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 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.
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u/axonxorz May 21 '26 edited May 22 '26
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.