Getting rid of the heat is going to be an issue for that... along with the massive pollution from the many launches required to get this in orbit.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit
(arstechnica.com)
The heat will just dissipate in the air, and they can launch it at night when it's colder. Science!
/s in case, there are a few mouth breathers out today
They could build them so that they stay in perpetual dawn or dusk. One edge with the solar panels in the su, the other edge with the cooling fins in the night’s cool breeze.
Oh! Oh! Attach it to a meteorite! Almost infinite heatsink in space!
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Free advice: The economics don't work out.
We just need to invent space construction, cheap fusion power, autonomous robotics, improve AI and set up astroid mining first, then it'll be a snap.
Honestly, it's hard to figure out what the first step in that chain is. If you want to start up industry in space, great, there are lot of potential benefits to that. But where do you start?
Within the next 50 years I do expect a broad sector of space industry to emerge, but I really can't predict what the first opportunities might be. Still, we can poke fun at it all we want right now, but I suspect a great many people will be working in space 50 years from now.
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Gotta get the MIC on board if you want that sweet sweet imperial paper.
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Me too. I'll even make them full AI.
Please send me $2 billion by Tuesday. My salary as yetAnotherUser CEO & CTO is a modest 20 million/year. Results are expected to appear by 2030.
Hey Gemini, make me a business plan, a marketing site and some presentations with fancy graphs.
Hey hey, I'll make them on Mars! Send the cash to me instead!
I'll do it right here on earth for only 75% of the cost. Think of how much you'll save versus mars.
But where's the vision? Is it even AI managed?
Stare into my asshole to find out.
What should that babble even mean?
In a data center, you have 4 main problems:
- Get an massive amount of computers there, and maintain them to keep working, including repairs and upgrades
- Get an massive amount of data there and the results back
- Get a constant and massive flow of electrical power there
- Get an equally massive amount of heat away from it.
Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked....
So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??
Yeah I don't know why anyone entertains the idea.
Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you'd have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can't keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that's more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.
Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.
The energy I don't know about really, but at least it doesn't sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You'd have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don't see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.
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Isn’t it incredibly difficult to shed heat in space since the only real way to move heat is radiation?
In the (fiction) novel Artemis by Andy Weir, which takes place in a city on the moon, they have a heat management system that seemed pretty cool. They convert heat to light, and radiate the light out into space. Not sure how feasible/scalable that is, but I thought the concept was cool.
If they can turn it into light why not turn it into energy to be used?
If I had to guess, maybe they had a surplus of energy and needed some way to dissipate excess energy. I read the book years ago though, so I don't really remember.
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There are some various ways. Radiators can be large and thin, and as long as the heat-sensitive part of the thing is kept cool it doesn't really matter how hot the rest of it gets.
In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.
Yeah me too! Give me money.
Welp, that's a fuckin stupid idea. Next!
The only thing better than grifting is grifting on an astronomical scale.
Come on now, people can't actually be humoring this fever dream, can they? It's just so fucking stupid...
Isn’t this how Skynet started?
No, it started when a scriptwriter came up with an idea for a movie that would sell a lot of tickets.
News headline in the future: "Orbital Data Center Crashes Into Los Angeles in a Mass Casualty Event"
Why not on mars? It's even farther away and too cold anyway.
Now Elon can have his own death star!
Even if this was an economically sound proposal, the next X45 magnitude solar flare might be a nasty surprise for reliability metrics...
Edit: at some point, this would also likely contribute to Kessler Syndrome, but at least we'd have chat bots.
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