Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries."

"Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers."

We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.

edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.

I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...

But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.

I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.

Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]

This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.

> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.

This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?

1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.

2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.

quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.

I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...

I never questioned it.

Space is also extremely cold, and if it's as dense as Musk cooling won't be an issue.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...

Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)

The man's a moron.

They can sell xAI/Grok to all automobile companies along with Tesla and other businesses(X.com included) just like the SpaceX services.

It would good to see how it was valued.

Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem? As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.

I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like

And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.

> merge it with a company created out of thin air for 20bil.

> have a third company buy it.

put it back on the market for 1.5 trillion.

This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are.

No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips.

(Although now it got me thinking, do random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)

What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.

I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.

I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.

I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi

Knowing the insane level of hardening that goes into putting microcontrollers into space, how to the expect to use some 3nm process chip to stand a chance?

Starship launches are only going to make sense every 779.94 days (the approx 2 year Mars-Earth proximity). The rest of the time, the launches could similarly be used to deploy orbiting data centers for XAi/Grok etc. Brilliant move.

Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.

Any claims that this is about putting compute in space is just a non-sense distraction. This was absolutely about bailing Elon out of his impulsive, drug-fueled Twitter purchase.

The only question now is: when they try to go public, will they be punished for wasting so much money or not? My guess is: not.

You cannot simultaneously build and launch 10’s of thousands of Starships to deliver 1 million tons of equipment and supplies bound to Mars while also committing to launching 10’s of thousands of Starships to orbit full of satellites.

They would need to quadruple their launch rate, and half of those launches would be Starships bound for Mars, the vast majority of which would never return.

How many Falcon9’s have ever been built? It is incredible to say you can build that many rockets and use up that much fuel on any reasonable time scale. You might as well say the Tesla Roadster version 3 will be a Single Stage to Orbit rocket car.

It's just a dumbest idea ever if Elon truly believes it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

Are we ready for that as a modern society or are we going to start enacting regulation against it? I'm sorry but people wanting internet everywhere does not justify we going back to the dark ages for a decade or more.

Socialized losses, privatized profits. As is the American way.

You know what's even harder to cool?

> Orbital Data Centers

Tesla has probably the most valuable shareholders on Earth. Over years of empty promises and meme status, the stock has pretty much purged all the level heads. So it's mostly deluded Elon sycophants giving placing their tithe on the alter of his sci-fi fantasy smoke and mirrors game.

In reality he will be dumping the debt of twitter and xAI (and maybe spacex?) on Tesla shareholders, and buoying that with the added layer of hyper that spaceX brings.

What a joke.

I expect the next step in this series of moves is to turn Tesla into a SPAC & have it acquire SpaceX, bringing its valuation nearer that 8.5t.

I think Elon's taken one too many puffs of hopium

Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [insert next vibe shift]

At what point do people start to see the ever-shifting goalposts for what they are?

Twitter/X in xAI

SolarCity into Tesla

xAI into SpaceC

I am just waiting now for Tesla to be acquired by SpaceC as it has run into issues.

Also, the incredible amount of grift here with the left hand paying the right is scarcely believable. Same story as Tesla buying Solarcity. Board of directors should be ashamed IMO.

We saw this on a much smalelr scale a decade ago when one of Elon's companies (Tesla) acquired a second one of Elon's companies (SolarCity) because it was broke and owed a ton of money to a third one of Elon's companies (SpaceX).

Elon was forced to go through with his impulsive Twitter acquisition by a Delaware court, an acquisition that was not only secured by a bunch of Tesla stock but also a bunch of Qatari and Saudi royal money. He then mismanaged Twitter so badly Fidelity wrote down its value by at least 80% [1].

So what did Elon do? Raised even more questionable foreign money into xAI, diverted GPUs intended for another of his companies (Tesla) into Twitter and then "merged" Twitter into xAI, effectively using other people's money to bail him out from an inevitable margin call on his Tesla stock.

Interestingly, Twitter was reportedly valued at $33 billion in this deal [2], significantly more than the less than $10 billion Fidelity valued Twitter at. Weird, huh? With a competent government, this would be securities fraud that would have you spend the rest of your life in jail. And even with all that, $11 billion was lost on the deal.

So here we are and it's time for the shell game to be played again. Now it's SpaceX's turn to bail out the xAI investors.

And what is the argument for all this? AI data centers in space. Words cannot describe how little sense this makes. Launch costs (even if the Starship launch costs get to their rosy projections), cooling in space, cosmic rays (and the resulting errors) and maintenance. Servers constantly need parts replaced. You can just deorbit the satellite instead but that seems like an expensive way of dealing with a bad SSD or RAM chip.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-acqui...

One of the dumbest things I've ever read.

And Musk keeps grifting about Kardashev 2 civilizations while his rockets do not even reach the moon.

If SpaceX goes public, that will rescue his xAi shares. I wonder how he will rescue his Tesla shares.

Not sure how X which “merged” wit X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX really matter or synergize but here we are. It’s all about the money being protected. And this Ketamine using wierdo is gonna be the worlds first trillionaire. Yay all of us.

Apparently optimus robots don't work and he needs to start his final grift, space datacenters, while his datacenters on earth are powered by gas turbines.

Most likely he's just trying to bury his epstein involvement where was exposed lying by his own daughter.

Musk aide while high: "sPaCe"

Slightly less high Musk aide: "But what is the synergy, where's the moat and how could that be done in practice and most importantly is there any limiting factor on Earth before we have to bring AI into.."

Musk : "SPACE!!!!!!"

It is incredible to think that the extremes of the stock market are actually pretty similar, pink sheets/cryptos and these mega companies are actually the same. News fueled pumps and dumps to win the cycle of hype of the week

The X and xAI doomsters are in complete shambles in an absolute failed prediction of the collapse of the November 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

Instead it is now part of SpaceX, still running with well over 240M+ daily actives and 500M+ MAUs.

Anyone who doesn't see how broken this situation is isn't paying attention. This is how people like Elon, who want to seize as much power from the government as they can, ensure that the means for seizing that power are untouchable.

Anyone who has ever used Grok or X lately knows that both of these products are heavily manipulated to align with the political, social, and economic views of Elon Musk, who is increasingly boosting "white power" language and full-throatedly backing America's most nationalistic and authoritarian president to date.

This is just another consolidation of power, and it's deeply worrisome. Any integrity one may have hoped remained at SpaceX just vanished when they aligned their mission with that of these deeply problematic digital services.

And this is not even scratching the surface of what looks like a deliberate attempt to create Kessler syndrome by launching millions of cheap short-term satellites into orbit, or the rationality of putting datacenters into orbit in the first place...

Energy Generation Practicality

Building satellite datacenters powered by solar energy in space is conceptually feasible, as solar insolation in orbit is about 1,366 W/m²—roughly 35% higher than on Earth's surface due to no atmospheric filtering or day-night cycles in geostationary or sun-synchronous orbits. Advanced solar panels in space can achieve efficiencies of 25-35%, yielding 340-480 W/m² of electrical power. For context, a typical terrestrial datacenter rack consumes 8-15 kW, but AI/high-performance computing (HPC) racks can reach 30-80 kW. Scaling to a hypothetical 1 MW datacenter (enough for ~12-30 AI racks) would require approximately 2,000-3,000 m² of solar panels, assuming 25% efficiency and some losses.

However, practicality hinges on mass and deployment. Thin-film solar arrays (e.g., from projects like Caltech's Space Solar Power Project) can weigh as little as 0.5-1 kg/m², making the array for 1 MW ~1-3 tons. This is manageable for a constellation, but integrating with compute hardware adds complexity. Concepts like Google's Project Suncatcher and Thales Alenia Space's ASCEND study propose modular satellites with integrated solar power, potentially achieving 10x lower carbon emissions than Earth-based datacenters. Challenges include orbital shading in low Earth orbit (LEO) and panel degradation from radiation/micro-meteoroids, but overall, generating sufficient energy is practical with current tech if scaled modestly (e.g., 100-500 kW per satellite).

Heat Radiation Practicality

Heat dissipation in space relies solely on thermal radiation, as there's no atmosphere for convection or conduction to a medium. This is highly practical because space acts as an infinite cold sink (~3 K background temperature). Waste heat from datacenter compute (typically 80-90% of input power) can be radiated via large, lightweight panels with high emissivity coatings (ε ≈ 0.9).

Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for blackbody radiation (P = εσA(T⁴ - T_sink⁴), where σ = 5.67 × 10⁻⁸ W/m²K⁴), a radiator at 50°C (323 K) emits ~550-620 W/m² (one-sided). For a 1 MW heat load, you'd need ~1,600-1,800 m² of radiator area—comparable to solar panel sizing and feasible with deployable structures like those on the ISS (which radiate up to 350 W/m²). Designs from Laird Technologies and NEC emphasize distributed radiation at the PCB level, using materials like aluminum or composites for efficient emission while minimizing solar absorption.

The main limitation is surface area: satellites must balance radiator size with stability and drag in LEO. Overheating risks exist during eclipses or high-load bursts, but passive systems (e.g., heat pipes) and active louvers make this solvable. Studies like ASCEND confirm space datacenters could reject heat more efficiently than Earth-based ones, avoiding water-intensive cooling.

Shielding from Cosmic Rays in LEO

In LEO (400-2,000 km), Earth's magnetic field deflects much of the high-energy radiation, resulting in dose rates of 100-10,000 rad(Si)/year—far lower than in higher orbits. This makes shielding practical and often minimal for short missions (1-5 years). Primary threats are total ionizing dose (TID) causing degradation and single-event effects (SEE) like bit flips or latch-ups.

Standard aluminum shielding (3-5 mm thick, ~1-2 g/cm² areal density) reduces TID to <10 krad(Si) over 3 years, sufficient for 65-130 nm chips. Polymers like polyethylene or borated polyethylene outperform aluminum by 20-70% in proton shielding, reducing displacement damage. Many LEO cubesats use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics with redundancy (e.g., multiple computers) and error-correcting code, avoiding heavy rad-hard parts that add mass/cost.

For datacenters, radiation-tolerant designs (e.g., from Melagen Labs' low-density composites) can extend COTS lifespan 3-5x. No exotic shielding is required—Earth's magnetosphere provides natural protection, and simulations (e.g., MCNP/OMERE) confirm viability. Drawbacks include occasional upsets during solar flares, but overall, LEO shielding is straightforward and cost-effective.

Launch Costs for Practical Mass and Competitive Compute

Launch costs are the biggest barrier. Current prices to LEO are ~$2,700/kg (Falcon 9) to ~$1,500/kg (Falcon Heavy). For a "useful" compute level—say, 1 petaFLOP/s (comparable to a small AI cluster)—hardware might mass 1-5 tons (based on dense racks like NVIDIA DGX at ~100-200 kg/rack, plus power/thermal systems). Including solar panels and radiators, a single satellite could total 5-10 tons.

At $1,500/kg, launching one unit costs $7.5-15 million—potentially competitive with terrestrial datacenter energy costs ($0.05-0.15/kWh over lifetime), but scaling to a constellation (10-100 satellites for global coverage) pushes totals to $75-1,500 million. Google's analysis requires costs <$200/kg by the mid-2030s for parity; Starship aims for $10-100/kg, dropping per-satellite costs to <$1-2 million.

Competitiveness: Terrestrial datacenters cost ~$10-20 million/MW to build/operate annually, but space avoids land/water constraints. At current costs, space is impractical for mass deployment; with Starship, it could undercut Earth prices by 10-50x in energy efficiency. Thales estimates needing 10x less emissive launchers for net-zero viability.

Overall, the concept is technically practical today for prototypes (e.g., via Starcloud or SpaceX proposals), but economically viable only with launch costs dropping 10-20x. Energy and heat are strengths; shielding is low-risk in LEO. Full constellations could emerge by 2030 if reusability scales.

SpaceX and xAI would not be able to freely collaborate on space datacenters after the IPO because it would be self-dealing. SpaceX likes to be vertically integrated, so they wouldn't want to just be a contractor for OpenAI's or Anthropic's infrastructure. Merging before the IPO is the only way that SpaceX could remain vertically integrated as they build space datacenters.