This is an interesting analysis, and I like the sliders that let you instantly show the impacts of system trades.
The one glaring hole that I see is the challenge of moving the data to/from the datacenter while it's on orbit. Bandwidth to/from space isn't free. FCC/ITU licenses are required, transmitters/receiviers/modems/DSP/antennas all add to SWAP (size, weight, and power). Ground-stations are needed to move the data up/down, but those have recently become a commodity too. Still, they're not free. (see: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station)
There is also the added latency between earth-based users and space-based datacenters, which may be a deal breaker for some applications.
Another issue I don't see covered are the significant differences between space-based hardware and terrestrial hardware. The space stuff needs to be radiation tolerant, and that usually makes it a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the terrestrial stuff, all other things being equal.
In the end, space-based datacenters are highly impractical even if you assume that Starship can put anything into orbit very cheaply.
What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum.
The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.
With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.
Yeah, I don't see a way to get around the fact that space is a fabulous insulator. That's precisely how expensive insulated drink containers work so well.
If it was just about cooling and power availability, you'd think people would be running giant solar+compute barges in international waters, but nobody is doing that. Even the "seasteading" guys from last decade.
These proposals, if serious, are just to avoid planning permission and land ownership difficulties. If unserious, it's simply to get attention. And we're talking about it, aren't we?
Cooling isn't anymore difficult than power generation. For example, on the ISS solar panels generate up to 75 W/m², while the EATCS radiators can dissipate about 150 W/m².
Solar panels have improved more than cooling technology since ISS was deployed, but the two are still on the same order of magnitude.
Let’s say you need 50m^2 solar panels to run it, then just a ton of surface area to dissipate. I’d love to be proven wrong but space data centers just seem like large 2d impact targets.
For some decades now I’ve heard the debunk many times more than the bunk. The real urban myth appears to be any appreciable fraction of people believe the myth.
But space isn't actually cold, or at least not space near Earth. It's about 10 C. And that's only about a 10 C less than room temperature, so a human habitable structure in near earth space won't radiate very much heat. But heat radiated is O(Tobject^4 - Tbackground^4), and a computer can operate up to around 90C (I think) so that is actually a very big difference here. Back of the envelope, a data center at 90C will radiate about 10x the heat that a space station at 20C will. With the massive caveat that I don't know what the constant is here, it could actually be easy to keep a datacenter cool even though it is hard to keep a space station cool.
The temperature that you raise to the fourth power is not Celsius, it's Kelvin. Otherwise things at -200 C would radiate more heat than things at 100 C. Also the temperature of space is ~3 K (cosmic microwave background), not 10 C.
Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zillions of those issues. The whole idea is just bonkers.
At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.
At today's prices perhaps, but pre ChatGPT you just have to run more of it + more error correction. Not great for the power budget but not anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
Starlink is however operating at ~500km where radiation is less of a concern, but where the lifetime of a satellite is only 2-3 years.
The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.
I think they last 2-3 years after they run out of argon fuel, so more like 7-8 years total. It looks like some Starlinks from Nov 2019 are still operational.
My understanding was that anything at ~500km needed readjustments every few months in order to not come down. Much less than 2-3 years.
I'd be interested to know what the average lifespan or failure rate of Starlink has been. That's good that some are still up there 6+ years later, but I know many aren't. I'm not sure how many of those ran out of fuel, had hardware failures, or were simply obsolete, but an AFR would be interesting to see.
My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often.
Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.
I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!
Your other options of fault tolerance typically achieved by doing everything at least twice and being willing to reboot (and accepting attrition from total ionizing radiation) or lots of shielding are fine for building functioning space hardware but suboptimal for building datacentre business models...
I think “won’t”. I could be wrong of course, but I imagine efforts to put servers into orbit will die before anything is launched. It’s just a bad idea. Maybe a few grifters will make bank taking suckers’ money before it becomes common knowledge that this is stupid, but I will be genuinely surprised if real servers with GPUs are launched.
I don’t mean to be facetious here. But saying “will” is treating it as inevitable that this will happen, which is how the grifters win.
There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.
Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.
The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues.
Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.
> This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers.
> References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.)
I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you.
(To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)
>This isn't about talent. It's about integration... Vertical integration isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole ballgame.
I'm going to assume there's tons of logical errors and oversights in the math, considering the author couldn't even be bothered to write the text of the post himself.
I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement.
Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).
OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.
SpaceX created reusable rockets that can fly back to the launch platforms and land gracefully. Hard to blame people for becoming fans. Before them stuff like this only existed in kerbal and sci-fi.
"Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work.
When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become cost-competitive with simply building conventional nuclear-powered (or renewable energy-powered) datacenters on the ground.
In fact we're off by 50-100x. Dramatic launch cost reductions still won't make it work. And of course if you invest a lot in specific lines of tech to make it work you then have to consider that the same can also be invested in better ground-based nuclear, bringing the cost of power down for everyone.
The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted to do something about these hypothtical data centers and the problems they would cause.
When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more.
It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.
Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).
Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.
Did a similar back-of-the-napkin and got 5x $ / MW of orbital vs. terrestrial. This article's analysis is ~3.4x.
I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile.
The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable.
A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into a daily Starship launch feels "cleaner" from an end-to-end automation perspective vs years long land acquisition, planning and environment approvals, construction.
More expensive, for sure, but feels way more copy-paste the factory, "linearly scalable" than physical construction.
It becomes worthwhile if its actually cheaper (probably significantly cheaper given R&D and risk), or if you're processing data which originates in space and the data transfer or latency is an issue
You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...
I’d love to see these variables fitted to learning curves. That would give you a forecast for when, if learning continues as predicted, the economics could be competitive. (If it doesn’t, you need a new paradigm first.)
AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick shut down in 2024 (though apparently it hadn't been in the water since 2020.) It seems like it basically worked, but it wasn't clear that the cooling advantage was all that big relative to the hassle of having them in a difficult-to-maintain environment.
The FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US, including stuff which extends beyond spectrum licensing like mandatory 5 year deorbiting capability for newly launched LEO satellites. Europe, China and India are not regulation-free utopias either.
You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres anyway.
Ultimately there are latency and minimise data-transfer arguments for doing certain types of data processing on local machines in space, but the generalised compute and model-training argument only works if the unit economics stack up as sufficiently good to cover the risk and R&D, and they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water even assuming launch costs become minimal. (It's slightly amusing to see how much some advocates of that other controversial futurist vision of spaced-based solar power - whose chances of success equally depend on low launch costs - viscerally hate the latest wave of datacentres-in-space hype...)
> FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.
If you get fed up of multiple layers of concerns and US specific bureaucracy, you simply move to a different country where a single authority is desperate to not only remove hurdles but might even give subsidies to someone that wants to employ lots of people to put up solar panels and give them a bit of surplus power and hot water. Chips and solar panels fit as easily in shipping containers as they do in spacecraft. The FCC actually has to handle the concerns of entities more concerned by the environmental impact of your megaconstellation because it's a 1km^2 wide missile travelling at 17,500 mph which much of the rest of the space industry is expected to expend propellant to evade where orbits intersect, which is a bit more concerning than 5km^2 of slightly less green fields and some question marks about water abstraction, and there aren't other authorities you can turn to. (Space is underregulated in terms of not having any practical traffic management beyond launch and spectrum licensing, but that's more risk rather than dream libertarian business opportunity; the FCC can still kibosh your project, you just won't get anyone clearing debris out your way)
Technically there is more space in space than Earth, but once you start factoring that convenient orbits for earth data transfer involve carving a high speed path which intersects with other spacecraft also moving at high speed and not all with as much control as they'd like it starts to look a lot less capacious. The Earth not about to run out of coastal regions with unbuilt land any time soon.
Yeah try tell average eco joe you are planning to warm up oceans by 0.00000001% of what sun does already.
(I agree right now it probably makes sense, but decades and centuries away we probably don't want to warm up earth anymore. If anything space datacenters could provide shade for earth lol.)
We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to the Drake equation.
The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
The cooling and density challenges of datacenters here on earth are not trivial , but in space this is multiple magnitudes more difficult.
These numbers are just random bullsh*t numbers.
And what problems do orbital datacenters solve?
They still need uplink, so not libertarian we can do what we want, you have no jurisdiction here thing.
This is just a sci-fi idea that is theoretically possible and is riding the ai bubble for users and investors that don’t know better.
This is very well done! I love including all the sliders so that we can play with the (reasonable looking) assumptions the author has made. Like the author, I share their surprise that the result did not come out even more in favor of terrestrial GPUs.
I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who just read too much Neuromancer, and they think they can construct their own Tessier-Ashpool orbital dynasty.
I suppose there are several other Oligarchs In Space stories and movies since then, but if the point of the space station is to host AI, that narrows it down a bit.
Or perhaps it's performative, designed to spook gullible politicians into changing laws to "keep" businesses that were never actually going to go somewhere else anyway.
I guess I'd assume that the premise driving this would be that there will eventually be enough business in space that it's necessary for space-centric use, and that terrestrial use is just a fringe benefit or loss leader or something.
But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed.
My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
space-elevators require various types of unobtanium and have their own logistics challenges not to mention failure modes that involve spattering fast moving debris round the entire equator
But if cost of the space GPUs is higher then the land GPUs, why would demand matter? Is there limited land? Are space GPUs better for some reason, like perhaps they can't be regulated as easily or because our AGI overlords will be less vulnerable to mobs with pitchforks?
At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.
I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.
Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.
What’s software that would benefit from running in space? The only thing I can imagine is processing of data generated in space so you need less downlink or can reduce latency, everything else can be calculated wherever you want, no?
I think the point the original guy is hand wavingly getting at is the point of something like this is to avoid the possibility of say a FBI raid or Nuremburgish trials for a vast AI surveillance processing facility hub for other down looking satellites if they were to lose their newly acquired power, or similar technocratic ramblings / ideas like it would survive the end of society.
Its like that scene at the end of Real Genius, "Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed." Lets look at the facts: Impossible to raid, not under any direct legal jurisdiction, high bandwidth line of sight communications options to satellite feed points that would be difficult to tap outside of other orbital actors, Power feed that is untethered to any planetary grid or at risk of terrestrial actors, etc.
That’s not how it works. Your state is responsible for your activities in space, so if you annoy other countries enough, your own country will regulate you. If they don’t, you could have just built the same thing on the ground in this country.
I have no idea what this Grok assisted article is trying to say. But the data-center-in-space hype is irrational. It hand-waves cooling and bit flip errors. It does not explain why we need chat bots in space (we don't need them on earth either).
It is a nice talking point for the U.S. Saudi Investment Forum. The Saudis apparently buy anything:
I realize terrestrial data centers have environmental risks, but are the risks greater for an orbital data center? I would think space debris, solar flares, or a bad actor satellite with a laser could do a lot of damage. Good luck repairing the orbital data center.
I'm not really interested in the problems that can come with orbital compute. We've seen them listed ad nauseam.
Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?
this does not makes sense from dollars pov to me, I ran a back of napkin session with claude & gemini on this and the short of it is you need a magical weightless radiator for cooling and even then it wont work because the launch costs need to be sub $100 before this can be feasible. this does not even factors the 5y amortization and LEO orbit drag correction.
It then occurred to me that they (all major AI companies) know all of these facts but still pushing for it so there must be another reason. Then I recalled the offhand statement from the openAI lady about govt backstop for infra, which was strongly opposed by public and AI czar. this might be be a backdoor way of injecting that backstop capital in terms of subsidies now for results in 5 years or so. and needless to say after pilot programs those will fail spectacularly.
I suspect that this orbital data centers isn't entirely about dollars (No doubt dollars are important).
I suspect it is about the regulatory environment. The regulatory environment on data centers is moving quickly. Data centers used to be considered a small portion of the economy and thus benign and not worth extorting/controlling. This seems to be changing, rapidly.
Given that data centers only exchange information with their consumers they are a natural candidate for using orbit as a way to escape regulators.
Further, people are likely betting that regulators will take considerable time to adjust since space is multinational.
True, but businesses don't care about regulations except where it costs them money. Also, remember that time is money, so any regulatory delays cost real money to a business.
My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars. And I believe that the cost of orbital data centers will come down due to technological advances, while the cost of regulation will only go up, because of local and global opposition.
"My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars."
I'm not sure. A couple of points:
1) The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down."
2) As I mentioned the regulatory frameworks in this area are evolving very quickly. It is unknown what the regulations will be in 1, 2, 5 years and how that will impact your business.
I think it is also about security. It is impossible for ordinary people to break into such a data center.
It’s a bit like the cyberpunk future when the ultra riches live in moon bases or undersea bases and ordinary people fight for resources in a ruined earth.
Well the argument some of these companies are making is that it would be cheaper over 10 years (some things like power can be cheaper in space, and you can get it from solar nearly 24h a day). It seems likely to me (as it does many other people) that it won't be cheaper, but if it's the same price or mildly more expensive there might be a regulatory incentive to train a ML model in space instead of a place like the EU
> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana.
I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy. But the best billionaires, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are actually trying to advance the tech tree.
We are honestly lucky that Musk is wired funny. Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken. But he takes it all as a personal challenge and doubles down. That is both his worst quality and his best.
You should read F.A Hayek's essay on The Paradox of Savings [1]. Creation of capital like factories, education creating new specialists, or new processes lowers the cost of production and leads to real economic progress. Excessive spending without capital creation does nothing except keeping factors of production wastefully employed when they could be put to other uses and always ends in inflation.
I will agree that if he hadn't aligned himself with Trump/MAGA he would have a much lower profile.
But I think we'd be better off if taking a political position did not automatically piss off half the country. I think a lot of competent but normal people refuse the get involved in politics because of how toxic it is.
I wish Musk had stayed out of politics, but I'm glad he hasn't given up on Tesla/SpaceX just because of the enemies he's made. I think any normal person would have.
>”we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy.”
You’re falling victim to the ‘broken windows fallacy’ here; money which is invested is actually more productive in improving medium and long term economic productivity than ‘consumption’ goods. Even ‘retained’ money (under one’s mattress) is not net-negative, as it increases the value of its circulating counterparts.
Scenario A: Someone breaks a window and the homeowner buys a replacement.
Scenario B: A homeowner adds a new window to their home.
Scenario C: A homeowner buys an online-course to learn how to make windows and then adds one to their home.
Scenario A has approximately no benefit to the economy. The homeowner is no better off (same number of windows) but had to spend money. The window maker might be better off, but only to the same extent that the homeowner is worse off.
I totally agree that Scenario A is not a benefit to the economy. That's the "broken window fallacy".
But Scenario B is definitely better for the economy. The homeowner has decided that having a new window is better than having the money. So the homeowner is better off. The window maker is also better off because they get the money. This is what happens when a billionaire buys a yacht.
Scenario C is the best. The homeowner has a new skill, which they can use to add more windows to their house or maybe their neighbors' houses. Over time, the amount of money spent on window-making will decrease, but the number of windows will stay constant or increase. That's a net benefit. And the online-course creator still made money.
This is what Musk is doing. He is developing new technologies that enable new capabilities and/or make existing things cheaper (e.g., electric cars, access to space, rural internet connectivity).
There is also Scenario D: The homeowner doesn't buy a new window but just keeps his money under his mattress. This is clearly the worst for the economy. Hording money like that means that there is less money circulating and lowered economic activity. The window maker is worse off, and even the homeowner is worse off if they would like to have a new window.
Billionaires who don't spend their money are the real danger, not the ones who tweet too much.
Investing their money is slightly better in that it makes the price of borrowing cheaper. But that only helps up to a point. Someone has to spend money or else there's no point in being able to borrow some. So I wish more billionaires were following Scenario C.
In your original comment, it sounded like you would encourage billionaires to buy yachts, solely "for the good of the economy".
Scenario D: A homeowner adds 10 window to their home because the populous think he is stingy and will send him to the guillotine if he does not start spending his money on new windows!
Scenario D provides no benefit to society.
If the billionaire does want the yacht, then no encouragement is needed.
Your description of Elmo applies to several other billionaires who have somehow avoided quixotic hyper-destructive rampages through American politics. I’m all for wired funny, but not when it comes with this much carnage.
I'm not sure who the whole 'Elmo' thing is for -- more than anything I cringe at the person saying it, rather than thinking less of Elon or whatever the hope is. Like 'drumpf', or the whole small hands thing, it just comes across like a redditism that escaped confinement.
Is the hope that Elon or fans of his read it and get offended? I doubt they care much, and I fail to see the point of it.
Elmo already cancelled out any progress made by buying a social media platform and getting the most anti-science anti-NASA admin in history elected. He's done a net negative on the world at this point, even if the scale is vastly larger than most people.
If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t).
This is an interesting analysis, and I like the sliders that let you instantly show the impacts of system trades.
The one glaring hole that I see is the challenge of moving the data to/from the datacenter while it's on orbit. Bandwidth to/from space isn't free. FCC/ITU licenses are required, transmitters/receiviers/modems/DSP/antennas all add to SWAP (size, weight, and power). Ground-stations are needed to move the data up/down, but those have recently become a commodity too. Still, they're not free. (see: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station)
There is also the added latency between earth-based users and space-based datacenters, which may be a deal breaker for some applications.
Another issue I don't see covered are the significant differences between space-based hardware and terrestrial hardware. The space stuff needs to be radiation tolerant, and that usually makes it a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the terrestrial stuff, all other things being equal.
In the end, space-based datacenters are highly impractical even if you assume that Starship can put anything into orbit very cheaply.
What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum.
The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.
With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.
Space is a much harder place to run datacenters.
Yeah, I don't see a way to get around the fact that space is a fabulous insulator. That's precisely how expensive insulated drink containers work so well.
If it was just about cooling and power availability, you'd think people would be running giant solar+compute barges in international waters, but nobody is doing that. Even the "seasteading" guys from last decade.
These proposals, if serious, are just to avoid planning permission and land ownership difficulties. If unserious, it's simply to get attention. And we're talking about it, aren't we?
Cooling isn't anymore difficult than power generation. For example, on the ISS solar panels generate up to 75 W/m², while the EATCS radiators can dissipate about 150 W/m².
Solar panels have improved more than cooling technology since ISS was deployed, but the two are still on the same order of magnitude.
This article assumes that no extra mass is needed for cooling, i.e. that cooling is free. The list of model assumptions includes:
• No additional mass for liquid cooling loop infrastructure; likely needed but not included
• Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
None of it is easy but neither is cooling impossible as many people are saying.
Doing like an 8xh200 server (https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgxh100-user-guide/introduction-...) is 10.2kW.
Let’s say you need 50m^2 solar panels to run it, then just a ton of surface area to dissipate. I’d love to be proven wrong but space data centers just seem like large 2d impact targets.
Yeah, you need 50m^2 of solar panels and 50m^2 of radiators. I don't see why one is that much more difficult than the other.
Especially if with the radiators you can just roll out as rolls of aluminum foil, which is very light and very cheap.
There’s a big difference between “impossible” (it isn’t) and “practical” (it isn’t).
What happened to "do things that don't scale"?
For some decades now I’ve heard the debunk many times more than the bunk. The real urban myth appears to be any appreciable fraction of people believe the myth.
But space isn't actually cold, or at least not space near Earth. It's about 10 C. And that's only about a 10 C less than room temperature, so a human habitable structure in near earth space won't radiate very much heat. But heat radiated is O(Tobject^4 - Tbackground^4), and a computer can operate up to around 90C (I think) so that is actually a very big difference here. Back of the envelope, a data center at 90C will radiate about 10x the heat that a space station at 20C will. With the massive caveat that I don't know what the constant is here, it could actually be easy to keep a datacenter cool even though it is hard to keep a space station cool.
The temperature that you raise to the fourth power is not Celsius, it's Kelvin. Otherwise things at -200 C would radiate more heat than things at 100 C. Also the temperature of space is ~3 K (cosmic microwave background), not 10 C.
Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zillions of those issues. The whole idea is just bonkers.
At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.
RAM corruption is not cheap to protect against
At today's prices perhaps, but pre ChatGPT you just have to run more of it + more error correction. Not great for the power budget but not anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure
Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.
The radiation effects on the silicon solar cells is often underestimated, it's not just the GPUs!
Starlink is however operating at ~500km where radiation is less of a concern, but where the lifetime of a satellite is only 2-3 years.
The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.
I think they last 2-3 years after they run out of argon fuel, so more like 7-8 years total. It looks like some Starlinks from Nov 2019 are still operational.
My understanding was that anything at ~500km needed readjustments every few months in order to not come down. Much less than 2-3 years.
I'd be interested to know what the average lifespan or failure rate of Starlink has been. That's good that some are still up there 6+ years later, but I know many aren't. I'm not sure how many of those ran out of fuel, had hardware failures, or were simply obsolete, but an AFR would be interesting to see.
Or in theory, indefinitely,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16527007 ("First firing of air-breathing electric thruster (esa.int)" (2018))
My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often.
Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.
I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!
Why make a GW datacenter on the ground if you can make two and pay to launch them into space?
There's more than that, it's possible to get permanent hardware damage from radiation at smaller (modern standard) process sizes.
I didn't think about that, so yeah, basically space based compute centers are just hype on top of hype.
Your other options of fault tolerance typically achieved by doing everything at least twice and being willing to reboot (and accepting attrition from total ionizing radiation) or lots of shielding are fine for building functioning space hardware but suboptimal for building datacentre business models...
they throw those satellites to a fiery doom on a regular cadence.
The LLMs they hope to have in those data centers already silently accept wrong results.
> Will…
I think “won’t”. I could be wrong of course, but I imagine efforts to put servers into orbit will die before anything is launched. It’s just a bad idea. Maybe a few grifters will make bank taking suckers’ money before it becomes common knowledge that this is stupid, but I will be genuinely surprised if real servers with GPUs are launched.
I don’t mean to be facetious here. But saying “will” is treating it as inevitable that this will happen, which is how the grifters win.
At this scale could you do shielding?
There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.
Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.
Sure. At the cost of lofting that shielding from the ground and taking the economics from 500x to 2000x crazy.
Really interesting article. Curious to see the ChatGPT link attached
But when I click on it, I get this error.
Failed to load shared conversation. Request is not allowed. Please try again later. (403, 9aebe525df75165e-BLR)
Scott Manley had a video about this last year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues.
Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.
> This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers.
> References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.)
I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you.
(To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)
>This isn't about talent. It's about integration... Vertical integration isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole ballgame.
I'm going to assume there's tons of logical errors and oversights in the math, considering the author couldn't even be bothered to write the text of the post himself.
OP here. Happy to answer any questions, appreciate the boost.
I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement.
Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).
Aerospace industry has a long history of missing lower cost/kg to orbit. I'm extremely suspicious of $500/kg, which is about a third of today's cost.
OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.
SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.
OTOH they have achieved many things that experienced people said were impossible or would never make financial sense.
OTOH they have a huge batshit crazy fanbase of boot lickers who are so gullible they'll believe and parrot anything Elon says.
SpaceX created reusable rockets that can fly back to the launch platforms and land gracefully. Hard to blame people for becoming fans. Before them stuff like this only existed in kerbal and sci-fi.
François Chollet https://x.com/fchollet/status/1999982683708150014 :
"Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work.
When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become cost-competitive with simply building conventional nuclear-powered (or renewable energy-powered) datacenters on the ground.
In fact we're off by 50-100x. Dramatic launch cost reductions still won't make it work. And of course if you invest a lot in specific lines of tech to make it work you then have to consider that the same can also be invested in better ground-based nuclear, bringing the cost of power down for everyone.
So the guy who shows his work says 3.4x and the guy who doesn't says 50-100x.
OP here.
man who quotes big number - often made a fool
The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted to do something about these hypothtical data centers and the problems they would cause.
When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more.
It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.
Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).
[1]: https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
> Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch
I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.
Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.
Did a similar back-of-the-napkin and got 5x $ / MW of orbital vs. terrestrial. This article's analysis is ~3.4x.
I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile.
The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable.
A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into a daily Starship launch feels "cleaner" from an end-to-end automation perspective vs years long land acquisition, planning and environment approvals, construction.
More expensive, for sure, but feels way more copy-paste the factory, "linearly scalable" than physical construction.
It becomes worthwhile if its actually cheaper (probably significantly cheaper given R&D and risk), or if you're processing data which originates in space and the data transfer or latency is an issue
You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...
I’d love to see these variables fitted to learning curves. That would give you a forecast for when, if learning continues as predicted, the economics could be competitive. (If it doesn’t, you need a new paradigm first.)
AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.
I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias.
Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick shut down in 2024 (though apparently it hadn't been in the water since 2020.) It seems like it basically worked, but it wasn't clear that the cooling advantage was all that big relative to the hassle of having them in a difficult-to-maintain environment.
> Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space
You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.
The FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US, including stuff which extends beyond spectrum licensing like mandatory 5 year deorbiting capability for newly launched LEO satellites. Europe, China and India are not regulation-free utopias either.
You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres anyway.
Ultimately there are latency and minimise data-transfer arguments for doing certain types of data processing on local machines in space, but the generalised compute and model-training argument only works if the unit economics stack up as sufficiently good to cover the risk and R&D, and they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water even assuming launch costs become minimal. (It's slightly amusing to see how much some advocates of that other controversial futurist vision of spaced-based solar power - whose chances of success equally depend on low launch costs - viscerally hate the latest wave of datacentres-in-space hype...)
> FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US
FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.
> they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water
There are fewer of those places that can be developed than there is space. The bottleneck to space is launch. The bottleneck on the ground is power.
I don’t think anyone thinks the math works right now. But as OP showed, it’s surprisingly proximate in a way SBSP is not.
> FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.
If you get fed up of multiple layers of concerns and US specific bureaucracy, you simply move to a different country where a single authority is desperate to not only remove hurdles but might even give subsidies to someone that wants to employ lots of people to put up solar panels and give them a bit of surplus power and hot water. Chips and solar panels fit as easily in shipping containers as they do in spacecraft. The FCC actually has to handle the concerns of entities more concerned by the environmental impact of your megaconstellation because it's a 1km^2 wide missile travelling at 17,500 mph which much of the rest of the space industry is expected to expend propellant to evade where orbits intersect, which is a bit more concerning than 5km^2 of slightly less green fields and some question marks about water abstraction, and there aren't other authorities you can turn to. (Space is underregulated in terms of not having any practical traffic management beyond launch and spectrum licensing, but that's more risk rather than dream libertarian business opportunity; the FCC can still kibosh your project, you just won't get anyone clearing debris out your way)
Technically there is more space in space than Earth, but once you start factoring that convenient orbits for earth data transfer involve carving a high speed path which intersects with other spacecraft also moving at high speed and not all with as much control as they'd like it starts to look a lot less capacious. The Earth not about to run out of coastal regions with unbuilt land any time soon.
(SBSP has its own similar issues, of course)
Yeah try tell average eco joe you are planning to warm up oceans by 0.00000001% of what sun does already.
(I agree right now it probably makes sense, but decades and centuries away we probably don't want to warm up earth anymore. If anything space datacenters could provide shade for earth lol.)
tbh this feels lot like people throwing Drake equation around. You put in whatever random numbers together and you can get any result you want.
We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to the Drake equation.
The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
OP here. Thanks SyzygyRhythm
You use of the word "quite" is highly "innovative".
The cooling and density challenges of datacenters here on earth are not trivial , but in space this is multiple magnitudes more difficult.
These numbers are just random bullsh*t numbers.
And what problems do orbital datacenters solve? They still need uplink, so not libertarian we can do what we want, you have no jurisdiction here thing.
This is just a sci-fi idea that is theoretically possible and is riding the ai bubble for users and investors that don’t know better.
This is very well done! I love including all the sliders so that we can play with the (reasonable looking) assumptions the author has made. Like the author, I share their surprise that the result did not come out even more in favor of terrestrial GPUs.
I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who just read too much Neuromancer, and they think they can construct their own Tessier-Ashpool orbital dynasty.
I suppose there are several other Oligarchs In Space stories and movies since then, but if the point of the space station is to host AI, that narrows it down a bit.
Or perhaps it's performative, designed to spook gullible politicians into changing laws to "keep" businesses that were never actually going to go somewhere else anyway.
I guess I'd assume that the premise driving this would be that there will eventually be enough business in space that it's necessary for space-centric use, and that terrestrial use is just a fringe benefit or loss leader or something.
But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed.
My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
Space elevators are pretend, you may as well ask if it would be cheaper if we had dilithium crystals
space-elevators require various types of unobtanium and have their own logistics challenges not to mention failure modes that involve spattering fast moving debris round the entire equator
As an expert in this field, I can assure that cost is not the most important factor. Demand is.
But if cost of the space GPUs is higher then the land GPUs, why would demand matter? Is there limited land? Are space GPUs better for some reason, like perhaps they can't be regulated as easily or because our AGI overlords will be less vulnerable to mobs with pitchforks?
Demand for what? A sealab like head in the sand view of lack of data regulation requirements?
specific software applications you can run in space that you can't run on Earth or can't run cheaper on Earth.
At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.
I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.
Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.
What’s software that would benefit from running in space? The only thing I can imagine is processing of data generated in space so you need less downlink or can reduce latency, everything else can be calculated wherever you want, no?
I think the point the original guy is hand wavingly getting at is the point of something like this is to avoid the possibility of say a FBI raid or Nuremburgish trials for a vast AI surveillance processing facility hub for other down looking satellites if they were to lose their newly acquired power, or similar technocratic ramblings / ideas like it would survive the end of society.
Its like that scene at the end of Real Genius, "Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed." Lets look at the facts: Impossible to raid, not under any direct legal jurisdiction, high bandwidth line of sight communications options to satellite feed points that would be difficult to tap outside of other orbital actors, Power feed that is untethered to any planetary grid or at risk of terrestrial actors, etc.
That’s not how it works. Your state is responsible for your activities in space, so if you annoy other countries enough, your own country will regulate you. If they don’t, you could have just built the same thing on the ground in this country.
...you have to pay me a lot for the answer to this question.
Don't be coy, please indicate the math that works differently in silicon in a zero g environment if its not some regulation dodge.
People in comments figured out half the answer already, the remaining half is left as an exercise for audience.
such as?
Unregulated casinos?
Unregulated casinos don't need this kind of compute. Most could be run on a decent raspberry pi or two.
At any rate, one basic communication's satellite worth of compute would be more than enough. No need for TPUs.
A cube-sat casino is an interesting concept for sure.
Hmm. Has anyone ever flown a pirate radio blimp?
Human trafficking ring?
I have no idea what this Grok assisted article is trying to say. But the data-center-in-space hype is irrational. It hand-waves cooling and bit flip errors. It does not explain why we need chat bots in space (we don't need them on earth either).
It is a nice talking point for the U.S. Saudi Investment Forum. The Saudis apparently buy anything:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2000603814249079165#m
I realize terrestrial data centers have environmental risks, but are the risks greater for an orbital data center? I would think space debris, solar flares, or a bad actor satellite with a laser could do a lot of damage. Good luck repairing the orbital data center.
Now imagine that the risks aren't being evaluated objectively. Imagine if the risks of terrestrial data centers have been exaggerated 100x.
I'm not really interested in the problems that can come with orbital compute. We've seen them listed ad nauseam.
Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?
this does not makes sense from dollars pov to me, I ran a back of napkin session with claude & gemini on this and the short of it is you need a magical weightless radiator for cooling and even then it wont work because the launch costs need to be sub $100 before this can be feasible. this does not even factors the 5y amortization and LEO orbit drag correction.
It then occurred to me that they (all major AI companies) know all of these facts but still pushing for it so there must be another reason. Then I recalled the offhand statement from the openAI lady about govt backstop for infra, which was strongly opposed by public and AI czar. this might be be a backdoor way of injecting that backstop capital in terms of subsidies now for results in 5 years or so. and needless to say after pilot programs those will fail spectacularly.
I suspect that this orbital data centers isn't entirely about dollars (No doubt dollars are important).
I suspect it is about the regulatory environment. The regulatory environment on data centers is moving quickly. Data centers used to be considered a small portion of the economy and thus benign and not worth extorting/controlling. This seems to be changing, rapidly.
Given that data centers only exchange information with their consumers they are a natural candidate for using orbit as a way to escape regulators.
Further, people are likely betting that regulators will take considerable time to adjust since space is multinational.
True, but businesses don't care about regulations except where it costs them money. Also, remember that time is money, so any regulatory delays cost real money to a business.
My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars. And I believe that the cost of orbital data centers will come down due to technological advances, while the cost of regulation will only go up, because of local and global opposition.
"My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars."
I'm not sure. A couple of points:
1) The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down."
2) As I mentioned the regulatory frameworks in this area are evolving very quickly. It is unknown what the regulations will be in 1, 2, 5 years and how that will impact your business.
> The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down."
That's not true for people experienced in the particular industry. Others can find a lawyer that will give them a good picture.
Interestingly, the humans running the "unregulated space datacenter" are still on Earth, subject to Earth's laws.
I think it is also about security. It is impossible for ordinary people to break into such a data center.
It’s a bit like the cyberpunk future when the ultra riches live in moon bases or undersea bases and ordinary people fight for resources in a ruined earth.
How on earth does that justify the astronomic expense difference?
Well the argument some of these companies are making is that it would be cheaper over 10 years (some things like power can be cheaper in space, and you can get it from solar nearly 24h a day). It seems likely to me (as it does many other people) that it won't be cheaper, but if it's the same price or mildly more expensive there might be a regulatory incentive to train a ML model in space instead of a place like the EU
> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana.
I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy. But the best billionaires, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are actually trying to advance the tech tree.
We are honestly lucky that Musk is wired funny. Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken. But he takes it all as a personal challenge and doubles down. That is both his worst quality and his best.
You should read F.A Hayek's essay on The Paradox of Savings [1]. Creation of capital like factories, education creating new specialists, or new processes lowers the cost of production and leads to real economic progress. Excessive spending without capital creation does nothing except keeping factors of production wastefully employed when they could be put to other uses and always ends in inflation.
[1] https://mises.org/mises-daily/hayek-paradox-saving
> Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken.
First, he seeks and creates conflict. He isn't 'taking' abuse, except in the sense that he is reaching out and grasping at it.
Everyone in that position takes lots of abuse. If they built their own fortune, they generally don't retire to the beach or they would have long ago.
I will agree that if he hadn't aligned himself with Trump/MAGA he would have a much lower profile.
But I think we'd be better off if taking a political position did not automatically piss off half the country. I think a lot of competent but normal people refuse the get involved in politics because of how toxic it is.
I wish Musk had stayed out of politics, but I'm glad he hasn't given up on Tesla/SpaceX just because of the enemies he's made. I think any normal person would have.
> if he hadn't aligned himself with Trump/MAGA he would have a much lower profile
He's been possibly the world's leading troll since long before his MAGA phase. Let's be serious.
>”we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy.”
You’re falling victim to the ‘broken windows fallacy’ here; money which is invested is actually more productive in improving medium and long term economic productivity than ‘consumption’ goods. Even ‘retained’ money (under one’s mattress) is not net-negative, as it increases the value of its circulating counterparts.
Scenario A: Someone breaks a window and the homeowner buys a replacement.
Scenario B: A homeowner adds a new window to their home.
Scenario C: A homeowner buys an online-course to learn how to make windows and then adds one to their home.
Scenario A has approximately no benefit to the economy. The homeowner is no better off (same number of windows) but had to spend money. The window maker might be better off, but only to the same extent that the homeowner is worse off.
I totally agree that Scenario A is not a benefit to the economy. That's the "broken window fallacy".
But Scenario B is definitely better for the economy. The homeowner has decided that having a new window is better than having the money. So the homeowner is better off. The window maker is also better off because they get the money. This is what happens when a billionaire buys a yacht.
Scenario C is the best. The homeowner has a new skill, which they can use to add more windows to their house or maybe their neighbors' houses. Over time, the amount of money spent on window-making will decrease, but the number of windows will stay constant or increase. That's a net benefit. And the online-course creator still made money.
This is what Musk is doing. He is developing new technologies that enable new capabilities and/or make existing things cheaper (e.g., electric cars, access to space, rural internet connectivity).
There is also Scenario D: The homeowner doesn't buy a new window but just keeps his money under his mattress. This is clearly the worst for the economy. Hording money like that means that there is less money circulating and lowered economic activity. The window maker is worse off, and even the homeowner is worse off if they would like to have a new window.
Billionaires who don't spend their money are the real danger, not the ones who tweet too much.
Investing their money is slightly better in that it makes the price of borrowing cheaper. But that only helps up to a point. Someone has to spend money or else there's no point in being able to borrow some. So I wish more billionaires were following Scenario C.
In your original comment, it sounded like you would encourage billionaires to buy yachts, solely "for the good of the economy".
Scenario D: A homeowner adds 10 window to their home because the populous think he is stingy and will send him to the guillotine if he does not start spending his money on new windows!
Scenario D provides no benefit to society.
If the billionaire does want the yacht, then no encouragement is needed.
Any normal human being may hang out with models for a while but I guess they will promote their own ideas very soon. $$$ brings power.
I am still waiting for someone to fund some open-source github projects instead of some new library or museum in their name.
Yes, absolutely! I think this will happen as more billionaires come from the tech world.
Your description of Elmo applies to several other billionaires who have somehow avoided quixotic hyper-destructive rampages through American politics. I’m all for wired funny, but not when it comes with this much carnage.
I'm not sure who the whole 'Elmo' thing is for -- more than anything I cringe at the person saying it, rather than thinking less of Elon or whatever the hope is. Like 'drumpf', or the whole small hands thing, it just comes across like a redditism that escaped confinement.
Is the hope that Elon or fans of his read it and get offended? I doubt they care much, and I fail to see the point of it.
He plans to IPO SpaceX and xAI, so this space data center fantasy benefits both:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-net-worth-hits-600-2022...
He is a walking billboard.
Elmo already cancelled out any progress made by buying a social media platform and getting the most anti-science anti-NASA admin in history elected. He's done a net negative on the world at this point, even if the scale is vastly larger than most people.
There was already an article of how this thing is just ain’t gonna happen:
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
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If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t).
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...