Retail cost per watt for terrestrial panel: under 45c
Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450
Annual performance degradation of terrestrial solar panel: under 0.5%
That of space-grade solar panel: up to 2%
Life span of terrestrial panel: about 2x that of space panel.
Total difference in cost per watt feeding a DC load in space vs on land: about x400
And that's ignoring launch costs. It makes absolutely zero sense. And given the scale of production and investment in manufacturing, terrestrial is likely to stretch even further ahead in the cost stakes.
It's not really extraterritorial from the point of view of needing to comply with regulations though. Your datacentre company has registered offices and physical locations. Your downlinks are based on territory. You need to relaunch on a regular basis and you have very restricted choice of territories that you can launch from.
When you add in the VRT and the QML (even not including the ZB-PRP 5) you get far lower than what a naive USP calculation gets you. Horner Weisenbach talked about this recently on their blog.
Cool, we will finally have actual data to see if that’s possible or not. My understanding is that doing compute in space for ML is pretty absurd, but the discussion will be way more interesting with real numbers.
I still think it’s mostly a way to put pressure on politicians, « you either give us tax cut, fast tracked permits, and let us do what we want with the land or we go to space and you get no benefits »
Doing compute in space for ML is perfectly possible (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi-Sat-2), making it competitive with terrestrial compute is a much harder question to solve.
Starlink is heavily regulated. Or at least as heavily as anyone else using radio spectrum
Not sure what interest the government would have in stricter regulation of the rocket launching side of SpaceX. Environmental impact and impact on air traffic and boats is regulated. And SpaceX existing is strongly benefiting the US government. They are their biggest customer
Is it possible that our current government is particularly prone to under regulation of Elon Musks companies and that a different administration may in fact behave differently?
When did they do this? I didn’t hear of any SpaceX launches besides the falcon launch yesterday for a government spy satellite. I wonder if this one was also bundled in.
I don't know what that Arianespace figure is referring to (perhaps just the commercial satellite market, or the portion of it they expect to capture?) but there were 317 successful launches to orbit in 2025. Last April there were six in 24 hours: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Three launches from one company is unusual though.
If US folks are watching a rocket launch and they're wearing light jackets, it's Vandenberg (which doesn't publish all their scheduled rocket launches.)
This is obviously for the Golden Dome. Missile interception for ICBMs only works in space and they need the hardware and AI for classifiers (decoy/not_decoy) and for targeting in space, too.
For civilian purposes this would be even more dystopian. Communication satellites and propaganda from space have always existed, but AI manufactured mass slop and propaganda from space really raises philosophical objections.
Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.
The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.
Terrestrial data centers are having a hard time connecting to power. What’s the good of a $40/Watt compute asset you can’t turn on? Spending $10 or even $20/Watt extra to get power by sending inference load to orbit starts to sound like a bargain, and that’s doable with today’s launch vehicles. With high reuse, that number drops to below $1/Watt for 24/7 power, which makes it cheaper than any terrestrial energy source.
And the vast majority of compute load is inference. Part of the training process benefits from a large, coherent (ie low latency) data center, but that’s a minority of the load nowadays.
Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.
Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.
I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.
But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.
Capacity factor of orbital solar PV panel: 97%
Capacity factor of terrestrial solar panel: 23%
Retail cost per watt for terrestrial panel: under 45c
Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450
Annual performance degradation of terrestrial solar panel: under 0.5%
That of space-grade solar panel: up to 2%
Life span of terrestrial panel: about 2x that of space panel.
Total difference in cost per watt feeding a DC load in space vs on land: about x400
And that's ignoring launch costs. It makes absolutely zero sense. And given the scale of production and investment in manufacturing, terrestrial is likely to stretch even further ahead in the cost stakes.
Recent and related:
Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49837350 - Sept 2026 (96 comments)
Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606 - Sept 2026 (551 comments)
The usp of data centres in space is extraterritoriality. That's all it is.
It's not really extraterritorial from the point of view of needing to comply with regulations though. Your datacentre company has registered offices and physical locations. Your downlinks are based on territory. You need to relaunch on a regular basis and you have very restricted choice of territories that you can launch from.
I think it's far more than the USP.
When you add in the VRT and the QML (even not including the ZB-PRP 5) you get far lower than what a naive USP calculation gets you. Horner Weisenbach talked about this recently on their blog.
That and being able to pretend that they’re doing something noteworthy instead of treading water and burning funds.
Cool, we will finally have actual data to see if that’s possible or not. My understanding is that doing compute in space for ML is pretty absurd, but the discussion will be way more interesting with real numbers.
I still think it’s mostly a way to put pressure on politicians, « you either give us tax cut, fast tracked permits, and let us do what we want with the land or we go to space and you get no benefits »
Doing compute in space for ML is perfectly possible (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi-Sat-2), making it competitive with terrestrial compute is a much harder question to solve.
What makes you think governments can't or won't regulate organizations operating in space?
The fact that SpaceX + Starlink exists and wasn't regulated in to oblivion shows the US government will mostly stay away.
Starlink is heavily regulated. Or at least as heavily as anyone else using radio spectrum
Not sure what interest the government would have in stricter regulation of the rocket launching side of SpaceX. Environmental impact and impact on air traffic and boats is regulated. And SpaceX existing is strongly benefiting the US government. They are their biggest customer
Is it possible that our current government is particularly prone to under regulation of Elon Musks companies and that a different administration may in fact behave differently?
When did they do this? I didn’t hear of any SpaceX launches besides the falcon launch yesterday for a government spy satellite. I wonder if this one was also bundled in.
There were three SpaceX launches yesterday. (An ISS crew, a Falcon Heavy spy satellite, and a big rideshare that included this).
There is a global market of only about 25 rocket launches a year (according to Arianne aerospace) and SpaceX launched 3 in a single day?
I don't know what that Arianespace figure is referring to (perhaps just the commercial satellite market, or the portion of it they expect to capture?) but there were 317 successful launches to orbit in 2025. Last April there were six in 24 hours: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Three launches from one company is unusual though.
There were 317 successful orbital launches in 2025 [0] and 229 so far this year [1]...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...
Edit: mistyped 317 as 313
Those were the Before Times. Now SpaceX is sending up sky clutter all the damn time.
If US folks are watching a rocket launch and they're wearing light jackets, it's Vandenberg (which doesn't publish all their scheduled rocket launches.)
https://www.spacex.com/launches/transporter18
This is obviously for the Golden Dome. Missile interception for ICBMs only works in space and they need the hardware and AI for classifiers (decoy/not_decoy) and for targeting in space, too.
For civilian purposes this would be even more dystopian. Communication satellites and propaganda from space have always existed, but AI manufactured mass slop and propaganda from space really raises philosophical objections.
In other news, Howard Hughes explored the deep sea for purely civilian purposes ...
Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.
The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.
Terrestrial data centers are having a hard time connecting to power. What’s the good of a $40/Watt compute asset you can’t turn on? Spending $10 or even $20/Watt extra to get power by sending inference load to orbit starts to sound like a bargain, and that’s doable with today’s launch vehicles. With high reuse, that number drops to below $1/Watt for 24/7 power, which makes it cheaper than any terrestrial energy source. And the vast majority of compute load is inference. Part of the training process benefits from a large, coherent (ie low latency) data center, but that’s a minority of the load nowadays.
Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.
Talking starmind.
150kw design Launch on 4000kg is 4 million. 150kw solar Radiator Electronics
20/watt is 3 million. We are above your budget.
Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.
I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.
But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.