alt Hacker NewsCould you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.
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Try this one. You need to parse the hard data from all the speculation. So draw your own conclusions.
https://www.aravolta.com/blog/datacenters-in-space
As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will counter each hard constraint with a handful of hopeful speculations.
As for pure scientific analysis, like the Scott Manley one, they tend to entertain themselves too much with the physics and mathematics and forget the economics behind it all.
Take Google’s own paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468) that estimates that launch costs, just to roughly match data center energy costs on earth, would need to reach 200USD/kg, which requires a 10 fold cost reduction relative to the current launch costs of Falcon 9. And that is to launch a _disposable_ server into orbit, that will disintegrate after a few years and likely have hardware failures well before that.
And these servers are not anything like a “data center”, and they won’t run the applications that we are already scrambling to find demand in earth. No, these would theoretically run some ultra-niche, highly experimental workloads maybe for NASA or the military. That alone can’t possibly justify the investment, at least not for the retail investor that actually expects a positive ROI. Nevertheless the tech elite and their pet journalists are more than happy to sell this fantasy to the average people.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Project Natick to materialize, Microsoft’s data center on the ocean, which makes far, far more sense than data centers on frigging space. Still they didn’t manage to make that one work in any meaningful sense.
Could you build a data center in space? Yes, absolutely I am sure there are no physical barriers. We have computers in space now, and those computers have telecom links to Earth.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.