this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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Oh man so much to unpack here.
First things first, you aren't shielding solar panels from radiation, you're shielding the computing components from the radiations. I don't know how much you know about microprocessors and silicon engineering, but I can promise you they do NOT like ionizing radiation or most other high energy sources of EM radiation, especially while energized. In space, this is a lot of heavy plating that is effectively dead weight and at best can be used as a secondary heat sink, but that's highly unlikely since it would also be absorbing heat energy while in sunlight.
Additionally, as I pointed out, you'd want to or at least be highly encouraged to pair these lunar data centers with long term colonies, at least as long term as you'd want the data center active. Any unmanned data center is going to fail within 6 months, be it in space, on the moon or some remote valley here on Earth. And while it's not cheap to sustain life on the moon, it's even less cheap to do so in orbit when you examine the effects of micro gravity on the human body as well as what it would cost to build a suitable shelter in orbit. There is a reason scientists talk about building long term colonization projects on the moon or Mars, not just putting up orbital space habitats like some gundam series. Earth Orbit may be closer but it's probably the least hospitable long term to any form of human habitation.
Heh, it's just funny to me that you would call the idea of orbital datacenters nonsensical compared to lunar datacenters. I mean, like I laid out earlier, orbital datacenters may well be a bad idea, but at the moment (in 2026) lunar datacenters are technically and logistically impossible and economically ludicrous. The launch costs alone make the project a non-starter.
And all for what? What are the advantages of putting this hardware on the moon? Possibly using lunar regolith as a heat sink? We don't need heat sinks, radiators work fine. Possibly avoiding ionizing radiation by building underground? That's just so much more work... Shipping in excavating equipment... Just no.
And there really isn't all that much ionizing radiation in low earth orbit, you still have the earth's magnetic field protecting you and the earth itself blocking all particles from one side. You get exposed to a little bit more than you do on the surface because you don't have the atmosphere's protection as well. But if nothing else, the existence of telacom satellite constellations proves that we've figured out how to overcome those obstacles, and many of those satellites aren't even in LEO some are all the way out in geostationary orbit without any of those protections, and they're still working fine. The ionizing radiation just isn't a big deal.
Again, I'm not saying orbital datacenters are a good idea, but I am saying it's doable today, right now, at a relatively affordable price. If to be realistic a lunar datacenter requires the kind of moon colony that won't exist for another 50-100 years at the very soonest, that seems like a worse plan.