alt Hacker NewsI'm pretty sure there are plenty of payloads and demand to put interesting stuff in space for SpaceX to have a profitable business. I don't think "datacenters in space" is a necessary condition for their success.
Which is good, because "data centers in space" has never made sense. Running a data center requires a ton of energy (because chips are functionally just heaters) and a way to recapture / dissipate that energy to keep the chips at an optimal operating temp. All the terrestrial arguments around data centers and water use are about cooling.
As far as I'm aware, space remains a vacuum. You can radiate some amount of heat off into a vacuum, but nowhere near enough to run modern hardware 24/7 at peak flops or whatever. Also, without an atmosphere, all the hardware you put up there needs to be radiation hardened. Also I know people whine about how few jobs data centers support during ongoing operations but the people who _are_ there are pretty much just swapping out failed drives and components because all these things have finite lifespans.
I've never heard someone explain what bottleneck exists on earth that is slowing data center development/deployment where the solution is "what if we put it in space, instead?" Is it some military defense thing about live target inference for rocket defense or something? I don't get it.
Watch the Scott Manley video where he does a very deep dive on the physics of cooling a data centre in orbit. He takes into account reflected heat off the earth and a LOT more.
TLDW summary: it’s entirely doable. Anyone that says it isn’t hasn’t looked at the physics and math.
Will it be financially beneficial is a totally different question. Of course there were endless experts saying reusable rockets and electric cars never would be.
> I've never heard someone explain what bottleneck exists on earth
1. Power.
2. Political will (current massive pushback over data centre builds).