1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
Well, it's a physics problem. The engineering solution is possibly not cost efficient. I'd put a lot of money that it isn't.
- We can't do that
- Why not?
- Well, physics for one.
- What do you mean?
- Well, at the very least we need to be able to emit enough RF-energy for a mobile base station to be able to detect it and allow itself to be convinced it is seeing valid signaling.
- Yes?
- The battery technology that fits within your constraints doesn't exist. Nevermind the electronics or antenna.
- Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.
I distinctly remember that last line. But I can't remember what my response was. It was probably something along the lines of "if I were that clever I'd be at home polishing my Nobel medal in physics".
Even the sales guy who dragged me into this meeting couldn't keep it together. He spent the whole one hour drive back to the office muttering "can't you do something creative" and then laughing hysterically.
I think the solution they went for was irreversible freeze and moisture indication stickers. Which was what I suggested they go for in the first 5 minutes of the meeting since that a) solved their problem, and b) is on the market, and c) can be had for the price point in bulk.
Radiators works almost just as well on Earth. Convection and conduction more than make up the difference.
The advantage of 24/7 solar power is clear, obvious, and undeniable, it's just a question of whether that's outweighed by the other disadvantages.
[1] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...
Fair point that in SSO you'd need 2-3x the radiator area (and half the solar panels, and minimal/no batteries). I don't think that invalidates my point though.
It does not make sense.
The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data centers more appealing than terrestrial?"
The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements contradict this.
Terrestrial will always be better:
1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never be as cheap as zero launches.
2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every way.
3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost more than standard (do they even exist for this application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than no shielding.
4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective radiation.
5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial solar collection for around the price of a single 1U satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is obsolete.
And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.
Sounds a bit like that Dilbert where the marketing guy has sold a new invisible computer and is telling the engineers to now do their job and actually make it.
You can argue that the current costs are too high and you need new physics or new inventions to bring it down to something more reasonable, yes. But the basic science of radiating heat in space is known. There are proposals for alternative designs that might work better. The question is how much can you build them for and what's the resulting cost profile. Which is an engineering question.
They have to solve for it being cheaper to launch and operate in space vs building and operating a datacenter with its own power generation on Earth.
That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point:
> Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things into space.
That is not the benchmark here.
It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could. It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than running them on earth.
Keep in mind there has only been ~600 falcon 9 launches in total. What makes you believe SpaceX can ramp rocket flights up faster than we could just build nuclear here on earth? Where there is, you know, construction infrastructure?
In the 1950s everyone thought we were entering the atomic age, an era when electricity would be too cheap to meter. That didn't happen: making nuclear simultaneously safe and cheap turned out to be much harder than anyone anticipated. Eventually people gave up on the Age Of Atoms and started saying that solar and wind were better. Go back in time and try to sell that in the 1950s and everyone would have thought you were insane. Huge land consumption and it only works intermittently? Why would that ever be easier than building a quick reactor?
And so here we are in 2026. The track record of SpaceX making things quickly and cheaply is vastly better than the modern nuclear industry. That's not necessarily the industries fault, but the over-regulation issue is real. If datacenters have the same problem Musk can still win despite the huge starting handicap. And everyone I know with experience of datacenter construction has similar stories. 90% of it is about dealing with governments and electricity suppliers (but that's mostly the grid, which is the government again).
