I would like to say unlikely, because we have a relatively small orbit band that has 100% sun exposure and this is just a stunt of Musk to foster SpaceX. But with the current administration, who knows.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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While to that apartheid bastard seem to be a wonderful idea of having data away from the prying hands of world governments, as they try replicating cyberpunk sci-fi concept of placing stateless corporate data havens in orbit, current limitations of technology, bad space weather which could fry pricey circuits and worrying problems with space debris makes such a concept less feasible.
Because the FCC has jurisdiction over all of space around our globe?
It is about damn time something is being done about the amount of crap that is being launched into orbit.
The permission request has to do with spectrum not launch. The title is just crap.
Solar power? I don't know, sounds kinda woke.
Scott Manley has a video on this:
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
My takeaway is that it isn't unfeasible. We already have satellites that do a couple kilowatts, so a cluster of them might make sense. In isolation, it makes sense.
But there is launch cost, and the fact that de-orbiting/de-commissioning is a write-off, and the fact that preferred orbits (lots of sun) will very quickly become unavailable.
So there is kinda a graph where you get the preferred orbit, your efficiency is good enough, your launch costs are low enough.
But it's junk.
It's literally investing in junk.
There is no way this is a legitimate investment.
It has a finite life, regardless of how you stretch your tech. At some point, it can't stay in orbit.
It's AI. There is no way humans are in a position to lock in 4 years of hardware.
It's satellites. There are so many factors outside of our control that (beyond launch orbit success), that there is a massive failure rate.
It's rockets. They are controlled explosives with 1 shot to get it right. Again, massive failure rate.
It just doesn't make sense.
It's feasible. I'm sure humanity would learn a lot. AI is not a good use of kilowatts of power in space. AI is not a good use of the finite resource of earth to launch satellites (never mind a million?!). AI is not a good reason to pullute the "good" bits of LEO
Not to mention all that stuff left in space can't just be brought down safely to reuse/recycle like other materials. So it's a permanent loss of resources.
And not just the resources, those orbits are going to be cluttered with slowly-deorbiting junk too. Until we get around to making something that can clean them up, we won't be able to put anything else there.
That's a lot of targets. Bring it on.
Sun power for data centers? How do they transfer generated energy? Or are satellites themselves data centers? :P
Indeed, the plan for SpaceX is to literally launch computers into orbit to have orbiting data centers.
No, I cannot explain why this seems like a good idea to anybody. Beyond, “Elon Musk likes juicing his stock by announcing useless sci-fi plans that won’t come true”
Space is probably the worst place to have a data center for multiple reasons, the biggest reason being heat.
Don’t think the goal is to get something functional, but to get money for it. The hardware would become outdated in short order even if you could overcome the heating issue.
He will just raise money in this grift and then run away with it, like literally every other grift he’s ever done. He’s never cared about it being realistic. Note the extreme lack of people on both the moon and mars, despite his promises of a colony in the early 202Xs. Note how his cars still don’t have FSD.
He’s just a liar.
Just another grift.
Like literally everything that evil waste of air does.
They use microwave emitters to "beem" the power to the surface, where it is captured by antennas.
I'm old enough to have played SimCity and there was a satellite power supply that only sometimes would miss the receiver and incinerate a swath of the city. Good times
Uhh, neat. Thanks
UHH how about no. Elon is on the fucking Epstein lists. Mark my words but this is somehow a part of Israel’s agenda to take over the world and control everybody under facism.
This is weirdly close to actual anti semitism. Israel is a genocidal state, reasonable people can agree, but there being a secret plan to control the world reaks of something more dog whistle-ish.
Also anti Israel state is not anti Jewish people, get that through your head first.
I mean yah? That’s obviously true. That’s why I said it was close to actual anti semitism. Not bona fide antisemitism.
Just keep watching. People have been shouting Epstein was working for Israel for the longest time and people said exactly what you just said.
Recent development shows that was actually becoming the case.
Occam’s razor.
on par for musk. spew out an idea that sounds revolutionary to those who are less tech literate when in reality it’s just another con to pump a stock and produce junk
Elon is on the fucking Epstein lists Epstein was working for Israel. Anything from Elon should be viewed as a potential terror attack on humanity.
Well, how will they cool their space data center? You can't use a heat pump to transfer heat to the space.
Not a few huge datacentres, a million small ones ~ starlink v2 size and power, mostly solved. There's 99 problems with this (see Kessler syndrome, radiation, ...), cooling isn't (much of) one.
It's never a good idea to have the latest very sensitive GPUs in orbit where cosmic radiation can hit them and disrupt calculations. Or you put some old school robust versions up there, but then they're too slow compared to ground based tech.
GPUs don't last that long anyway. 5 years is a number you see often. Less with constant radiation. There is no upgrade or replace. That means these satellites will just stay up there for a few years until they de-orbit them and then we have a million satellites burning up in the atmosphere.
GPUs are also very power hungry. One modern rack of 72 GPUs sucks 120 kW. All solar panels of the ISS deliver 215 kW. These things won't be small. And you needs hundreds to thousands to get the capacity of one data center.
So far, putting them in orbit doesn't seem to make things easier.
Don't forget heat. You can't just drain the local water supply to cool all your systems in space, you need to actually radiate all those kilowatts of power after your chips convert them into heat.
And you can only use infrared to radiate heat in orbit, which is the least efficient way to transfer heat.
Also thanks too Moore's "Law", pretty much anything launched will have 1/2 the processing power of something on the ground of equivalent size every 2 years.
Part of the success of cloud hosting is that thanks to Moore's law companies were hesitant to buy hardware only to have it quickly become outdated*.
*cloud servers are actually pretty expensive so it really didn't work out like this, but by the time that was obvious, the advantage of cloud was you had support for aaS Software built in (e.g Database, load balancing, caching, etc), and downstream of that is the death of open source vendors being able to get by selling support, but I'm sure that won't have any negative effects 🙄.
This administration is only going to approve these satellites if they are powered by coal.
Or if you give them a big fat bribe, either one will suffice.
Kessler syndrome here we come!
SpaceX claims the fleet will orbit the Earth and use the sun to power AI data centers
I do NOT believe them.
I think they rather want to use AI to power the sun.
/s
Lol, either these won't be able to cool themselves or they will pump out heat straight into the upper atmosphere, which seems like a bad idea (I honestly don't know enough but I suspect we simply don't have the data to know what long term negative effects it will have)
Also just like Starlink this is a really dumb way to solve any problem other than how to inflate SpaceX valuations.
Now the lie that Starlink is resistant to censorship has been exposed twice (Ukraine & Iran), this is just the test Elon Grift.
The edges of the atmosphere are either too thin to do any heat transfer, or when the air gets thicker the satellite has friction and quickly burns up.
This was my first thought, cooling in space is hard. There isn't a medium for the heat to transfer through, outside of inferred radiation. I could be very wrong on this though
This idiot can't even figure out self-driving cars, but we're supposed to trust him to point microwaves at the Earth's surface? All so that he can power a technology that no one wants or needs?
Fuck this timeline.
I wonder at which point the amount of satellites in orbit would begin to measurably reduce the incident solar radiation on the surface. If we could block out the sun to cool the earth and capture that energy at the same time to do useful work, that'd be pretty cool.
But this would probably just go to powering orbital datacenters running Grok, so we're fucked anyway.
I don't think blocking out the sun is the answer to global warming lol
Having lived through 3 partial/total solar eclipses, even a small shift in the amount of light really fucks with the rhythm of the entire environment. Birds stopped chirping entirely at noon last time. We'd just be replacing one form of global disaster with another.
Not to mention we'd end up fully saturating the available orbital space around earth, causing constant satellite crashes and the complete inability to launch rockets through the mesh and debris. At a certain point the satellites would cease to function entirely through all the trash orbiting earth and at that point we'd have essentially walled ourselves off from ever safely exploring space. It's a terrible idea all around
That's the origin story of The Matrix. Only, we don't have real AI but glorified chatbots.
Not a space expert but in v1.5 isn't the center of mass being unaligned with the center of drag going to cause issues over time?
From the thumbnail I thought they're gonna launch a line of smart watches
Nothing about these morons is "smart."
As if SpaceX could actually do that
Oh boy, I bet the comments on this one will be useful.