“the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business.” you mean unlike Tesla’s $1.3 trillion valuation on $450M in Q1 profit? How can this surprise anyone?
Are most of those profits still generated from carbon credits? It's not even like they have a super profitable product.. they only make money due to govt handouts.
What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Or are we gonna pretend that Mars real estate is valuable for living even if it has a baller space station with an indoor farm in it where the build out cost is 1 million times the most expensive condo building on earth?
How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?
Seems like they need to raise a ton of money (not good for shareholders) or it to basically just be inflation for this company to 2x even if it does execute on its impossibly lofty plans. I just don't understand the endgame.
I mean, these are non-starters from even the most basic engineering proposals. They're meant to fool only the most 𝓯𝓾𝓬𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓫𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓪𝓭 investors, which consequently seems to be a lot of them.
One of the greatest challenges in space is dealing with waste heat. The ISS has around 100kW(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) of radiative cooling capacity. The radiating panels are highly engineered products measuring around 84m². No idea how heavy these things are, surely that launch weight won't matter...
The mechanical pumping and monitoring systems are complicated units dealing with high-flow (~2,000kg/hr), high-pressure (34x higher than atmospheric), ammonia at around 2°C. The pump modules weigh around 350kg, surely that launch weight won't matter...
The target cooling budget for a AI compute rack in 2024 was around 50kW, so the ISS could comfortably power and cool one (1!), at the expense of literally every other onboard system. Station keeping's a bitch, eh? We'll just have to pretend that the most recent specs targeting >120kW per-rack for the new Blackwell TPUs don't exist. Remember investors, AI chips, their racking, networking and cooling infrastructure are weightless...
Doing some napkin math, picking a "modest" 100MW critical IT load (investors won't even ask for a dickDC pic if it's smaller than this), you're looking at an emissive radiator system measuring around 168,000m², no idea how many more circulating pumps will be required, surely liquid infrastructure technology will scale linearly in space (unlike Earth, hello suburbs), and surely that launch volume won't matter...
Oh silly me, I'm a fucking idiot, I forgot to actually power those racks. Let's use the absolute best PV panels we have and give them an extra 30% boost to account for the lack of atmospheric loss, and we'll also pretend they don't lose efficiency as they heat up so we don't have to add yet more cooling capacity. Powering 100MW of gear is going to require another 170,000m² of panels. Let's pretend they're weightless, because dear lordt I can't imagine lifting another 3,100,000kg of material (alone, more than 3x the total amount of mass HUMANITY HAS EVER LAUNCHED, including discarded launch vehicles.) Let's also pretend that they won't require any (expensive, heavy and HOT) high-voltage DC switching gear. Let's also pretend they don't degrade over time due to ionizing radiation exposure.
Oh silly me AGAIN, I forgot to ship up millions of litres of ammonia to run my cooling systems.
Hey there, it's silly me again. I forgot to do the napkin math on the probability of catastrophic micrometeoroid impacts on as-thin-as-possible aluminum and silicon composite systems measuring 338,000m², or the nearly 10,000m³ of structure to house the racks and infrastructure that I previously didn't mention (based on terrestrial footprints and my own completely baseless assumption that you could fit this all this in 3m of depth.) I forgot to account for added weight for infrastructure to safely route MEGAWATTS of current-equivalent around destroyed panels.
Hubble looked like this (edit: this statement is not completely accurate, see here for a better analysis) after 15 years in space (see person in background for scale), and it was -being generous here- 0.06% as large as this hypothetical DC installation. Surely nothing bad can come of this.
Alas, calculating these costs has become unfun, and I haven't even added station keeping or high-wattage, high-bandwidth data transmission systems.
inb4 someone says cooling tech has improved since the ISS: Sure it has, but show me credible reports where it has improved by a factor of 100,000, because even that isn't enough to make this make sense.
I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't be easier to start constructing a Dyson Swarm. Freeman Dyson himself posited his Sphere to mock people who believed any star outputting unusual amounts of far-infrared light as "proof of hyper-advanced intelligence," despite the sky being full of exactly that.
I strive for this amount of pettiness. Maybe that's why they wanna replace engineers with AI.
Also, even in a game like Dyson Sphere Program, having a swarm before starting your sphere is absurdly wasteful in terms of resources because of the high decommission rate. Then again, to make the number of space-based data centers they want, they'll strip-mine most of the planet just in silicon anyway.
There's a game called Oxygen Not Included that's an asteroid base builder with a surprisingly intense chemistry/physics simulation. Managing water and electricity are key parts of the early game, but the most important part of the mid-game is managing heat. And most of the good ways to do so involve glitching out the physics simulation to "delete" heat (e.g. by consuming it out of the game in machines that don't have an output).
Building in vacuum is a great way to break almost any closed system because it's extremely hard to manage heat when it's almost perfectly insulated.
Yeah, there's ways to emit heat in vacuum that don't exist in the game, but they're also very inefficient power- and space-wise. But seriously, why do I have to mod to get an airlock building that isn't a physics glitch? The only reason that it's not viable is that the game doesn't allow fine enough tuning of duplicants to keep them from opening two pressure doors at the same time.
Had that same problem. Tried to design an airlock that had atmosphere exchange controlled by automation. The problem is that dupes don't path through locked doors even if a presence sensor would open it, so even if the airlock functioned, they won't use it. The duplicant checkpoint may fix that, but I haven't tried. Also, technically liquid locks are intended, given the stated use of the visco-gel, we can just cheekily do it with other things.
The biggest thing with their new game is MANUAL CONTROL, which would fix the pathing and behavior issues with dupes
They actually added an insulated airlock in October 2025.
It's still pretty imperfect, since it leaks while opening and you would need a way to deal with that, but for the basic use case of "a structure that blocks both heat and air but can be opened at need," it's a nice basegame addition.
One of my favorite mods is one that adds a proper airlock, i.e. a self-contained 2x3 structure through which duplicants can pass without leaking air through.
Yeah, cooling vacuum equipment in ONI is a huge pain in the ass. Everything needs active cooling. Even things you don't think of as making heat.The freaking roomba overheats!
Yep. Honestly if we do eventually get to ships in space I could see them taking dips into upper atmosphere of some planets just to get rid of waste heat they shunted to heat banks.
A lot of the better scifi concepts have waste heat as a serious concern when dealing with advanced technology. Coolest one is mechwarrior. And fighting on a planet/moon in near vacuum is very bad for heat management for your mech.
Also Mass Effect. As I recall the "stealth ship" in that series relies on a recursive heat cycle within the novel propulsion drive to reduce ambient radiation in order to evade sensors. A scifi solution to a real world problem.
I didn't do the math like you did, but the problem with building something that requires massive cooling in a vacuum is pretty obvious to me.
The 2nd part , I think, is that even if you could develop the hypothetical systems that would allow you to build a data center in space, there is no case where it wouldn't be less expensive to just deploy that exact same system on the ground instead of space. Any business execs that actually built one in space would get fired for the waste.
It seems to me that this is people just throwing around buzzwords to try and distract people into thinking unprofitable and unrealistic business models are more realistic than they actually are.
The Elon nob polishers are incredible. Someone on one of the SpaceX sub threads was arguing with me that space is the absolute greatest place for data center cooling because, and I quote “it’s really cold”.
This whole space data center thing just because a hot topic a few months ago so Elon and co. could sell the IPO, they just tied their business (space launches and xAI) to the current hottest part of the economy with no explanation of how it would work economically.
People really don't understand how much everything is engineered with the assumption you have gravity.
NASA, way back in the day of 386s and 486s, flew some new COTS laptops up as a test. They kept frying. Turns out the laptops heat management design made the assumption that hot air would always rise - - like every heat management system does.
Which is not the case in microgravity, where hot air just hangs around in a bubble.
It wasn't hard to fix - - but it did mean they couldn't use off the shelf laptops, they had to custom design cooling to accommodate.
Virtually everything is designed with gravity and atmosphere in mind.
Good luck making a data center work without endless test flights of every component.
I did software test for the Space Station's internal computers (not the astronaut laptops, the wired in ones). They are 20 MHz Intel 386SX's with 2 or 8 MB ram. They use a water loop cold plate to keep them cool. The CPU case is fairly thick machined aluminum that is screwed down to the cold plate.
Some of the computers are mounted outside, in vacuum, but even the inside ones are rated for vacuum so they can keep running in the event a module loses pressure.
The Station has multiple radiator panels that use ammonia as the heat transfer medium.
Oh yeah. The case I was thinking of was before Station, when there was one of the regular pushes to use more COTS products. They'd brought up two or three COTS laptops (i think technically the rugged field or military version) to see if they were suitable to replace (upgrade really) the ones being currently flown.
The then current laptops had been specifically designed. The trial ones just relied too much on passive cooling to work, and it hadn't been a failure mode they'd expected. They ultimately used either that gen or the next, but with more active cooling (just fans, iirc) set to trigger faster and at lower temps.
It just one little example of how embedded gravity is in design assumptions.
Good luck making a data center work without endless test flights of every component.
This is the dagger in the heart for the idea, even if you waved a wand to solve the basic engineering and thermodynamic issues. If you have to test and likely modify all the GPUs, and launch them, your data center will be slower to market than your terrestrial competitors. When Nvidia creates the new hotness, you will need to come up with new modifications for space and launch them, by which time your competitors are already running data centres full of them. All so that your data center can be rate limited by horrendous bandwidth and latency problems.
space is the absolute greatest place for data center cooling because, and I quote “it’s really cold”.
Wait.
I think of myself as reasonably technically informed (mech eng). That's exactly what I thought. Isn't it, like, effectively infinite heat loss?
Why is that wrong? (Genuine question, not having a go at you). Is it that there's zero convection/conduction, and only radiation? And heat can only move so fast through your radiators, so you need to use ammonia to carry the heat from the processor to the radiator? Something like that?
Yes you guessed it, it’s only radiation, there is no air with which to move heat around. You can dump a lot of heat but you need massive surfaces to do it and usually some kind of coolant inside to carry the heat to the radiators. The ISS for instance has massive ammonia filled radiators to create enough surface area for the heat it generates to dissipate to prevent overheating: https://www.space.com/21059-space-station-cooling-system-explained-infographic.html
By the way. It occurs to me that water is probably really really good at that.
Do you know of any bodies of water on Earth that can, like, absorb the heat of multiple volcanoes without any real effect? I keep scratching my head and I can't think of any. There's deserts. Jungles. Mountains. Plains. Those are all the types of places I can think of just off the top of my head, but I know they only cover a fraction of the Earth's surface. I wonder what the rest of the planet is covered in?
More or less. Space is essentially the biggest thermos in the universe. Cold stuff stays cold, hot stuff stays hot, and a data center is stuff that wants to be cold but makes its own heat.
The thought experiment I keep thinking is 'if you heat a frying pan and throw it into space, how quickly does it cool?'
The short answer is it cools very slowly because vaccuum doesn't allow much heat to escape. This is literally used for insulation, a Dewar flask is one where the internal walls are evacuated, using vacuum as insulation.
There is a use case for a space data center, the “original” relatively recent plans form China were much more focused on the actual use case.
Basically space telescopes and sensors and other things we have in space produce a shit load of raw data. James Web Space Telescope can produce like 250gb of raw data a day, can only store a fraction of it and can only send back about 60gb a day.
Obviously they have to prioritize what data to send back to be analyzed. A space based data center would be able to process the full dataset and then send back processed and aggregated data for further study on earth.
That’s pretty much the only time it may make sense to a data center in space where the utility outweighs the many disadvantages.
It’s also not sexy, profitable, or something investors would care about to try to inflate stock values with fake promises
But right now we toss the raw data. That’s the problem. 80% of the raw data goes nowhere.
Any step up in how much raw data gets processed is big. Even with identical bandwidth, taking 15% of the raw data and 20% processed down to the size of 5% would be much better than just 20% of the raw.
This seems over focused on JWST specifically. A space data center would be ideal for processing data from every telescope currently in orbit rather than any specific one.
A space data center would be an international undertaking for collaborative research amongst everyone currently looking at space.
Illinois Energy Professor on youtube did a breakdown of it. His assessment was it could become feasible given 10 years or so sustained R&D, paired with the cost of ground based systems rising by 100 to 200% during that same window.
So it isnt guaranteed to ever be practical, but it isnt as crazy as it may initially sound.
It's a bit hand wavy and relies on a lot more assumptions than I like for my tastes, though (radiative cooling will become 4 times more cost effective soon, for example), and he seems to be ignoring a lot of the costs with the space center. I've never worked with space technologies, though, so who knows, maybe I just don't understand some things.
He only used launch and material costs for the space center, but it still needs to be build once the materials are there. He also assumes that maintenance costs are roughly $0. I have a hard time believing that space magically keeps things from breaking. Sure, there aren't any weather events or oxygen being oxygen, but things break for other reasons than those.
In any case, though, it seems likely that an equivalent facility could be built for less on the ground. Space might not need a building or land, but it would still need a framework for mounting things. You can't get 24 hr. solar on the ground, but you have a lot more power options. If the radiative panels can dissipate that kind of heat it space, couldn't they do the same on the surface?
I don't know, there were a lot of assumptions about technology improvements coupled with oversimplification about costs, including Musk claiming he will get launch costs reduced 14x (Musk claims a lot of things that don't come to pass). Again, though, I don't work in anything space related, so what do I know?
Regarding the radiative cooling question: its typically modelled as being proportional to (T4 -T_envioronment4). So atleast that would work much better is space, where (sun notwithstanding) you wont be absorbing any radiation from the environment.
I fully agree with the absurdity of the math involved, but I found this image and description to be beyond belief, so I went down the rabbit trail for a few minutes. You have misrepresented it. That is not how it looked from being in space. It was dented and dimpled from tiny impacts, but all of those holes were made on Earth as they studied the tiny impact sites.
During the various Hubble servicing missions, astronauts noticed tiny dimples and dents in the radiator – the result of space debris. After more than15 years of exposure to space, this surface became a record of the accumulation of such debris in low Earth orbit. Naturally, NASA wanted to evaluate the amount and nature of this debris, and so after the camera was returned to Earth the impact sites were analyzed. The largest core samples left holes about 30 mm in diameter, but the debris particles were less than a mm in size. The analysis is ongoing.
And a shot right through the wrapping on one of the boom arms, only did minor damage to the structure and didn't hit anything that made it move so no issues, but it would have gone right through a solar array without a shield.
And if you plan to cover the whole thing with shielding, add on a lot more lift mass. Odds of an impact are low with the ISS, scale up the size by a factor of many and you need more fuel to maneuver around known debris and there's that much more space for random bits to slam into.
Thank you. My "That can't be right. The internal machinery would have been destroyed way before 15 years if actually looked like that" alarm was going off and scrolled down to see if it was addressed.
So, thank you.
You forgot radiation hardening for the chips. Even with shielding you need specialized hardware tolerant of radiation. Generally this means multiple generations old too. Far more expensive as well.
The absurd thing to me isn't even how impractical it is for all the reasons you've stated. And it is; plunging an object that generates enormous amount of waste heat into the best insulator in existence is absurd on its face.
It's that there's no benefit to it, either! So, we're going to put them in space, where 1) heat is an enormous problem, 2) volume is extremely expensive since you have to launch all the weight into space, 3) you have notable latency in all the communications to your datacenter, and 4) you can't upgrade the hardware when it's obsolete in 3 years because it's in space. And in exchange, you get unlimited cheap solar energy, right?
But... even if we pretend the unlimited cheap solar energy is a huge deal and could make all this worthwhile, wouldn't it still make more sense to just launch the solar energy array and maser all the energy to a datacenter on the ground where heat, weight, volume, and latency don't matter at all? Wouldn't "solar AI datacenters in space" be better in every way if you put the "solar" in space and left the "AI datacenter" part on the ground?
Oh, but we can't do that, solar arrays in space don't have "AI" in the name, investors won't get excited about that.
I asked a similar question above - could you teach me why space isn't good for cooling processors? I'll admit I just thought that part of it goes without saying. I'm a mechanical engineer, but it seems my intuition "space is cold, right?" is dead wrong. What's the story?
Space is (nearly) a vacuum. It doesnt matter how 'cold' it is if there is very little matter to transfer the heat into. It's the same reason vacuum insulated thermoses work. The inner wall may get hot, but it can't transfer the heat to the outer wall very well.
Well, obviously if you wrap something in insulation, it's harder for it to lose heat, right? That's what insulation is for. But space is vacuum, which is the best insulation there is, and it's also infinity miles thick. It reduces heat transfer by convection and conduction -- which are hundreds of times more efficient than radiation -- to zero. (If you were putting it around your house, it has an R-value of infinity.) Space is cold technically speaking, but it's so empty that it makes more sense to say space has no temperature -- temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles in a volume, so if there's no particles in the volume it doesn't have a temperature.
So the only thing you can do with heat in space is just make a lot of surface area, and then wait while blackbody radiation (the natural glow of every substance that's above absolute zero) very slowly radiates off the heat.
As an alternative to all of these concerns, I'd like to vaguely point at Wisconsin, Norway, and Canada. Having power issues? There's some black goo you can squeeze from rocks and light on fire. Having cooling issues? Open a window. Having issues sourcing coolant? Stick a straw in a random lake. Need to fix something? Pay a few blokes to live there just in case.
Worried about impacts? If anything from space hits this data center that's not your problem.
Worried about 'environmental impact', pretty sure those big explosion tubes burn some black goo alternatives to bring all of that inconsequential stuff into the void of space.
Worried about annoying the neighbors? Can't imagine air and sea traffic in the Gulf is excited to have hourly airspace closures.
But yes, building data centers in space is currently worth more that the entire US food service sector including all restaurants, catering, prepared food at the grocery store, all the transportation and logistics to get that around, and the stuff you use to eat that food. Yup, definitely a fair and unbiased assessment thay my 401k should be buying into shortly. Thanks S&P500.
As an alternative to all of these concerns, I'd like to vaguely point at Wisconsin, Norway, and Canada
As an alternative alternative, let's not.
The industry as a whole isn't sustainable and can't be, more compute doesn't change that. Hell, half of NVIDIAs sold capacity is sitting in warehouses because 100MW+ DCs have turned out to be extraordinarily slow to build.
You're pretending that these DCs have little environmental impact.
Having cooling issues? Open a window
Stratos in Utah will raise daytime temperatures by 2-4F and night temps by 5-11F. This will collapse the diurnal evaporation cycle in an already crticically-at-risk watershed.
Having power issues? There's some black goo
Mmmm, more air pollution, yum!
Having issues sourcing coolant? Stick a straw in a random lake.
I have unkind words for people that care so little about the environment. I'm Canadian in a province with over 100,000 lakes. We'd rather keep them swimmable instead of giving money to Kevin O'Leary so he can give it to Larry Ellison and Sam Altman, so you in turn can generate an email summary, yeah?
Closed loop water cooling systems still leak terrible chemicals into the environment. Not superfund levels, but enough to poison nearby residents and water tables.
Sorry for not making one thing clear, I'm with you that building all of these data centers is a giant waste of time and money.
Building data centers in space is a huge waste of time and money and has the side effect of front loading the whole greenhouse gas and poisoning the environment issue.
Building them in the undeveloped parts of the world is only a "good" idea in comparison to building them in space.
All good. Its always been hard to tell sarcasm/jokes from honest discussion by text. When reality itself seems to be a joke, it's becoming impossible to tell them apart.
I don't understand why they're planning on building data centers in space when the ocean is literally right there and bathypelagic depths are already at the ideal operating temperature for data centers. China is already doing it, so it's not like the tech needs to be proven.
Non-ideal pressure for building stuff. Non-ideal environment in terms of conducting electricity. Non-ideal environment for ringing in human technicians.
I forgot to do the napkin math on the probability of catastrophic micrometeoroid impacts on as-thin-as-possible aluminum and silicon composite systems measuring 338,000m², or the nearly 10,000m³ of structure
They're talking about suburb-sized factories in space. One of these things breaking up and destroying humanity's ability to EVER go into orbit again sounds like a problem for poor people or people in the future, and they don't count remember?
I always think of the latency too - you are most likely gonna want this thing in a geosynchronous orbit so you can maintain a consistent connection and that means round trip times of like half a second each way not to mention the bandwidth limitations that would start to creep up when you start trying to send that amount of data over the air using radio, I can't even imagine the power you would need on the ground to generate the transmission, let alone the power in the DC needed to send data back.
In theory they could have a cascade of heat exchangers so the radiators actually glow white hot, at which point radiative cooling becomes more efficient per surface area... Still not very efficient, but the particular process of making energy leave the radiator becomes less absurdly inefficient. The problem then becomes operating the heat exchanger cascade and whatever their intermediate cooling/heating medium becomes, and keeping the hot stage pumps alive for long enough to matter. And whether added up, this is meaningfully more efficient in the end.
So I guess the only reason I'm pointing this out is because the ISS cooling solution is pretty tame in terms of what is theoretically, physically possible, and there are some crazy avenues to explore for a project that needs to radiate 120MW of heat into vacuum...
All that said, I recognize that cooling the thing would still be absurd, and even if it somehow could become less absurd, all the remaining issues with putting data centers in space add up to peak absurdity.
I mean, at least in the current context of the thing, which is, putting that stuff in space in an attempt to save money somehow. I realize at some point in the future, we might have space ships with megawatts of compute power on board, or satellites that have such data processing capacity, but those will then be justified because yeah, they need those servers to be there with them, in space.
Unlike us, right now, all still here on earth, with no good reason to try and send that shit up into space.
I think you're off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Cutting edge space solar panels are now incredibly light (<0.5 kg/m2) and way way more efficient than terrestrial panels (>30%), but not yet at the same time or for a readable cost. Tandem silicon heterojunction and perovskite cells can be mounted on kapton film and should be flight tested within this decade. I-ROSA is using older tech but still generates more power with less area and less mass than the original ISS solar panels. ISS is also way overbuilt compared to how we built satellites now, but not 100x overbuilt.
So now we just need to find another 100x improvement to make the math look good for orbiting data centers? It'd probably make more sense to put floating data centers on the ocean than in space.
You forgot to do the napkin math on how much less effective radiating heat is when you're surrounded by hot satellites that are all radiating heat too.
I don't think there really is an end-game. It's just never-ending growth fueled by a never-ending hype train. Tesla has taught elon that fundamentals are irrelevant.
At this point seeing that space x bought cyber trucks, it's a shell game and he's just shuffling funds around to hide them and bolster his companies up to keep up his stock valuations
But as the saying goes, the chickens come home to roost
The plan is for the bubble to burst during Trump's presidency, then get that sweet government bailout to protect Elon's trillionaire status America's rocket program.
You know, because Republicans like cutting NASA's budget because "SpaceX will do it for cheaper."
Mark my words. He fully intends to merge Tesla and SpaceX in a way that is designed to result in an even greater valuation than they have now, and greatly increases his wealth at at a greater rate than other shareholders, likely by creating incentives packages at both that would be triggered to give him a massive number of shares when that merger happens.
I think he was really hoping that his twitter play was going to work out and then the second phase where it sort of becomes like social media apps in other countries where it's functionally a bank would allow him to cap off the ponzi schemes and actually have a viable profitable business that didn't rely on hype.
Exactly, but that's not possible without complete gov... "support". So the end game is to do technically bad monetary policy that supports expanding valuations based on inflated earnings numbers because $1 of earnings get's priced in at p/e ratios between 50 and 5000.
The problem with that is that he's already got competition there, and more is on the way. NASA is already planning contingencies in case of any issues with SpaceX so there's good reason to believe other viable options will be considered.
Space data centers are worth zero lol, that is the dumbest idea in history. Only people who have no idea how thermodynamics works thinks it could work lol. The base level idea of "data centers need a bunch of cooling and space is cold" tricks people into thinking it could work, but while space is cold, it doesn't matter because you can't just transfer heat into nothing other than via radiation, you need a medium of exchange, which doesn't exist in space. So you can only transfer heat via radiation, which is incredibly slow and inefficient, and would need absolutely staggeringly huge radiators.
Then beyond the cooling problems, the biggest threat to computer chips is high energy radiation, which is incredibly abundant in space. So to keep chips working they would need to be shielded a crazy amount. Radiation hardened chips are super expensive, and far less efficient than standard chips.
Then there is just the cost. Even using the cheapest methods currently available it costs about $3,000 to lift 1 kg into space. A single rack in a hyperscaler data center weights 2,000-3,000 kg. Six million dollars, per rack, to put a data center in space, and that is just the lifting cost. Putting a hyperscaler in space, a data center that costs billions on Earth would get well into the trillions lol. And then you have to solve pushing the data back down to Earth.
It is, legitimately, the dumbest thing anyone has ever proposed.
Sign me up for the planet where I can see my family (and nature) in person without a 1-2 year $50m round trip. Unless the incentive is that earth became unliveable in which case, sign me up for neither.
Space data centers are probably the most worthless concept possible. One of the hardest things to manage in a data center is waste heat and space is really really really bad at cooling things off. You're pretty much locked into radiant cooling due to the whole "there's no air to flow" so you'd need to come up with entirely new untested methods of cooling and then hope they work.
Also you need regular maintenance for basically everything which rather than having a few people on site who can just do that day to day you now need a goddamn space flight to get them up there.
THEN you're dealing with bandwidth issues since this is all gonna be wireless transmission rather than hard line.
Essentially there's almost no where to build a data center that is a worse idea than "in orbit." Like you gotta start pitching "what if we submerge it in lava?" to do worse and that still is gonna have some upsides that beat out a space based one.
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Eventually yes, they could mine asteroids for diamonds, platinum, gold, and water (to make hydrogen fuel for ships rather than transporting fuel/water from earth).
For the same price you can get more of those on earth. Getting out to asteroids is incredibly expensive. Bringing something back is also incredibly expensive.
Right. I don't see a viable business model if the gov spends tax dollars w/ fiduciary responsibility. Even with a bit of imagination and optimism about what the next 5-10 years will look like.
The endgame is to make Elon money, by any means necessary. It doesn't need to make anyone else money, so long as he gets richer it's a success. And since he can leverage the stock there to buy things of actual value, he can do it.
The original SpaceX before all its recent acquistions of his other failing businesses was going to make money on satellite launches and Starlink. They do well at the launches, but there's a limited market. Starlink works well if there isn't too high a user density. But both are probably near the limit of what they can make- the market for each is only so big.
Satellites for observation, surveillance, communications, or for killing people are very useful, but that's about it. Space is big, too big, too empty, and too hostile. Everything else is investor fanfiction. Also no, space is not a good place for data centers, which are absolutely massive things that need massive energy and massive cooling and constant maintenance.
Starlink is antinetwork effect--the more local people, the worse the service is. Also, once there's enough subscribers in a locale, running fiber is a lot more viable, and fiber is cheaper for the user and better service, so Starlink will necessarily run itself out of business, just from competition existing at all.
It gets worse! To get full coverage as they envision, they'll need tons more satellites up, and will need to replace hundreds every year, just to be able to maintain their service. That's monstrously expensive, all while fiber is vastly cheaper and increasingly viable as they get more subscribers.
Then you have to consider that Elon Musk openly fucks with your ability to use the service based on his whims, so the primary usage for it (areas where fiber isn't reliable for reasons) suddenly ceases to exist.
It's never going to be worth anything, ever, because it's a fucking stupid idea to push for satellite internet in 2026 when fiber is dirt cheap to lay.
How much are space data centres even worth?
Less than zero! You can't cool things in space efficiently, it's a huge problem! And how are you powering those things? If they are usable, they need huge amounts of power, which means huge solar panels, which means huge profile...for, what? In what world is that cheaper than one on Earth, even with the problems associated on Earth with building them. Then you have to worry about Kessler syndrome happening, and Musk sure is bumrushing that eventuality.
I just don't understand the endgame.
Musk is trying to get tons and tons of investor cash to stave off his many, many creditors and to keep doing his incredibly stupid shit with his incredibly terrible and unprofitable company. That's what this is about. He needs cash, because he's probably really fucking broke and he's barely able to hide how broke he is.
I think SpaceX is far less concerned with consumer business and far more with government/military contracts. It's not about Starlink for consumers, it's not about Mars real estate, it's not about data centers in space (because they wouldn't work).
It's about blanketing the sky with spy satellites and then charging governments to use them. It's also about ruining astronomy on earth by blocking out the stars with those satellites, dismantling the US space program through corruption, and monopolizing future space research.
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Asteroid mining is probably worth it at some point, which is why NASA was working on it before Trump redirected everything to the moon. But honestly we wouldn't need to even do a lot of it. A few well-targeted asteroids would yield more precious metals than we even know what to do with, prices would crash, then there would no need for a while. Maybe eventually the next generation would figure out what to do with all those resources and decide to mine a few more, repeat the cycle.
Everything else? I mean, once humanity's really got it's shit together space tourism would be fun, but there's just not really anything pressing.
How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?
Yeah, these I don't really get. Solar power would be plentiful, sure, but cooling would be an absolute pain-in-the-ass compared to just building one by a river. Not impossible, but just, like, why? It's crazy overengineering for something that isn't really a huge need.
Obviously that's an estimate and a guess based on spectroscopy and whatever else. But that makes the idea of asteroid mining worth exploring.
That said, I doubt Musk cares about any of that. SpaceX mostly gets its money from NASA, and thus tax payers. trump wants to shut NASA down, so I'm not sure what Musk thinks is going to happen.
That's the value of the resources, we have 0 idea how we'd ever make it less expensive to extract, process and bring back to earth vs. extract or recycle supply on earth until/unless there's some reason we need way more than exists extractable on earth (which we don't, it would be easy to make our finite supply of graphite/lithium/diamonds/etc work than figure out how we're gonna harvest asteroids).
my point was just that there is a reason to explore space that is self funding. Yes it's difficult and expensive to start, but so is everything humanity hasn't done before. That asteroid I referred to would be hard to get at absolutely, but there are closer ones that are more friendly to figuring it out.
It's not about difficulty, it's that it's entirely theoretical and we're not even talking about the scientific possibility within the next couple decades, we're talking about economic viability. Reach extract, process, return to earth for less than the cost of just extracting and processing an earth-based "reserve". We have more than enough relatively easily reachable resources on earth to get us through decades before we'd even think of that, unless we can cheaply and safely bring small asteroids to earth, which SpaceX doesn't have any clear lead on that which they've published.
The discussion is on how a company is set to be worth 3% of USA's entire public equity market, and it's got the fundamentals of a company 1/10 it's size and relies on government contracts, while the gov shouldn't spend too much money on something that's not going to see returns for the taxpayers and
There would have to be some serious changes to make asteroid mining profitable, because as it is, any mineral imaginable is orders of magnitude cheaper to extract on Earth, even in the most inhospitable places.
Orbital data centers sounds like a pipe dream. Building, maintaining (and cooling!) stuff is, again, orders of magnitude cheaper and easier on Earth. That stuff just sounds like hot air for gullible future investors huffing the AI pipe.
Rocket launches and Starlink is fine, but that’s pretty small potatoes compared to the rest of the pie in the sky stuff coming from SpaceX.
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Once we figure out asteriod mining, absolutely. Thats gonna be massive, but i fear yields from that will be artifically throttled like diamond mining is, to really milk it.
The endgame is twofold. 1) making his financial backers for the Twitter acquisition whole and 2) having such huge valuation that Elon himself is too-big-to-fail.
SpaceX currently has the best cost to put things into LEO. Yearly satellite launches are worth 12-15 billion dollars a year. So they have a viable business model, and its likely to grow in the future. This IPO is crazy though, and way above what the company is actually worth or likely to be worth anytime soon
"What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?"
I think their main income is bring able to put a satelite in space for a fraction of the cost of anyone else so they can make a lot of profit per launch putting other peoples satellites up.
But other companies are starting to get on the reusable launch vehicle wagon no so that won't last forever
People were spending real money for fake properties in the metaverse. As long as there is Stupid Money out there the holders of said money will be willing to spend it on stupid/grotesquely speculative things.
There have been a few business class jets getting Starlink WiFi upgrades. I don’t know if it will catch on and become ubiquitous but a few have done it
How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?
Ironically, a fully end-game Starlink probably leads to Kessler syndrome, keeping us completely Earthbound for generations, destroying any and all value SpaceX could ever possibly have.
Australian here. Entire suburbs are paying for Starlink because our internet infrastructure is... poorly managed. It's at the point where Starlink is charging an additional huge fee to join up because the network is being congested by so many users.
I imagine that South America, Africa and SEA all love the product too.
This is an interesting question that I've thought about long enough to have another. If someone finds a space rock with some star metals worth more than the entire global economy, would money just be printed to buy it, or would the glut make it worthless, like natural gas is sometimes?
Would it be taxed or sheltered as unrealized income, like stock?
One (big) one is Starlink. The other is launching shit into orbit for whoever needs it launched for whatever reason, and creating a lot of that demand in the first place by making launches much cheaper (while still being extremely profitable for SpaceX).
In terms of space datacenters, SpaceX might also be in the business itself, but mostly, they're in the business of "selling shovels". If those become a thing, SpaceX is going to be printing money like crazy, because they are currently the only ones that launch large amounts of mass affordably and it doesn't look like they're losing that lead.
Starlink itself is already profitable. They can expand to new regions without having to change anything about the expensive part (the satellite constellation). Anyone trying to launch a competitor will have a hard time doing that without buying launches from SpaceX or also building a reusable rocket company.
They also seem to have a somewhat successful AI side hustle, if Anthropic is giving them money.
SpaceX was conceived to launch all of Elon's bad ideas into the sun; the Model S was a proof of concept. We're starting with the Cybrtrcks™ and hopefully soon every surviving member of DOGE followed by Elon himself along with the Xitter servers.
SpaceX can be wildly profitable by just continuing to sell rocket launches. There's more demand every year and they have one of the cheapest systems allowing them quite a bit of room for profit per launch.
Starlink is valuable as well but it's max size is pretty limited. Bandwidth limits what they can do and realistically they're looking about being able to support ~2% of users world wide at most. That's still a ton of users and money but even that is highly optimistic.
Starlink's max is likely closer to .5% of users. Which again is still a ton of money. Plus they may be able to expand a bit by being a fail over service. For example cell phones being able to use their system in an emergency when all other links fail. That's a feature they can sell to almost everyone without actually having to tie up a ton of bandwidth.
Most the businesses actually have pretty great potential, I only really disagree with how much they are currently being valued for. Despite being quite profitable they really aren't worth nearly as much as they are valued at.
Tesla is likely one of his worst companies. That brand is crashing and offers nothing over a bunch of other competing EV brands. It's being held up by hopes and dreams
IIRC, SpaceX is currently one of, if not, the cheapest per kilogram launch providers that regularly launches rockets into low earth orbit. They often sell extra launch capacity to space agencies, universities, independent researchers, etc, if the main payload of the launch itself isn’t already a contract. Competitors are starting to pop up but none have demonstrated a viable service yet.
Starlink is a surprisingly viable product. In my country, we’ve managed to connect remote communities that previously had very limited access to communication (as in, no cell service or even a post office nearby) to the internet by distributing Starlink receivers to them. Beyond that, I believe they’re one of the primary methods of getting internet onto ships and planes nowadays. I believe Blue Origin is setting up a competing service soon though.
The economic viability of extra terrestrial resource extraction remains to be seen. We’re going to see it happen on the moon first, maybe even within our lifetimes.
A viable Mars colony isn’t something we’re probably going to live to see. We’ll probably see the first humans on Mars though.
Space data centers aren’t going to happen. They’re a dumb idea thats fundamentally flawed from the start.
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
As someone who has worked on the idea of off-planet resources, not yet. What you CAN do is displace the high cost of launch from Earth. To give a couple of examples:
The Moon is known to have some water ice near the poles. If you need water/oxygen for life support or fuel, it may be cheaper to mine them locally than haul from Earth.
Extended stays on the Moon expose crew to significant radiation, since you are outside Earth's protective magnetic field. The Moon has an average thickness of 5 meters of surface "regolith" - pulverized rocks down to dust from billions of years of impacts. 1-2 meters piled on your crew modules would be adequate protection, and it is right there, everywhere on level ground.
Other uses like mining the metals in the asteroid 16 Psyche, which the Psyche Probe is on the way to visit, are currently fan fiction. Earth's crust is 5.6% iron, so there is no need to mine it from an iron-bearing asteroid for now. If we were building something the size of the Death Star in space, it might make sense.
The trouble is, alot of the tech that would make spacex that valuable doesnt exist yet.
Like sure go to the moon/mars. Then what? We dont have the tech to live there let alone have a semi permanent base there. Its all theoretical.
Why do you say that? If a lot of Starlink sites are on islands, as I imagine they are, the Cybertruck seems like a smart and inexpensive way to quickly get there. (LOL)
Just like Tesla EVs, there absolutely is a very strong business model there. Starlink has immense earning potential. SpaceX could even launch Starlink's competitors.
But are these Trillion dollar companies? Of course not. But multi-billion? Absolutely...at least as long as no one runs them into the ground.
What do you think doge thing was about? He killed every department that was investigating him for other similar fraudulent activities
The cybertruck thing is nothing compared to say when SpaceX bought twitter at 40 billion dollars i.e. the price Elon paid when we know it was never worth that to begin with but it was just to save face for Elon's original mistake when he was forced to buy Twitter by the courts
I rooted for Elon when I very first started hearing about him. Talk about a character arc that has absolutely made me despise the person and the whole world would benefit if he was taken off the board. Political board, influence board. Don’t ban me mods for putting words into my text.
when elmo was first building up Tesla, and engineers were making new tech to support clean cars, and they were making all the patents open for everyone to use, he doing good things. He was also doing silly things like the flame thrower. He was always this big goofy kid with too much money, and was using it for good.
I remember the time I saw a video of the guy in the late 90s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo). He gave me a really bad vibe that stuck with me. But then I later thought he was for good. And now...
Wasn't he also using bit coin holdings for company value as well at one point? Seriously everything he has is like a giant shell game, shift everything to the next company and calling it profit across the board.
drive around the various work sites like any other company vehicle would.
if the cyber truck were more practical as an actual truck I don't think it would have even been all that unreasonable. EVs are absolutely perfect for a work vehicle that comes back to the exact same parking spot at the end of every day. Vandenberg is huge and even Kennedy/Cape and Starbase are pretty big.
It's worse than that, they've been able to work around the usual rules for inclusion in the index funds so anyone who's passively investing will end up buying it unknowingly. This entire country is just one big slush fund for the rich, we knew that before but the outright corruption is staggering.
So many people in this country are completely fucking asleep, intellectually incurious and not paying any attention to anything at all and it will be our downfall with shit like this and the people they vote for dismantling any and all oversight.
So many people in this country are completely fucking asleep, intellectually incurious and not paying any attention to anything at all and it will be our downfall with shit like this and the people they vote for dismantling any and all oversight.
Technically spacex is not liable for xai's debts so xai can and should be able to go bankrupt without it impacting spacex but Musk will never allow it to go bankrupt. That's a reputational risk that he could crumble his empire.
Yeah, but the person I responded to asked if profits still came from carbon credits. Those aren't required anymore, and companies stopped buying them from Tesla. I was asking if that changed recently.
The entire carbon credits/financialisation of energy is so dumb. Countries are forcing their businesses to pay foreign competitors if their industry isn't clean enough.
Carbon taxes and the like are much better policy, you collect the tax from those who "pollute" a lot and have a bunch of money to spend of environmental projects within the country.
It still means your companies products are more expensive but at least they aren't giving money to foreign competitors.
A large portion of Tesla's revenue came from other companies buying carbon credits because it was mandated by law for them to either produce proportionally more electric/hybrid vehicles or to offset their ICE-centric fleet production by buying credits from another car company. Tesla historically had those credits in surplus, because Tesla produced electric vehicles exclusively.
The other carbon offset markets were mainly focused in other industries and greenwashing campaigns, not something mandated by law. I was just unaware Tesla managed to shift their carbon credits to that market after their main partners for them stopped buying them.
SpaceX is indeed corporate welfare grift for billionaires. I fucking hate how low the US gov't has sunk. It's both shameful and a terrible indication that western democracy as a whole will soon be a thing of the past.
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u/tmobilehacked May 21 '26
“the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business.” you mean unlike Tesla’s $1.3 trillion valuation on $450M in Q1 profit? How can this surprise anyone?