I think they're a great idea. They don't use land, don't continuously use water, and don't pollute our land and waterways. And, as an added bonus, they're extremely expensive and a money-pit.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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They particularly don't get cold so basically, they're useless
it's another Musk idea brought to you by ketamine.
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(2 replies)
Very useless and expensive idea.
Even putting aside the absurd expense, impossible power demand, lack of cooling and abundance of hostile radiation, what the fuck is even the point of a data centre in orbit? "Sorry, I can't access my files right now, the data centre is over the Indian Ocean". "Yeah, I've sent the email - it'll be delivered in fourty-three hours when the satellite is next in range of London". Yes, I'm being facetious but what possible benefit could there be for having ten thousand tiny, low-power data centres - of which you can only access one or two at a time - versus the obvious, existing, cheaper, proven alternative?
As far as I know, there are no more orbital deadzones. We've got so many satellites, if not Starlink, I'm sure some other satellites could do the job of relaying to ground stations. We get live video of boosters landing in the middle of the ocean after all.
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(4 replies)
They solve a couple issues but introduce a host of others.
If you focus on the couple issues solved, you're obviously biased.
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(7 replies)
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!
Like with Starlink, it's all about orbital dominance.
If Starcloud is about data storage out reach of terrestrial events (attacks and desasters), then it's irrelevant whether the performance can compete with terrestrial systems. In fact the paper neither mentions flops or bytes.
Looking at starlink, it must be possible to run at least some computational power in space.
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(2 replies)
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.
Well there's a headline that's going to have a lot of sane comments under it.