this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
There's also the very real problem of data transfer.
On land you just lay down another fiber optic cable and you can double your data transfer rate.
In space, you have to deal with cross talk and interference on a limited spectrum.
Free space laser communications are possible, but even then you are only talking about 10s of GB/s, and you cant add more lasers or receivers on a satellite already in orbit.
But if you have a constellation of thousands of LEO communications satellites to leverage...
Doesn't help, your laser (or RF comms if you are using them) can still only send out a fixed amount of data per second, it doesnt matter if it is being sent to the ground or another satellite, once it is launched there is a hard cap on how much data can flow into/out of it in a given time and there is no way to improve that.