Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

Posted by angadh 6/26/2025

Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship(angadh.com)

199 points | 349 commentspage 3

kemotep 6/26/2025|

Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o

gloosx 6/27/2025||

Hmm, so you could launch a 100 tonne bitcoin mining rack and basically mine it with free energy 24/7? Another crazy idea for Elon, need to calc how long will it take to payback the launch cost.

t1E9mE7JTRjf 6/27/2025||

I wonder what the implication on data protection / privacy laws and the like would be. Would it be as simple as there'd be no laws, or is the location of the users still relevant?

ceejayoz 6/27/2025|

Laws definitely still apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

> Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty" and that States Party shall bear international responsibility for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.

trhway 6/26/2025||

My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same weight and launch cost.

Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.

ggreer 6/27/2025||

If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).

1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

__m 6/27/2025||

$10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.

hartator 6/27/2025||

> There, 24/7 solar power is unhindered by day/night cycles, weather, and atmospheric losses (attenuation).

Wouldn’t the earth still get in the way of the sun or it’s too far away?

diabeetusman 6/27/2025||

Normally yes, but the L1 Lagrange point always would have an unobstructed view of the sun. Granted, L1 is a lot further away than LEO (~3x the distance to the moon), so that makes it harder and more expensive to get to

qayxc 6/27/2025||

You don't need to go that far. That's what sun-synchronous orbits are for.

ericyd 6/26/2025||

This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I can't scroll or zoom to fit.

v5v3 6/26/2025|

Same for me.

But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.

angadh 6/27/2025||

should be fixed now.

ZiiS 6/27/2025||

They can get highly qualified space engineers to do a lot of pre-qualification work for free though! (Cunningham's law)

quantified 6/26/2025||

And all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night sky.

rob_c 6/27/2025||

Always entertaining to read how some things are so obviously wrong as to be laughable, but this is somewhere between solar roadways being feasible and hyperloop being physically possible. It's a grab for money from idiot investors imo. (fitting in with OpenAI's current strategy to dilute control I'll admit)

fennecfoxy 6/27/2025|

This is such a gloriously stupid fucking idea.

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