Pastry in spaaace! Still, eventually they will stop working.

You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.

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.

Keep people from destroying data centers by having them destroy themselves? Is this some sort of zen koan?

They're shielded by being in a very low orbit. I don't think that would work for a data center.

If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.

People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.

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.

The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.

The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn't be any better in any other orbit.

It's conserved.

The real issue with space-based data centers isn't just whether they’re a "bad idea" from an engineering perspective; it’s that they represent the ultimate transition toward a vertically integrated, unregulated monopoly. While everyone is focused on the technical hurdles, we need to look at who actually benefits from this shift. For someone like Elon Musk, this isn't just a project—it's a way to own the entire global internet stack. Because he owns the "truck" (SpaceX) and the "road" (Starlink), he can launch and link these data centers essentially for free. This creates a market that is so tightly locked into one ecosystem that it can never be challenged by a terrestrial competitor.

​From a purely operational standpoint, space turns every earthly liability into a superpower. Data centers on the ground are a nightmare of land taxes, massive water consumption for cooling, and constant strain on local power grids. In orbit, those costs vanish. Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free, and solar power is available 24/7 without weather or night cycles getting in the way. Even the physical security is inherently top-notch because the hardware is literally unreachable. When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely. The user just needs an antenna, and the "gatekeeper" handles everything else in the sky.

​The terrifying downside is that this creates a jurisdictional black hole. If a server is orbiting 500km above the Earth, whose laws actually apply to the data stored on it? We’re talking about a "gated community" where the ownership, pricing, surveillance policies, and privacy standards are all controlled by a single entity with zero competition or government oversight.

Once we stop building ground infrastructure and rely solely on the "space cloud," we lose all leverage. It’s an engineering miracle for the person who owns it, but it’s a democratic nightmare for the rest of us. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s the construction of a digital kingdom that sits physically and legally beyond our reach.

Thoughts?

Wasn't it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.

LOL don't worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.

Pardon my potential ignorance, but I'm under the assumption that radiating heat in vacuum is NOT easy. Normally, heat escapes from sources into the surrounding atmosphere, whereas in space, only radiant heat (IR?) can bleed off into vacuum. The conductive heat from, say, a cycling loop of water still needs a radiator that vents into surrounding volume. Without atmosphere, radiators can't conduct efficiently, right?

Please set me straight if possible.

These are my thoughts https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/

I'm no expert, but this is my understanding as well.

Interesting. So the "post-truth era" isn't just for the masses, but the rich as well, as they cannibalise each other.

As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don't see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don't have all the facts.

I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!

and cooling needed in space.

Turns out you can't cool something just by putting it in space because most heat transfers require convection, which requires a medium, say, air.... which is notably lacking in space.

Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free,

Is it though?

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you'll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Right... and a carpet is a pet you keep in your car, got it.

From that to a space elevator...

I'm no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn't necessarily want to contend with.

While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it's not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They're harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.

I'm not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.

But the dads that never loved them are dying, this is their last chance to try to earn that love by recreating the sci fi fever dreams of the 1950s.

Yeah, heat dissipation is surprisingly difficult in space, because the only real way to do it is via radiation. And radiation is one of the least effective methods of dissipating heat.

The vast majority of heat transfer on earth happens via physical contact, in the form of fluids or solids touching each other. That’s what a heat sink is for. It increases surface area, so more fluid (air) can touch it and carry heat away. But without some sort of fluid contact, a heat sink isn’t going to help much. It’ll act as a radiator, but the cooling efficiency will only be a fraction of what is achieved via traditional forced air cooling.

Something will need to develop around the new capabilities

Send Musk to Mars.

Your thoughts were really well written. I'm glad you took the time to explain your viewpoints organically instead of taking an easy way out to avoid having to do it yourself.

How about this for what my post was trying to say....

It's a good idea to the person who can pull it off. It will be highly profitable and they will monopolize that ecosystem. For the rest of us, if this were ever to become adopted wide spread, it has the potential to make something that normal people can no longer compete with and can't easily avoid (assuming it is significantly subsidized initially to offset cost and get users to adopt it)

Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.

Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.

Space ain’t happening.

I can see the point of underwater datacenters though, for some very specific use cases. Compute heavy workloads with high energy densities could possibly make sense to ”free cool” below water. DLC everything and pump the heat straight into the ocean.

Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it's a multi-decade operation and doesn't look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody's excited to talk about.

It's going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you'll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.

it was? havent watched it.
I really hope it wont ever come to that, but knowing what those monsters do to kids it wouldnt surprise me if they wanted to make that movie into reality.

I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it's doing.

The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can't confiscate it and therefore you can't control it. Hell once it's up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).

It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.

Before even considering radiation damage, hopium $200/kg launch costs mean 15c/kwh electricity. The you add the cost of specialized panels and radiation emitters. At least 20x that of earthly systems.

There's a difference certainly but do you think the people who seem to be floating this idea know the difference?

Right. Exactly zero understanding on your part.

How do you enforce jurisdiction?

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

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.

Do you know how BIG they would have to be to dissipate a data center worth of heat to keep it as cool as on earth?

Super heat what in that space? The point is there's nothing to transfer heat to. All you can do is radiate infra-red light.

I've already made 100x on my space AI satellite

The idea of putting data centers in low Earth orbit sounds cool at first. It feels futuristic. It feels like something that should be efficient.
It is not.

Yes, space is cold. Yes, you get a lot of solar power. Those are the two points everyone repeats. What they leave out is basic physics and cost.

Cooling in space is not free. There is no convection. Heat only leaves through radiation. That means giant radiator panels. AI racks throw off massive heat loads. The more compute you add, the more radiator surface area you need. That adds mass. Mass costs money to launch.

Even with companies like SpaceX driving launch prices down, it is still extremely expensive per kilogram. And servers are not permanent infrastructure. They get replaced every three to five years. You cannot economically upgrade racks in orbit the way you do in a building on Earth.

Then you have radiation. Either you harden the electronics, which makes them slower and more expensive, or you accept higher failure rates and build in heavy redundancy. Maintenance becomes a logistical nightmare. A failed power supply on Earth is a service call. In orbit it is a robotics problem.

Meanwhile hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google put data centers next to cheap power, fiber backbones, and cold climates. It is boring. It is practical. It works.
Orbital data centers only make sense if we already have large scale industry in space. We do not.

And what really makes these threads irritating is the obvious rage bait framing. Throw up a clickbait title about AI destroying the planet or Big Tech trying to escape Earth and you attract people who already hate AI. The discussion stops being about engineering and economics and turns into ideological noise.

If someone wants to seriously debate energy efficiency or scaling limits, fine. But pretending near Earth orbit is some obvious solution is not serious analysis.
It is a cool sci fi concept. It is not a rational infrastructure strategy.

I'm pretty sure that's the point TBH.

Kinda scary when the context is these kinds of corporate systems, though.

Okay, but have you considered how cool it would be to put a data center in space?

What if I told you that we have to BEAT CHINA to space?

I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.

how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it’s doing.

You threaten to disable it, which would be very easy give how fragile it is

It'll be in shadow at midnight, yes, but not necessarily at any other time. Geostationary orbit is at about 7x the radius of the earth.

As such, the period when in will actually be in shadow is only a short period directly behind the planet.

Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free

When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely

Citation needed.

And on water usage, I will point out that gas generators and evaporative cooling are only used on Earth because other methods (geothermal, big radiators, heatpumps) are somewhat more expensive... Not, like, orders of magnitude more expensive like pure radiative cooling in space.