Posted by billybuckwheat 23 hours ago
China's state-backed starlink competitor GuoWang is putting 13,000 satellites in orbit by 2030. They've already started launching satellites.
China's Qianfan plans 15,000 satellites by 2030.
AST SpaceMobile is building their own network.
Amazon Leo plans for 3,000 satellites in orbit, and is already launching satellites.
The EU is building IRIS², explicitly as a Starlink alternative.
Russia, after realizing how critical starlink is on the battlefield, is building its own Rassvet network. They've already launched satellites.
This article seems to confuse Starlink with ordinary cellular communications
Edit: wow even apple music is included in this.
Of course, it's possible nobody actually wants to do this, they just want to get funded to do it. (Old joke: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant...")
Technically it's fine, just take something like Starlink and use most of the power for compute rather than for comms.
But financially, it depends on price to orbit being extremely low; not just lower than Falcon, but as low as Musk's best public claims about what may be coming at some point.
Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.
Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.
You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.
If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.
With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.
Remember that one satellite doesn't represent a data center, it represents maybe 0.1% of a data center.
So you invest $5b into a solar farm and data center outside of Tunis and 5 years after you finish construction a popular uprising topples the government and now you're dealing with new management? Nah, nobody is going to do that. And who's going to work there? How are you going to get data out of there? You're going to end up using satellite comms anyway. It's not 1953 any more and (thankfully) nobody is in a position to "Operation Ajax" your popular uprising when that happens too. I mean, maybe, but yeah, I would not do it.
Even in relatively stable places like the US or the EU, let's say you bought some random parcel of land in the New Mexico or West Texas desert region. Or even in Southern Spain or something. Even if you get the land cheap, with relatively easy fiber access (doubtful, but whatever), you're still beholden to the communities there. You think they have spare water to cool your facility? How are the schools for the kids of the engineers working there? You think that people are going to be head-over heels in love with Amarillo or Extremadura? The land is cheap because people don't want to live in these places, so picky people are going to steer clear. And at the end of the day, you're still going to have to get everything permitted, approved, stamped 80 times, and the project will grind on for months.
No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. You can park the satellites in a sun synchronous halo that lives about on the terminator, and just pull in power constantly and radiate directly away from the sun in the other direction. It's going to be expensive, it's going to be technically challenging but we will do it. Also, think about the California high-speed rail stuff. If you try to build on earth you're going to be permitted and social-media'd to death anywhere on earth you decide to build one of these. For better or worse people hate Elon. I mean, I understand it, he's kind of insufferable and his dalliance with politics was a bit of a disaster (seriously, USAID cuts are killing people), but he's certainly no moron and I do not think he's entirely un-selfaware. He knows that people aren't going to let him build these wherever he wants. You're going to have to ask for permission thousands of times, there's going to be social media campaigns to stop him, literally any screw up (his fault or not) is going to be loudly shouted to everyone. If he decides he wants to expand his facility, that's more permits, more restrictions, more permissions.
So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. Initially that was red states or at least relatively "non-hostile" states like where Tennessee, but even there people will squawk about it. I don't mean to say "squawk" to dismiss those folks, well, maybe I do, but I just think it's a bit silly in the context of us burning gazillions of gallons to bomb the Iranians. Nobody is going to do a damn thing about the climate or anything right now, and stopping data centers from getting built feels like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, but I digress.
Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. The technicians and engineers can live in California, or work remotely from anywhere really, and you won't have to deal with increasingly well funded and clever NIMBYs. The real challenge is going to be finding optimal launch sites for this stuff. Hilariously, my neck of the woods up here in Alaska is uniquely suited to launch into inclinations that would allow for constant sunlight. It's what, 98 degrees inclination for an SSO? So you can launch launch north out of Poker Flat and south out of Cape Chiniak. Though we don't have the infrastructure up here to support that out of Poker Flat yet. And nobody will squawk too loudly about it up here. I think those lunatics trying to slingshot satellites into space are trying to launch out of Adak too, so, hypothetically, that's an option as well other than the logistics of getting vehicles up here.
Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a book report, but these companies are not optimizing for cost savings right now, they're optimizing to avoid people telling them no.
>> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone.
>> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical.
This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage. There is also no defense in space.
Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities?
Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t stand in the way.
And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.
Both are already things that can be done in principle, the question is just how expensive the solutions are.
For scale: if these million satellites were 25kW each, that's 25 GW total; Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year between cars and PowerWall units, so provided they didn't need replacing more than every four years this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, so you'd just need to put this all somewhere without much cloud cover.
Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon
A little more destructive pushing suns into supernova to write "Coke is Life" across the sky.
Let's assume two premises:
1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).
If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.
But if you buy the two premises above, then what matters is whether orbital or terrestrial datacenters are better for the environment. And it turns out that, given the current energy generation mix, the CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters far outstrip the CO2 from launch.
A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.
So, if you care about the environment, and you believe/fear that AI will demand a lot of compute, then you should hope that orbital datacenter work out. If you really care, you might even help to develop them.
An orbital DC makes fiscal sense when the cost to launch one to space is lower than the cost to build one on Earth.
Key point: The cost of building on Earth will inevitably trend upwards as more restrictions & costs are (~80% rightfully) placed onto Earth-bound datacenters.
At present it's like railroad building across the Wild West; get some notional national 'permission' and then chuck them up there into a globally-shared space. That's not sustainable as the important orbits become crowded.
It would also be cheaper to build one on the moon, if it was free to build them on the moon.
But I do agree that the economic math is not a slam dunk. A lot of things have to go perfectly right for it to make sense economically.
But that's the irony: Orbital datacenters are much cleaner than terrestrial ones, and if we don't deploy them, it will only be because corporations care more about profit than the environment. You would think environmentalists would be the ones pushing for orbital datacenters.
Doesn't need to: because data centres are already power-constrained, the correct question is marginal new supply in each case.
If you build 25 GW of new data centres (which seems to be roughly the scale being proposed here), the options are (1) build more power plants or (2) have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts.
What are those new power plants going to be? Even though Trump hates renewables, they're now the cheapest new power source, which was already necessary to be even considering putting 25 GW of PV onto satellites in the first place.
This makes it a question of what's cheaper: over-provisioning and storage, or launch costs?
The opposition is from people who have a brain and like to use it. And dont engage on Musk next cheap trick to sustain his chimerical stock valuations. A 100 MW datacenter in vacuum takes from you "put a man on the Moon" to "lets host Kubernetes on the Sun" :-))
Just to start, a 100 MW datacenter is a 100 MW toaster. On Earth, the waste heat would go into into air or water. In orbit, it can only leave by radiation. So you need a massive radiator area, plus pumps, coolant loops, structure, pointing, redundancy, and micrometeorite protection...
Then you need radiation hardened GPUs, DRAM, SSDs, optics, and power electronics and those are not going to magically become space rated because the pitch deck has a Mars picture on it. Also on earth datacenters these parts constantly fail. There was even some recent study of about 20% of GPUs failing within 3 years, and humans constantly have to replace them. In orbit, you would have space mission to swap the bad PSU...
If you make the calculations, at normal electronics temperatures, rejecting the amount of heat needs a radiator field on the order of 500 m x 500 m under ideal assumptions... Then you neede power, and that has the same scale problem. Meaning you need an enormous solar farm, but wait...what about the scenario of a eclipse? For 30 minutes without sunlight you need about 50 MWh of storage.
Musk is a moron, and this video of him explaining it as simply radiative is proof number 256 you can be an idiot, and a billionaire. And shame on Jensen Huang for not calling him out: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc?t=140
How did you come to 10 launches / 1000 tons as what it takes to launch a 100MW data centre in space?
I care about the environment and I think we can keep earthbound systems, and also reduce their impact. Making assumptions about the feasibility of launch and the economic absurdity of orbital compute, but not affording the same assumptions for what could be done for earthbound systems, is confusing?
And no, orbital compute is absolutely not far lower than earthbound in co2 cost. Because it doesn't exist at any scale. All orbital compute is solely dedicated to switching where it is best served. If you were to spitball numbers, are we even willing to assume orbital matches earthbound in compute total, dollar cost, uptime, or any beneficial metric?
The only metric I see is just slinging silicon into space.
But if they made economic sense, then they would be much more environmentally friendly. On CO2 emissions, we're talking about a factor of 37. That's not a small amount. Even a factor of 10 would be a major issue multiplied by terawatts of power. Sure, maybe Earth-bound energy gets cleaner, but it's not going to get 10 times cleaner before 2036.
Currently we’re not on that trajectory but if we don’t get there we might be too busy with civilizational collapse to need space data centers.
It would require doubling the rate of 2025 renewable deployments on average for the next 11 years so technically and economically it’s feasible.
The alternative of collecting debris in space is discussed by some space agencies. I really don't think it is a good behavior from SpaceX to put more trash in space and let public money take care of the cleanup later.
CO2 emissions from reentering satellites is far lower than CO2 emissions from terrestrial datacenters. If you need 1,000 tons of satellite for a 100 MW of compute, you're not going to get more than 1,000 tons of CO2. In fact, you'll get much less since metal doesn't release CO2 when it melts.
1,000 tons of CO2 is negligible compared to 40,000 tons at launch and invisible compared to 1.5 million tons for a terrestrial datacenter.
> 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms).
> If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable.
I'm glad you said the final quoted paragraph; while it has always been difficult to tell which websites are accurate vs. slop, and moreso today with fully automated slop, I see claims the current rate is doubling between 15 and 3 months. Even at the slowest of these, 15 months, this gets 2^(120/15) = 256x growth in 10 years, which would raise it significantly above current total global electrical demand: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...
> A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional.
Not so: given that existing power capacity is already a constraining factor for new ground-based data centres, the alternative to be considered is not the CO2 emissions of existing average USA energy sources, but the CO2 emissions of new energy sources. This may be many things, but given that renewables are now the cheapest new energy, if politics stops renewables in the US it just means the data centres (especially at this kind of scale) aren't going to be in the US, but it doesn't say that they'll be in space specifically.
That is one wild, batshit insane assumption. So much so that I did not bother to read the rest of your post.
A fantastic way to break your economy. Even the extra half trillion/year Trump wants to spend on the military is increasing investor concern about buying US treasury bills.
(Phrased that way because while I hear they're targeting 1.5T valuation that doesn't mean they'll be selling 1.5T of shares).
SpaceX wants investors to think that they will be able to launch millions of satellites.
1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...
Musk would be "the most credible" at claiming he'll have 1000 trillion dollar by 2050, it doesn't mean it's credible at all.
10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.
They seem to have constructed a rocket that consistently gets heavier and more complex and more expensive and farthrt behind schedule and hasn't demonstrated specified payload.
IOW it ain't better than falcon heavy.
When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.
You got a different rocket equation?
Wonder what will be the next step.
(150 metric tons/100kg) = 1500 satellites per Starship launch
1e6/1500 = 666 launches per MTBF (3 years)
666/(3 years) = 222 Starship launches/year
If the proposed satellites are to be 1 ton, the required launch cadence would be ten times higher.
At this point, 160 Starship launches in 2026 would be close to every weekday.
They already have three launch sites for Falcon and can't do 200.
(Also see edit, my first post relied on Apple's autocomplete for maths and it used a short ton, plus point about these numbers corresponding to a mere 100 kg per satellite).
Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for space based data centres to be worthwhile.
If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.
According to Google, the price threshold to make space make more sensible than building on the ground is $200/kg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
Without full reusability, the estimated cost for Starship to LEO is kinda hard to find (necessarily, given the design isn't yet finalised), Wikipedia says $100m/launch in expendable mode, and the SpaceX website* says 250 metric tonnes in expendable mode, which is $100e6/250 metric tonnes = $400/kg.
* at least it does at time of writing: https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship
Really? I wonder how they are going to get them up there without rocket launches?
Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...
Aggravatingly, I have seen research estimating that even the much smaller number of satellites currently in orbit is already enough to be unstable with regard to a Kessler cascade, and any question about the realism of Musk's goals from finance and engineering limits is clearly not enough to prevent this kind of scenario. Which may result in other governments interfering with his ketamine supply to make sure their satellites aren't caught up in one.
Simplest helpful thing for the Kessler problem is "just"* have fewer larger satellites, and if Starship actually delivers the launch costs necessary to make space-based data centres worth the bother vs. just buying some cheap desert land, I anticipate Musk getting managed upwards by his staff in this regard.
* nothing in space is "just"
Regardless of how they fall, they still fall on the planet.
And this still ignores the massive atmospheric pollution of chemical rocket launch.
Space elevator would be a big help with launch, but the trash is still dropped on the ground, or in the ocean, in the end.
Leave it to the chainsaw man who has already become the millenium's worst killer, to wreak yet more sad havoc and ruin upon the sphere. What absolute trash, what a mad frivolous pointless ambition meant only to crowd out anyone from thinking of this enormous mass stupidity, destruction. Taking up/taking over of space, for no clear stated reason or value except to steal from us all, to deny & claim from the rest. Madness. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
It seems like an incredible amount of pollution to make, to go lord over everyone's heads. This isn't a plan that has any empathy for the earth or reason, except to just deny everyone else access, to burn as much rocket fuel as conceivably possible. So no one else can. Just go build some terrestrial solar, please, thanks.
The man is the bloodiest butcher of the millennium and this is a vile stealing of shared human space. Your lack of actually saying anything and throwing random jabs my way to defend him is ignoble & distracting, adds 0 engagement.
Rockets aren't new technology and they are not imagining the environmental harm. It has been known for a long time. It is just that with only ~300 launches per year (and about 35000 launches ever) the harm has not risen to the level of something that has to be limited.
A million data center satellites is a significant increase in that harm. Furthermore data center satellite are expected to have a service life of maybe 3-5 years so there will be an ongoing 200-370k replacements needing to be launched. That's 3.3-6.2k launches per year at 60 satellites per launch.
Is it? 100 tons of gb300 rack is ~0.04% of the expected 30GW of new data centers they want to build by 2030... 100 tons of gb300 gives you a measly 10MW data center, it's not even considered a medium sized data center at that point.
Not counting the hundreds of square meters of solar panels and cooling panels you'd need for each rack, you can easily multiply the total weight by 2-5x
They won't run a decade or two either, the failure rate at 3 years is ~50%.
And of course all of that ends up burning down and is completely un recyclable. It just doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how you look at it really.
The math don't math. Too many young dudes watched too much space opera with big heavy armored spaceships that rumble when they fly. Real space is lightweight and fragile. We don't make data centers out of that stuff.
When I worked in a midstream gas company, I recall a meeting when we were explaining the business to some new IT folk, and talking about the plants that process 100K barrels. One new guy in particular literally dropped his jaw and said, "you process 100K barrels of gas a year??" The room looked at him like he was insane and the woman running the meeting politely replied: "No, per day."
So acting as if "it burns less than a power plant" somehow means it is trivial is just a really odd take.
Besides, the methane burn is one piece of the puzzle. There is more to environmental impact than just methane.
Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.