> That "why" is almost missing from the public conversation. People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't.

But then he never answers that fundamental question, and jumps straight to the hardware and power and cost? What problems are orbital data centers trying to solve? What optimizations are they intended to deliver? Are these optimizations beneficial to everyone who uses a data centers, or just operators or users of orbiting satellite constellations?

> But the knock-on effects are why this keeps pulling at people. If you can industrialize power and operations in orbit at meaningful scale, you're not just running GPUs. You're building a new kind of infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out. Compute is just one of the first excuses to pay for the scaffolding.

This seems to be the closest we get to a “Why”, but it doesn’t make much sense. A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”? How?

> The target I care about is simple: can you make space-based, commodity compute cost-competitive with the cheapest terrestrial alternative? That's the whole claim. … Can you deliver useful watts and reject the waste heat at a price that beats a boring Crusoe-style tilt-wall datacenter tied into a 200–500 MW substation?

Isn’t the answer clearly “No”? The default settings of his model — which I assume he considers optimal — tell us that power for orbital data enters will cost 3.5X terrestrial ones. And that only SpaceX has the vertical integration to do even attempt to do this. So again, where is the competitive advantage?

Also, I don’t understand why he’s including satellite construction and launch costs for a 40,000 satellite constellations in his analysis, if he’s assuming SpaceX as he claims. Wouldn’t SpaceX simply implement these compute capabilities in the next gen of Starlink, so which would reduce costs significantly.

> It might not be rational. But it might be physically possible.

But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying? I don’t think the question has been whether orbital data centers are possible, it’s been whether they are rational. And that centers foremost h the unanswered question, Why is this a good idea?

> But then he never answers that fundamental question

The fundamental question is “is it economically viable”, and the answer from his model is “not really”

> A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”?

I think he’s claiming industrializing larger and more economical power generation in space, as well as the means to put it up there, would make it easier to transition to a theoretical space economy

> But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying?

From the article, he claims that people handwave the economics, so at least the people he has interacted with haven’t been saying that.