Technology

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.

As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don't see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don't have all the facts.

I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!

I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it's doing.

The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can't confiscate it and therefore you can't control it. Hell once it's up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).

It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.

Well its a great ideal if you happen to be a company with a space program, sounds like a very lucrative venture.

only way it will be worth putting anything in space is by having a spaceport in there first and some reliable way to haul stuff from ground to it. At least way i see it, at the moment its like building a complex facility on an undiscovered continent with no support. But anything we put there shouldnt be privately owned anyway, or maybe that can be acceptable AFTER we have good and reliable infrastructure there which can deal with the bullshit that comes with privately owned stuff.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to put it underground?

Shame you can't do some sort of thermoelectric power generation thingie with all the heat from these data centres.

LOL don't worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.

By the time you launched and assembled one in orbit their hardware would already be outdated. Sounds like a great plan!

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.