Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility, as well as making no economic sense. Engineering and the laws of physics get on the way.
Just because Scott Manley refuses to call that out, so he can do another eight videos about it, don´t stop listening to somebody with the feet on the ground:
Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way.
Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.
Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late.
Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?
There's a difference between "infeasible given materials and manufacturing capabilities of the time" and "infeasible as a scalable solution due to the laws of physics"
note the scalable in there. Even under best case assumptions, it's only a good fit for edge coprocessing where latency is super important. You're not going to power the world's compute with a self healing Dyson sphere (but if you think that, I've got something to sell you).
Almost no one said those were impossible, just hard. This is completely different. Rather like... a train in a vacuum tube hard. Definitely harder than making a subway with autonomous trains under a modern city. And much harder than being a third rate AI lab, though Elon did hit that target perfectly.
Train-in-a-vacuum-tube isn't even restricted by the laws of physics, and it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum anyway, just low pressure. Data Centers IN SPAAAAAACE have the teensy little problem of cooling that you can't just brute-force a solution to. Those giant things dangling off the ISS that make up most of its footprint aren't solar panels, they're heatsinks, and they still have issues managing heat.
Energy radiation scales T^4 so physics is really on your side here. If you can engineer GPUs to run a little hotter you get significant decreases in radiator size required.
Well... If the launch cost is low enough you can just pack a radiator large enough. Good thing this might drive the development of a wider Starship and Ultraheavy booster (or a Superheavy-Heavy where three Superheavy rockets boost a bigger, heavier Starship). Eventually we can get to the Comicallyheavy booster.
Perhaps, but I don't see the costs getting anywhere near being worth it. You'd need a space elevator or to manufacture the sinks IN SPAA— er, in space. The latter is theoretically possible but still extremely remote, the former still requires unobtanium.
Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?
From the SpaceX S-1: "For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net." In plain terms: SpaceX's rocket division charges outside customers roughly $102 million per Falcon 9 launch — but it charges Starlink $0.
SpaceX appears to be heavily subsidizing Starlink in the launch cost sense.
There is a mix of clever and sketchy accounting going on in Muskworld making it hard to see which elements profitable/sustainable and what isn't.
> Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?
This is always a funny "gotcha" people bring up. Except the gotcha is always different somehow. Sometimes it's "the US subsidizes it" because NASA gets amazing deals on launches it would otherwise pay 10x or more for. Sometimes it's Starlink that subsidizes the launches. Sometimes it's the launches that subsidizes Starlink.
Maybe the answer is just what is obvious: vertical integration and economies of scale makes starlink/falcon 9 profitable. The combination is the thing.
This is not about something being impossible, but something that solves no problem except keeping launchers busy.
The only reason I can imagine for space-based data storage is being out of reach of most police investigators. Recently, a very corrupt banker in Brazil was arrested and his phones were confiscated and, up to now, two have been cracked, with a big effect on the approaching election. If the thing is in orbit, it's a lot harder to confiscate it.
Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter.
He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to have lost interest in EVs unless they're robotaxis.
Just recently he scammed Wall Street with a horrific overvaluation for a company whose only profits come from Starlink and whose biggest rockets blow up before they reach orbit.
Now he's talking about orbital data centers which make no sense to any engineer who understands thermodynamics (and sadly, many don't) and which are unnecessary because within the next 5 years 90% of inference will be done on local machines in users' homes because the hardware and the algorithms will be good enough to enable it and every Joe and Jane are fed up with surveillance capitalism.
But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.
Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.
Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".
SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.
But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.
If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.
I don't think they are impossible, just impractically expensive. That should be no problem for AI companies and their infinite access to capital. Nobody wants datacenters to be built around here on the ground, so I say get to spending.
>Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility,
Not really, thermal radiators are well understood and the size needed aren't really that unreasonable. Radiation hardening the GPUs is probably the single hardest problem along with actual launch costs.
>making no economic sense
Yes this is the real issue, Spacex would need to reduce the cost of launches by ~10x with Starship for it to ever be viable.
Rather than reasoning on the feasibility of data centers in space, what are the constraints that prevent them from being built on Earth? What's the minimum cost of building and operating in the US the equivalent of a 1M satellites data center?
Solar and batteries get you through the entire day right here on Earth, plus you can shit in a toilet when you need to go on site to fix or upgrade something, not in a little tube. Plus you can probably just drive there instead of needing 15,000 feet/sec delta-v to get to orbit. And you can breathe. Surely the cost of batteries and panels do not exceed the costs and logistical pain-in-the-dick going into orbit will impose.
There's a very narrow band of sun-synchronous orbit with consistent enough sunlight to make orbital data centers viable. Even with a tight constellation of 500,000 to 1,000,000 satellites packed into that band, it still doesn't make economic sense compared to what terrestrial data centers can do. At 500,000 satellites you're looking at maybe 50 GW of solar power. Then factor in the lifespan of LEO at ~5 years you're looking at hundreds of satellite launches daily to maintain that infrastructure.
Now work is being done for increasing solar access (Starcatcher) and others are working on improving LEO refueling and repair capabilities, but I would say we're decade+ away from establishing any true compute infrastructure in orbit.
In LEO you are about 50% of the time in the shadow of the Earth. Higher orbits or solar orbit (where you can get uninterrupted sunlight) require a lot more fuel and the further out the data center is, the higher the latency.
Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility, as well as making no economic sense. Engineering and the laws of physics get on the way.
Just because Scott Manley refuses to call that out, so he can do another eight videos about it, don´t stop listening to somebody with the feet on the ground:
"Orbital Data Centers: Spacecraft Constraints and Economic Viability" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27197
"Hot AI in Cold Space: Thermal-Crosstalk-Aware Scheduling for Sustainable Orbital AI Clusters" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26150
"Above the Cloud: Building Data Centers in Space - Richard Campbell - NDC Copenhagen 2026" - https://youtu.be/eo7MEPgWGic
"Space Data Centers Are Dumb" - https://youtu.be/-w6G7VEwNq0
Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way.
Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.
Good thing Elon's companies have a history of moving engineering impossibilities from impossible to slightly late.
Remember when globally competitive electric cars, re-usable boosters, catching a rocket with chopsticks, playing a fps game via a brain implant, and maintaining a satellite constellation at 480km LEO were also impossible?
There's a difference between "infeasible given materials and manufacturing capabilities of the time" and "infeasible as a scalable solution due to the laws of physics"
There is also the very practical question of "what problem is this trying to solve?"
What law of physics do orbital data centers violate? You must have learned some strange physics.
How about the physics of space radiation and radiative cooling.
The guy has to rent out his terrestrial data centers because he can't make use of them.
We probably don't need to pollute space with dead GPU's.
note the scalable in there. Even under best case assumptions, it's only a good fit for edge coprocessing where latency is super important. You're not going to power the world's compute with a self healing Dyson sphere (but if you think that, I've got something to sell you).
Thermodynamics.
Almost no one said those were impossible, just hard. This is completely different. Rather like... a train in a vacuum tube hard. Definitely harder than making a subway with autonomous trains under a modern city. And much harder than being a third rate AI lab, though Elon did hit that target perfectly.
Train-in-a-vacuum-tube isn't even restricted by the laws of physics, and it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum anyway, just low pressure. Data Centers IN SPAAAAAACE have the teensy little problem of cooling that you can't just brute-force a solution to. Those giant things dangling off the ISS that make up most of its footprint aren't solar panels, they're heatsinks, and they still have issues managing heat.
Energy radiation scales T^4 so physics is really on your side here. If you can engineer GPUs to run a little hotter you get significant decreases in radiator size required.
Well... If the launch cost is low enough you can just pack a radiator large enough. Good thing this might drive the development of a wider Starship and Ultraheavy booster (or a Superheavy-Heavy where three Superheavy rockets boost a bigger, heavier Starship). Eventually we can get to the Comicallyheavy booster.
Perhaps, but I don't see the costs getting anywhere near being worth it. You'd need a space elevator or to manufacture the sinks IN SPAA— er, in space. The latter is theoretically possible but still extremely remote, the former still requires unobtanium.
It all depends on how far you are willing to go to make your server invulnerable to a police raid.
Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?
From the SpaceX S-1: "For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net." In plain terms: SpaceX's rocket division charges outside customers roughly $102 million per Falcon 9 launch — but it charges Starlink $0.
SpaceX appears to be heavily subsidizing Starlink in the launch cost sense.
There is a mix of clever and sketchy accounting going on in Muskworld making it hard to see which elements profitable/sustainable and what isn't.
> Is the starlink constellation profitable on its on without any cross subsidization from any other Musk endeavor?
This is always a funny "gotcha" people bring up. Except the gotcha is always different somehow. Sometimes it's "the US subsidizes it" because NASA gets amazing deals on launches it would otherwise pay 10x or more for. Sometimes it's Starlink that subsidizes the launches. Sometimes it's the launches that subsidizes Starlink.
Maybe the answer is just what is obvious: vertical integration and economies of scale makes starlink/falcon 9 profitable. The combination is the thing.
This is not about something being impossible, but something that solves no problem except keeping launchers busy.
The only reason I can imagine for space-based data storage is being out of reach of most police investigators. Recently, a very corrupt banker in Brazil was arrested and his phones were confiscated and, up to now, two have been cracked, with a big effect on the approaching election. If the thing is in orbit, it's a lot harder to confiscate it.
Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter.
He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to have lost interest in EVs unless they're robotaxis.
Just recently he scammed Wall Street with a horrific overvaluation for a company whose only profits come from Starlink and whose biggest rockets blow up before they reach orbit.
Now he's talking about orbital data centers which make no sense to any engineer who understands thermodynamics (and sadly, many don't) and which are unnecessary because within the next 5 years 90% of inference will be done on local machines in users' homes because the hardware and the algorithms will be good enough to enable it and every Joe and Jane are fed up with surveillance capitalism.
I used to make similar arguments.
But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.
Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.
Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".
SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.
But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.
If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.
I don't think they are impossible, just impractically expensive. That should be no problem for AI companies and their infinite access to capital. Nobody wants datacenters to be built around here on the ground, so I say get to spending.
If it ends up bankrupting them, even better.
the way the crony capitalism economy works, it will bankrupt all of us well before it does the AI companies...
>Data Centers in Space are a practical engineering impossibility,
Not really, thermal radiators are well understood and the size needed aren't really that unreasonable. Radiation hardening the GPUs is probably the single hardest problem along with actual launch costs.
>making no economic sense
Yes this is the real issue, Spacex would need to reduce the cost of launches by ~10x with Starship for it to ever be viable.
Rather than reasoning on the feasibility of data centers in space, what are the constraints that prevent them from being built on Earth? What's the minimum cost of building and operating in the US the equivalent of a 1M satellites data center?
have you ever seen a detailed photo of the ISS?
* https://images2.imgbox.com/64/4b/GhtUtq1m_o.jpg
look at how massive the solar panels and more importantly the thermal radiators are outside
compare to the size of the human habitat tubes
"AI" in space would demand as much if not even more for each node
The advantage is solar power in space. They will never stop getting sunlight.
Solar and batteries get you through the entire day right here on Earth, plus you can shit in a toilet when you need to go on site to fix or upgrade something, not in a little tube. Plus you can probably just drive there instead of needing 15,000 feet/sec delta-v to get to orbit. And you can breathe. Surely the cost of batteries and panels do not exceed the costs and logistical pain-in-the-dick going into orbit will impose.
There's a very narrow band of sun-synchronous orbit with consistent enough sunlight to make orbital data centers viable. Even with a tight constellation of 500,000 to 1,000,000 satellites packed into that band, it still doesn't make economic sense compared to what terrestrial data centers can do. At 500,000 satellites you're looking at maybe 50 GW of solar power. Then factor in the lifespan of LEO at ~5 years you're looking at hundreds of satellite launches daily to maintain that infrastructure.
Now work is being done for increasing solar access (Starcatcher) and others are working on improving LEO refueling and repair capabilities, but I would say we're decade+ away from establishing any true compute infrastructure in orbit.
In LEO you are about 50% of the time in the shadow of the Earth. Higher orbits or solar orbit (where you can get uninterrupted sunlight) require a lot more fuel and the further out the data center is, the higher the latency.
https://youtu.be/-w6G7VEwNq0?t=340
I think everyone misses the real point - they're completely outside the jurisdiction of any government.
Short of launching an ASAT and the risk of space debris, nobody will be able to shut them down.