by vjk800 | 2026-02-04 08:49:37+00:00
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.