Why don't you want to launch the equivalent of a data center in low earth orbit satellites just to have them rain back down every decade or so?
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
795 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
85921 readers
4348 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
We could be launching solar panels into space that beam down radiation to make power more plentiful and cheap, but nah we but a complex data center that needs maintenance and complex parts
I’m far more concerned with the suggested floating datacenters. Just dumping more waste heat into the ocean. WCGW.
You wildly underestimate the size of the oceans. If they're going to be built anyway, and if they can have a long lifespan even in salt water, this would be far better for the environment than the currently popular method of using rivers for cooling - rivers can be warmed by perceptible and significant amounts until they carry that extra heat into the oceans, plus fresh water is more rare, precious, and in need of protection than salt water.
If the heat made by the data centers can warm rivers, and those rivers can warm the oceans... Aren't the data centers already warming the oceans? Which would mean that putting data centers directly in the ocean would definitely warm the oceans?
Temperature is what matters. The same amount of heat out into a river can significantly warm the whole river downstream, but have no detectable effect on the ocean temperature, just because the heat is diluted so much.
Like, dilute a bottle of tequila with two liters of cola, sure you'll get drunk - but pour that same tequila into a full swimming pool, and you'd never get drunk even if you drink the pool water all day.
Does it actually make much of a difference whether it's dumped into the ocean or into the atmosphere? I thought the ocean warming happens because the atmosphere is hotter.
That space data center might end up dumping more waste into the oceans with all thise launches but certainly more into our atmosphere.
I don't know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
- Despite SpaceX's advancements in regards to things like resutable rockets, shooting stuff into space is still prohibitively expensive.
- Server clusters are exceptionally heavy.
- Server clusters run hot, cooling is not a triviality considering you can't just rely on convection in space, so more mass for alternative solutions.
- Datacenters need regular maintenace.
- Logic boards won't do well with the radiation in space.
- Despite SpaceX's advancements in regards to things like sattelite internet, getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
Not saying this won't ever be a thing. But not in the lifetime of anybody on earth right now I don't think.
People don't understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.
Not saying this won’t ever be a thing.
I'm saying it
Unless it becomes cheaper than having a datacenter on earth per quanity of compute, it won't happen in any meaningful scale even if these issues are solved.
I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX "concept" is complete bullshit.
I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. "regular maintenance", "low latency") or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. "rockets prohibitively expensive", "radiation shielding").
Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - "super cool and innovative tech": "Underwater data center", like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:
Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.
Reasons:
- Delivery is super cheap (in comparison to space) at scale, thanks to the already existing wind farm infrastructure
- Weight is not an issue
- Cooling is solved
- Maintenance is not necessary, but replacement is. Easy on scale, because modular.
- No radiation shielding necessary
- Connection: data cable = no extra lag or quantity limit
Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂
This whole idea reminds me of the "putting solar panels on highways" idea that keeps popping up from time to time. Anyone who has ever built anything understands how stupid it is. Even if you could do it, it still wouldn't make sense over just putting solar panels next to highways.
It will never be an economic thing. Only unpluggable skynet military thing. The weight is not an issue. though. It's volume.
Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.
don't need to think much about this crackpot idea.
where would the heat dissipate? that just ends this topic.
Via radiation into space. All you need is a radiator, the weight of a battleship (or worse). Yes, the idea is crazy.
Not just experts but an 11-year-old with a mild interest in space could have explained to these techbros why this wouldn't work as an idea.
Even if it could be made to "work", the idea that it would somehow be superior to or more economical than a terrestrial facility is madness.
It would make sense if there's no space left on earth to build new datacenters, but the simple solution to that is just to stop building so many datacenters.
Basically they're trying to build a data centre where the most expensive part of the data centre is the building itself which is completely not how it's supposed to work.
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!
Incredibly bad, too lenghty, mostly irrelevant criticisms of the fraud of space datacenters, followed up by the Skynet military justification of being unable to unplug skynet.
Space datacenters from SpaceX are a fraud because they have a 5 year lifecycle with deorbiting of entire unit. The costs compared to 30 year lifecycle of terrestrial solar/battery powered datacenter energy is thus 6x higher (costs of shell/shield, solar, radiators is about the same but 6 replacements). Terrestrial building costs are $20/watt. SpaceX ambitions are to get $30m/launch costs. To be only 2x the terrestrial costs, launch costs need to be $1m (just the fuel costs) with deorbit being to fly off into space instead of a salvage trip.
At 12x the costs, the competitive GPU rental hurdle has to be 12x more expensive than earth. Only military skynet applications would pay for this, and specifically, only permit mechahitler to decide if skynet is doing a good job.
Or the need to pump a stock to rubes
view more: next ›