Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.

1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.

2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.

3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.

As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.

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jraby3 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:

- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.

- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.

- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/31/spacex-seeks-federal-appro...

2. https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze

3. https://www.netizen.page/2025/05/cost-per-kilogram-to-low-ea...

Edit: added item 3

	▲	estomagordo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Elon has open sourced them, or the people at SpaceX who actually know or understand something did?

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audunw 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)