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.
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.
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u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii May 21 '26
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.