5 years is a Starlink's typical lifetime. Data center satellite lifetimes will probably be shorter. Demise sooner, replace more often. GPUs get more energy efficient every year and leaving the slower, hungrier chips up there much longer than 3 years seems wasteful given the cheap cost of launch.

I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design goals, it'll beat Falcon 9 and we could see orbital servers being demised and replaced every 3 years, maybe even 2, for ones with abnormally high failure rates.

Now, whether or not this will all make money in the end has a lot to do with what's going on down here on terra firma and how long it takes to get useful capacity into orbit.

(It's taken 7 years to get Starlink capacity enough for serving 10M customers. Verizon FiOS did 10M in 5 years. AT&T Fiber took 4-5 years to deploy to 10M. So, space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial.)

> space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial

But it depreciates faster. That fiber run is lasting for 50 years, not 5. You need 10x the installation capacity just to keep up.