It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.

It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.

It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

Radiative cooling in space is not some unsolved problem.

The problem is whether it's worth the launch costs for it.

Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution

In 2024, Starcloud posted their plans to "solve" the cooling problem. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

> As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space...

They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate, they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps hectares of radiators.

They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps.

So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at all over a lifetime of decades.

This seems like the sort of "not technically impossible" problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.

The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.

Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.

It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around

While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation stealing copyright content is not okay any more

(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.

It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).

Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.

> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

That's wise.

However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:

  But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in particular come to mind:

I think he has rocket company that needs more work.

Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company.

The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project.

I really think it's that simple.

People did the calculation: radiative cooling requires smaller surface area than solar panels. So, basically, a solar panel itself can radiate heat.

Have you done a calculation yourself?

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?

A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).

There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.

It’s funny how quickly the general public forgot about the “vacuum thermos”. (Perhaps more popular before StarBucks overran society).

Those flasks don’t have any space age insulating material - mainly just a vacuum…

Technology from 1892…

What in particular is wrong/misleading in the Starcloud whitepaper, then?

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

I don’t believe you’ve considered the possibility of a data center on Pluto…

But in all seriousness, if there is a possibility of building industrial centers outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is surely not here yet. Lots of areas would need improvement.

> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power

It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)

Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator

You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.

I think it's possibly more informative to look at what happened with SolarCity and Tesla and contemplate if there's not a similar dynamic here.

> Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot.

1) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier conducting heat standing still.

2) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier in motion.

3) The heat can be transported by thermal radiation.

The first 2 require massive particles, the latter are spontaneous photons.

A thermos bottle does not simply work by eliminating the motile mass particles.

Lets consider room temperature as the outer thermos temperature and boiling hot water as the inner temperature, that is roughly 300 K and 400 K.

Thermal radiation is proportional to the fourth power of temperature and proportional to emissivity (which is between 0 and 1).

Lets pretend you are correct and thus thermally blackened glass (emissivity 1) inside the vacuum flask would be fine according to you. That would mean that the radiation from your tea to the room temperature side would be proportional to 400^4 while the thermal radiation from room temperature to the tea would be proportional to 300^4. Since (400/300) ^ 4 = 3.16 that means the heat transport from hot tea to room temperature is about 3 times higher.

If on the other hand the glass was aluminized before being pulled vacuum the heat transports are proportional to 0 * 400 K ^ 4 and 0 * 300 K ^ 4 . So the heat transport in either direction would be 0 and no net heat transport remains.

If you believe the shiny inside of your thermos flask is an aesthetic gimmick, think again.

You are making a non-comparison.

Imagine comparing a diesel engine car to an electric car, but first removing the electric motor. Does that make a fair comparison???

"A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos."

A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively narrow band around room temperature.[1] during all operational phases.

This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits around room temperature.

[1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning 20°C (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the rule).

I used to really enjoy musk's talks when he was spooling up tesla. He was an engineer and obviously the world is missing what engineers see clearly.

But now looking back and accounting for the claims he made there's a pattern.

I saw this article:

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-...

that said... he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.

I have reached the same conclusion -- this is perhaps not a distraction but an attempt to gather funds to pursue the One True Goal...

Radiative cooling scales with surface area, compute scales with volume and density. That mismatch is brutal for high-density workloads like AI training

As an engineer of the software variety, logically heat dissipation would seem like a difficult problem.

But SpaceX has lots of real engineers who are very smart. I’m certain they ran the math on it. Which is more than you or I have done.

If they say it can be done, I’m inclined to believe them.

AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.

Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.

> makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot

Thermos has 2 parts responsible for thermal isolation: vacuum and some coating that reflects heat radiation

Also in earth conditions, most of thermal radiation goes to surrounding air, heating it. This is not the case with vacuum, so thermal radiation will be even more efficient

What about this articles points?

https://research.33fg.com/analysis/debunking-the-cooling-con...

Exactly - satellites need to be cooled to prevent overheating that wouldn’t happen on earth.

(Space doesn’t help in cooling GPUs in a satellite - space makes cooling worse)

Can’t you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and dissipates.

This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.

He's got a trillion dollar compensation package on the line. You can absolutely guarantee he's doing something shady.

"But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. "

I'm pretty his point is that while cooling is an impossibility, it is not the only one!

The only way I see this actually working given the resource requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of the solar panels at L1 or something.

https://share.google/uXWQyAp7a8nE03qoi

This is my 2 cents, I have an engineer background, not space science background.

At earth or above sea, we use cooling to maintain the temperature below 60 degrees, or 80 or 100 or something.

Shadow of space is -157 degrees, the cooling design will be different.

The 4-5nm gpu will break from high energy protons from the sun.

Lag for roundtrip: 35ms. But when satelite needs to pass through other satellites as has no ground coverage you add more lag and reduce bandwidth of the whole network.

The best part is jurisdiction safety. Very hard to get raided by govs.

My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.

Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.

So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.

Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?

It links his middling AI company and his failing social media company with the only company that can send the United States to space.

X failing and can't pay its debts? Welp, better give him a government bailout otherwise no more rockets for you!

You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...

But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.

Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.

This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is much lower and it’s the temperature difference which determines the rate of cooling.

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Unfortunately no. The arctic region is too cold and humid. You need way more energy to manage the cooling of a datacenter there than somewhere hotter.

Yeah the Space Data Center companies completely gloss over this fact by saying "oh yeah and we'll need radiators 10x the size of our solar panels. NBD."

The ideal would be to park the data centers at the lagrange point behind the Earth in its umbra, so they don't need to dissipate direct solar heat.

The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.

It's not just Musk, Google is working on it too... very soon to actually launch tests. I have a feeling it's a regulatory dodge of some kind.

> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

That.

Also, am I the only one to remember when SpaceX was supposed to pivot to transporting people from cities to cities, given how cheap and reusable and sure BFF/Starship was going to be ?

Or how we were all going to earn money by pooling our full self driving cars in a network of robo taxis ?

In all seriousness, what is the number of "unrealized sci-fi pipe dreams" that is acceptable from the owner a company ? Or, to be fair, what is the acceptable ratio of "pipe dreams" / "actually impressive stuff actually delivered (reusable rockets, starlink, decent EVs, etc...)" ?

I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.

That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.

Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.

By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.

Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.

And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.

> You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

I don’t remember the difference from my science classes, isn’t This the same thing essentially?

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic

This. Like it would make far more sense to colonize the poles than Mars.

You can't exchange heat with vacuum

If you put a pipe with hot gas inside, in space, it will get colder by convection.

Blow air through the pipe.

One man able to put a data center worth of mass in orbit is one man able to crash a datacenter worth of mass into Earth anywhere he wants.

or perhaps as simple as saving xAI for himself as he prepares to offload rest of Twitter?

I have no idea how it compares to the heat being generated, but one advantage of space would be totally efficient radiative cooling, I believe. Assuming you can pump the heat, and can deploy a large enough surface area (the key question I assume), then you have that at least.

> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab.

It could also just be ignorance and talking out of his ass to look smart. Like when he took over Twitter and began publicly spewing wrong technical details as if he knew what he was talking about and being corrected by the people actually working on the product.

I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.

>i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot

e.g. the lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink cold too

It will be the communications, not the compute part.

He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.

His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.

Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.

I suspect Musk has a workable plan of some sort, realistically. Clearly, the one thing that is available in space is an abundance of square meters. There is no need whatsoever to conserve space at sufficient orbit. It is a little counter intuitive as we are so used to needing to conserve all the things.

Power input and heat radiation both scale with area so maybe there is some way to achieve this at scale. For instance, maybe it will not look like a traditional data center or even traditional chips.

apocalyptic space twitter with satellites shaped like whales that drop from the sky would have been cooler.

I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.

They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.

I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.

A glaring lack of oceans to boil

The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.

Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.

And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.

Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.

> Musk is up to something here.

This is Musk, yet again, pulling themes from sci-fi books. He has that vision of ushering in the "future" which is good for dragging us forward but also he fails a lot. His open letter cited the Kardashev scale and his vision for getting us forward like in the novel accelerando.

Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal networking, its power management (what happens when its in darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration (https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-vibration...)

What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.

Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)

Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.

Its just complete and total bollocks.

utter utter bollocks.

All of this and more.

For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.

I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.

Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.

Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.

Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?

Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.

Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...

quantum computers on the sun!

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Please, no!

Musk lies with ease and routinely. This and Optimus are both just more examples of that.

“Musk is on to something here”? Really? Any high school student with a basic grasp of physics could explain that. But sure, the idiot billionaire nazi “is on to something”. That’s giving him too much credit.

Of course it doesn’t fucking make sense to put data centers into space. Even if heating were solved somehow magically, server disks are veeery prone to fail and need replacement. Shoot a rocket up every week to replace failed drives or absolutely burned through GPUs? Yeah, that doesn’t even remotely sound feasible.

Jeffrey Epstein's friend Elon Musk is trying to stop a financial disaster in xAi that would expose how irresponsible he is. He's gonna put all that in a company that has real money coming from government and soon will get retail investors money.

musk is always up to something but remarkably people still eat this stuff up - remarkable to watch!

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> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us that radiative power scales to the fourth power of temperature (T^4). While terrestrial cooling is largely linear and dependent on ambient air/water temperature (the "wet-bulb" limit), a radiator in space is dumping heat into a 3-Kelvin sink. That thermal gradient is massive.

>I would not assume cooling has been worked out

On the other hand Starlink has several thousand satellites up there using solar power to run processors and cooling them with radiators so it's not totally new technology.

Here's a Musk tweet linking some analysis https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2013676764099199156

Space is a vacuum and yet here we are on a rock floating in space warmed by the sun and the temperate is actually pretty comfortable. Indeed, without the greenhouse effect it would be positively chilly. An important part of a thermos is that you have to use high albedo materials in the vacuum chamber or else it would lose heat too quickly to radiation.

A satellite as a whole will come to thermal equilibrium with space at a fairly reasonable temperature, the problematic part is that the properties of electricity make it easy to concentrate a good part of the incoming energy in a small area where the GPU is. Heat is harder to move than electricity and getting that heat back out to the solar panels or radiators requires either heavy heat pipes or complex coolant pumps.

It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.

1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.

2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).

3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.

4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.

5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.

> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!

Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).

The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).

The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.

People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.

Make sense now?

On the engineering side, your list pretty much nails why this reads as sci-fi dressed up as a roadmap

Think Elon: A swarm of advanced AIs working from space, untouchable for most, steering execution of his power fantasy on earth. And if not he has military goons to sell it to.

The technical discussions here are distractions to the avoid dealing with the glaring dissonance that for the vast majority none of this will improve life on earth.

Regarding 3, they're almost certainly thinking of putting these in SSO where the radiation environment isn't too much worse than you see on the ISS. If they were going to go outside the Van Allen belts it would be a different story.

The whole AI bubble makes way more sense if you model it not as rational economic activity, but rather as the actions of a rogue AI slowly taking over our institutions and redirecting them towards its goals. Data centers in space make no sense economically, but think of how survivable the rogue AI will be once we build those orbiting data centers! (I am joking about this, but it's weird that my logic makes sense.)

> 5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth

Sun-synchronous orbit means solar panels collect the same amount 24/7. I guess that's the #1 benefit. Cheap energy.

Added some math on my comment that outlines the boundaries of economics of this considering most of what you mentioned.

It doesn't make sense. It is just Musk trying to pump up SpaceX valuation before the IPO.

for the chips to both be radiation hardened and as powerful as our current chips they'd need to be massive. There's a reason the mars rover uses a PowerPC G3

>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?

Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.

> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.

They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.

When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.

> sure space is cold

Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.

The cooling misconception is probably the biggest tell

The benefit is to siphon US tax money into billionaire pockets. It's insanely obvious and this has been Musk's MO for like 15 years now. Hyperloop? That was a grift to stop public transit from expanding. Tesla robo-taxis? Still waiting. FSD? Still waiting. Everything he does is a monumental grift to make himself richer and more powerful. The man is a hollow shell of a human being and the only thing that makes him feel anything is more money and power.

> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is

And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").

I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.

> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level

This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.

> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.

I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.

> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.

I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.

> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.

Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.

> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.

> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.

These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.

That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.

This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.

I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this.

It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.

I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.

Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too, where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible because they were developed early on for communications, then obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the real world.

But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” ― William Gibson, Count Zero

I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.

> above any earthly government

Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.

well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a datahaven for less-reputable banks!

He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.

https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...

https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...

https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...

> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.

A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.

So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.

Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.

I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.

A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:

- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.

- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.

- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/31/spacex-seeks-federal-appro...

2. https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze

3. https://www.netizen.page/2025/05/cost-per-kilogram-to-low-ea...

Edit: added item 3

3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)

2) it is extremely common to add storage to existing servers. Only slightly less; RAM, CPUs etc. not to mention how often it is cost-effective to replace broken components.

The lifetime of a GPU in practice is around 3 years. There is no way this plan is going to work. Musk knows that, he's just counting on stupid people to buy into the SpaceX IPO on hype.

Makes me wonder:

Back in the early 1990s I read some children's futurist book that suggested that we might send solar panels to space that would then beam energy via microwaves to the surface. The book was more fantasy than science, so I took it with a huge grain of salt and appreciated it for its entertainment value.

But do you think schemes that try to direct solar energy to the surface are more practical then running datacenters in space?

> Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050

How unbelievably crass. "Let's build something out of immense quantities of environmentally-destructive-to-extract materials and shoot it into space on top of gargantuan amounts of heat and greenhouse gas emissions; since it won't use much earth-sourced energy once it's up there, that nets out to a win!"

Insane.

> micro droplet technology

Intentionally causing Kessler Syndrome?

> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.

> reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.

The danger is that these nuanced, legitimate use cases get rhetorically stretched to support much bigger claims. That's where skepticism kicks back in.

It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.

That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.