3 ms·

Repairability and depreciation are the main problems. A earth data center can be repaired, depreciated, and recycled at EoL recovering some of the costs. SpaceX

Repairability and depreciation are the main problems. A earth data center can be repaired, depreciated, and recycled at EoL recovering some of the costs. SpaceX datacenters are a total write off from the moment they are launched.

jacobgold 3mo ago
That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware. I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.
- nijave 3mo ago
  GPUs depreciate super fast. It might last 5-7 years but it's already outdated at 2-3 Also space has more radiation
- bakies 3mo ago
  uhh no I dont think the road vehicle is harsher than a rocket launch
  - jacobgold 3mo ago
    The rocket's payload most likely has higher peak vibration but only for a few minutes, and just one time. The road vehicle's payload is shocked by every pot hole and speed bump, for years.
- asadotzler 3mo ago
  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.)
  - kibwen 3mo ago
    > 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.
  - croes 3mo ago
    Starlink rushed when they put the satellites in orbit, AT&T did the opposite. They did the bare minimum. So terrestrial was faster without really trying
  - maxerickson 3mo ago
    The efficiency of the chips only matters if the orbit is full. If the orbit isn't full, all they are is additional compute.
vlovich123 3mo ago
The Microsoft design of filling an airtight submersible structure with argon and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean floor is the alternative design - you’re not looking to do repairs but amortize the low cost of failures across the value you extract. The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribly slow compared with normal mechanisms. It means you need giant physical structures whose sole job is to accept heat from the processing core and radiate it away and have so much more material that you can radiate it at the speed you generate. It’s a huge unsolved physics problem which is why everyone is skeptical.
- bakies 3mo ago
  It's so, so cheap to buy tap water and dump it on the heat exchange.
  - munk-a 3mo ago
    With well considered engineering it doesn't even need to be tap water. If you have a closed loop thermal conductor that interacts with the components themselves you can then use really trashy contaminated water that just needs to be clean enough not to actively erode the heat transfer mechanism. We have setups like this all the time that use condensed air via cooling towers or salt water immersed heat sinks to discharge energy - it's more expensive than tap water but it isn't technically complex. So if it ever becomes unpalatable (likely due to politics) to use tap water there are some readily available alternatives. The big win of being in space is just a worse alternative to using an intermediary heat transfer medium.
    - bakies 3mo ago
      It's the same reason we use single use plastics. No matter the politics the business decision is going to use the cheapest option available. I'm confident that all the hyperscalers could create datacenters that don't affect the local community basically in anyway. There's been data centers hidden in plain sight for decades. The demand drives it to the lowest common denominator
tqi 3mo ago
Isn't the problem also that because of radiation, processors in space either need to have larger feature sizes OR additional shielding / redundancy? Seems like a pretty high price to pay for slightly cheaper energy...
- nijave 3mo ago
  Ars had an article that cited some HPE testing on the international space station that said regular hardware is _probably_ fine up to about 5 years Definitely not definitive but it's plausible current hardware could survive with minimal modification
  - tqi 3mo ago
    hm but "fine" as in probably won't die? my question was more whether the hardware would need extra redundancy or shielding in order to not have unacceptably high error rates
    - nijave 3mo ago
      There's a radiation section in the article, I'll let you draw your own conclusions https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...

jacobgold 3mo ago

That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware. I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.

nijave 3mo ago
GPUs depreciate super fast. It might last 5-7 years but it's already outdated at 2-3 Also space has more radiation
bakies 3mo ago
uhh no I dont think the road vehicle is harsher than a rocket launch
- jacobgold 3mo ago
  The rocket's payload most likely has higher peak vibration but only for a few minutes, and just one time. The road vehicle's payload is shocked by every pot hole and speed bump, for years.
asadotzler 3mo ago
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.)
- kibwen 3mo ago
  > 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.
- croes 3mo ago
  Starlink rushed when they put the satellites in orbit, AT&T did the opposite. They did the bare minimum. So terrestrial was faster without really trying
- maxerickson 3mo ago
  The efficiency of the chips only matters if the orbit is full. If the orbit isn't full, all they are is additional compute.

vlovich123 3mo ago

The Microsoft design of filling an airtight submersible structure with argon and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean floor is the alternative design - you’re not looking to do repairs but amortize the low cost of failures across the value you extract. The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribly slow compared with normal mechanisms. It means you need giant physical structures whose sole job is to accept heat from the processing core and radiate it away and have so much more material that you can radiate it at the speed you generate. It’s a huge unsolved physics problem which is why everyone is skeptical.

bakies 3mo ago
It's so, so cheap to buy tap water and dump it on the heat exchange.
- munk-a 3mo ago
  With well considered engineering it doesn't even need to be tap water. If you have a closed loop thermal conductor that interacts with the components themselves you can then use really trashy contaminated water that just needs to be clean enough not to actively erode the heat transfer mechanism. We have setups like this all the time that use condensed air via cooling towers or salt water immersed heat sinks to discharge energy - it's more expensive than tap water but it isn't technically complex. So if it ever becomes unpalatable (likely due to politics) to use tap water there are some readily available alternatives. The big win of being in space is just a worse alternative to using an intermediary heat transfer medium.
  - bakies 3mo ago
    It's the same reason we use single use plastics. No matter the politics the business decision is going to use the cheapest option available. I'm confident that all the hyperscalers could create datacenters that don't affect the local community basically in anyway. There's been data centers hidden in plain sight for decades. The demand drives it to the lowest common denominator

tqi 3mo ago

Isn't the problem also that because of radiation, processors in space either need to have larger feature sizes OR additional shielding / redundancy? Seems like a pretty high price to pay for slightly cheaper energy...

nijave 3mo ago
Ars had an article that cited some HPE testing on the international space station that said regular hardware is _probably_ fine up to about 5 years Definitely not definitive but it's plausible current hardware could survive with minimal modification
- tqi 3mo ago
  hm but "fine" as in probably won't die? my question was more whether the hardware would need extra redundancy or shielding in order to not have unacceptably high error rates
  - nijave 3mo ago
    There's a radiation section in the article, I'll let you draw your own conclusions https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...