this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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You can, they just have to be smaller rather than a massive single orbital data centrer like this proposal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80
Still not a great idea because of the economics, but the same can be said for the data center build out on earth too, so why would they let that stop them?
For a single satellite, we'd need a football sized array for heat dissipation. The dissipation capacity isn't equal across the entire array. And you need some way to move the heat from the centre out towards the edges.
And aside from that, 100k satellites is the limit of objects we can put into low earth orbit before we start risking cascade collisions that break everything into small bits and make getting anything into orbit impossible. We're currently at 14k objects. Space X is proposing ONE MILLION satellites. And they'll each need huge heat dissipation arrays.
For scale. roughly a two server datacenter needs to have solar and radiator about as big as the ISS.
Which is possible, but insane. However insane plain old datacenter is, just tons more insane.