1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites
For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - >>46878961
>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
Source? I can't immediately find anything like that.
And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve
no he won't
1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.
2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs
3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.
4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...
A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.
> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space
More corrosion. And still, interconnects.
Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
Surely given starlinks 5ish year deorbit plan, you could design a platform to hold up for that long... And instead of burning the whole thing up you could just refurbish it when you swap out the actual rack contents, considering that those probably have an even shorter edge lifespan.
These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost.
Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.
This adds weight and complexity and likely also forces a much higher orbit.
I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.
Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days for large ones. (In America.)
Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor of in-space data centers.
I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.
Maybe the AI workloads running on it achieve escape velocity? ;)
Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
That is exactly what you do - just like with Starlink - toss out the panels with attached GPUs, laser transmitter and small ion drive.
Just admit it was hyperbole.
... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.
100 years later: "why does everything taste like cadmium?"
with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.
>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.
> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.
You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!
What a cult.
5kg, 500W panel (don’t exactly know what the ratio is for a panel plus protection and frame for space, might be a few times better than this)
Say it produces about 350kWh per month before losses.
Mass to LEO is something like 10x the weight in fuel alone, so that’s going to be maybe 500kWh. Plus cryogenics etc.
So not actually that bad
I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.
Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time.
High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.
At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.
The known scammer guy? Like these ideas wouldn't pass the questions at the end of a primary school presentation.
Every DC I’ve been in (probably around 20 in total) has been multi storey.
(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)
Yes, only doubling the capex. With the benefits of, hmm, no maintenance access and awful networking?
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000. So we're at $13.3(3)/Watt. We need to double it because same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping
Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever
A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.
If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.
Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating the earth?
Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting above the clouds?
If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems, why not for a million other more sensible options?
Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.
120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which is still good.
[1] - https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr... [2] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-pos...
This is the big thing, but Elon's child porn generator in orbit will be subject to US jurisdiction, just as much as if they were in Alaska. I guess he can avoid state law.
If jurisdiction is key, you can float a DC in international waters on a barge flying the flag of Panama or similar flag of convenience which you can pretty much buy at this scale. Pick a tin-pot country, fling a few million to the dictator, and you're set - with far less jurisdiction problems than a US, Russia, France launched satellite.
The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking
What that does have to do with anything? If you want to solar-power them, you still are subject to terrestrial effects. You can't just shut off a data center at night.
> Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting above the clouds?
They'd have to fly at 50,000+ ft to be clear of clouds, I doubt you can lift heavy payloads this high using bouyancy given the low air density. High risk to people on the ground in case of failure because no re-entry.
> If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems, why not for a million other more sensible options?
How is this a fantasy? With Starlink operational, this hardly seems a mere 'fantasy'.
However, with Starship SpaceX has both done more and less than putting a banana in orbit. Less, because it's never once been a true orbit; more, because these are learn-by-doing tests, all the reporting seems to be in agreement that it could already deliver useful mass to orbit if they wanted it to.
But without actually solving full reusability for the upper stage, this doesn't really have legs. Starship is cheap enough to build they can waste loads of them for this kind of testing, but not cheap enough for plans such as these to make sense if they're disposable.
Why not?
A capacity problem can be solved by having another data center the other side of the earth.
If it's that the power cycling causes equipment to fail earlier, then that can be addressed far more easily than radiation hardening all equipment so that it can function in space.
You'll note that there is still a frame that it gets unfolded with and that you've got the additional mechanical apparatus to do the unfurling (and the human there to fix it if there are problems.
Again, you'll note that there is frame material there.
You don't have a sheet of glass on it, but space doesn't give you the mass savings you think it does.
Those are cutting edge tech (designed to work at Jupiter's distance) and that's about 40 m^2 of space (ten times more than you're describing) and they mass 176 kg ( https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-025-01190-6 ). If we assume that scales down linearly, the cutting edge technology for solar panels is 20kg for 4m^2 which is more than your estimates. ... And they have problems and can fail to deploy. https://spacenews.com/cygnus-solar-array-fails-to-deploy/ https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1105/25telstar14r/index.htm... https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-skylab-2-astronaut... https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210020397/downloads/Al...
You'll note that the Cygnus used the same design as Lucy, though smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_(spacecraft)
> Starting with the Enhanced variant, the solar panels were also upgraded to the UltraFlex, an accordion fanfold array, and the fuel load was increased to 1,218 kilograms (2,685 lb).
Digging more into Ultra Flex, https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~dbeale/ESMDCourse/Site%20Documen...
> Specific performance with 27% TJ cells: >150 W/kg BOL & > 40 kW/m3 BOL
So there's your number. 150 W/kg of solar panel array. 1 kW is about 7 kg.
They're not cheap.
https://spacenews.com/36576ousted-from-first-orion-flight-ci...
> In 2011, Orbital replaced Dutch Space on the project and gave ATK’s space components division, which was already supplying the substrates for Dutch Space’s Orion solar panels, a $20 million deal to provide UltraFlex arrays for later Cygnus flights.
Solar in space is about 5-10x as effective as solar on the ground.
Then it's roughly 10x-15x and still works.
> Invest in reality, not in billionaire's fantasies.
SpaceX has dramatically reduced payload cost already. How is that a fantasy?
There’s so much overhead you’re hand waving away to make your numbers work.
Also I'm astounded how important AI data centers are when we are running out of freshwater, to mention a thing we could easily solve with focusing our efforts on it instead of this. But yeah, surely the Space AI Data Centers (aka. "SkyNet") is the most important we must build...
Also this is just about Elon jumping the shark...