this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world's largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
Please tell me you aren't serious.
They are completely cereal!
Super cereal
With extra milk
dude! how do you expect anyone to answer if you don't say surely you can't be?
I am serious, and don't call me dude!
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That's 50,000x just for 1GW.
These aren't big things, they're small satellites. They're going to be ~100kW. They only need to 5x the existing radiator they think will work.
How would you power them?
The surface area of solar panels exceeds the surface area needed for radiators to cool everything.
In space I would imagine you'd find the perfect sandwich ratio. One bun solar, one bun radiators, the meat being the racks.
A radiator. Next question?
What's going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?
Obnoxious as he seems to be, he's actually right, there will be no convection, but they'd radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.
You'd need an enormous radiator to move the heat a data center puts out. Not even all the billionaires put together could afford that.
Sure, the idea is as bad as solar roadways. It's actually kind of impressive to come up with an idea that bad.
To do that they'd have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It's not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
Yeah as I have already said, it's kind of impressive how bad the idea is, I mean how can it be worse...