this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I don't know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
What about the latency hit getting data back to earth?
People don't understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.
I'm saying it
This whole idea reminds me of the "putting solar panels on highways" idea that keeps popping up from time to time. Anyone who has ever built anything understands how stupid it is. Even if you could do it, it still wouldn't make sense over just putting solar panels next to highways.
That, and solar windows.
Making an expensive solar panel that lets most of the energy pass through it, and is not mounted in a way to effectively collect solar energy, is a terrible idea.
Unless it becomes cheaper than having a datacenter on earth per quanity of compute, it won't happen in any meaningful scale even if these issues are solved.
I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX "concept" is complete bullshit.
I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. "regular maintenance", "low latency") or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. "rockets prohibitively expensive", "radiation shielding").
Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - "super cool and innovative tech": "Underwater data center", like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chinas-hicloud-launches-wind-powered-underwater-data-center-targets-500mw-subsea-deployment/
Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.
Reasons:
Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-could-face-same-hurdles-microsofts-abandoned-2026-04-01/
It will never be an economic thing. Only unpluggable skynet military thing. The weight is not an issue. though. It's volume.
Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.