LOL don't worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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The thing is spacex's whole falcon 9 architecture needs something to do. They very quickly cleared the backlog of satellites waiting to launch and now they're waiting for space start ups to materialize and want to launch things into space. The majority of falcon 9 launches now only launch starlink. It'll get even worse if they can make starship work, they'll have a huge capacity with nothing to put in it. Ai data centers in space are an attempt at justifying the entire concept of starship or at the very least employ the falcon 9 team.
This and spacex going public tell me the return on investment of a space based internet provider maybe isn't profitable enough to fund a rocket development program. Their big cash cow, being the ISS taxi, is winding down and now they're looking for suckers with money.
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Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it's a multi-decade operation and doesn't look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody's excited to talk about.
It's going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you'll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
I mean, making fuel is one thing
Actually i was more thinking of crude metallurgy and materials processing. You could quite easily get aluminium from lunar regolith, and also tons of silicates. This allows you to produce shielding, radiators and the structural elements of solar panels without having to kaboom-boom the tons of raw material from the Earth. And it's not particularly high-tech stuff either, just some furnaces and basic extruding would go a long way. If you just have to ship the delicate electronics from Earth you're already saving a lot.
By the time you launched and assembled one in orbit their hardware would already be outdated. Sounds like a great plan!
No, this is fake news. I bet on Elon, he knows more than anybody on Earth, he already put men on Mars and created Hyperloop.
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It's as stupid as solar roadways, a solution nobody asked for and we also already have way better solutions.
I mean why.
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