes it the ultimate scale-up opportunity - no real limits on space or power availability, so once you get that method down, you can mass-scale and get great economies of scale. Maintenance isn't a thing, these will be disposable.
I think that's it, money's not the limiting factor if they can pitch this successfully, which I think they will. They want massive scale without the constraints you hit when doing it on earth. I think he's aiming for scale that we haven't seen in DCs on earth.
A regular set of servers will straight up be destroyed if put on a rocket and launched into space: the motherboards and PCBs aren't mounted or rated to survive the vibration. The connectors and wiring isn't rated for that vibration. Sure, some probably make it, but you will lose machines from just launching them alone. Any electrolytic capacitors in there? If your system exposes them to vacuum or even just low pressure, then those likely die too. Solar panels? We can launch them obviously, there's a reason people send up expensive solar panels: because you're doing a lot of work making sure they'll physically survive the launch.
So of course, now you have to build a space-rated server frame, PCBs and GPUs. You ain't going to buying bulk H100's from Nvidia. And you have to package and mount it to get it both survive the launch and physically fit into the payload bay. Then you have to add a deployment system for it, sensors etc. And then you have to add an assembly system, because if it doesn't fit in one launch (you're proposing 250+ launches for power alone) then all of these systems need to be assembled in orbit. How are they going to be assembled? How are they going to be maneuvered? Even if you could rendezvous accurately with the construction orbit, we're talking months of drift from every little thing knocking stuff around, putting it into a spin, etc.
So either each of these is now a fully contained satellite, complete with manoeuvering system and power, or you're also needing to develop a robotic assembly system - with power and manoeuevering in order to manage and assemble all this.
And let's not forget mission control: every single one of these steps is incurring a bunch of labor costs to have people manage it. And not cheap labor costs: you're going from "guys who roll racks in and plug stuff in and can be trained up easily" to "space mission control operators".
Is this doable? Probably. Is this going to be in anyway cheaper then Earth? Not in the slightest, and it's not going to be close.