At minimum how would the heat be managed? Also as someone else said, just getting the material from the earth into orbit is currently possible but why?
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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The linked video by Real Engineering does some back of the napkin math and yeah.... the numbers are so off anything remotely feasible, it's hilarious.
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(16 replies)
Even putting aside the absurd expense, impossible power demand, lack of cooling and abundance of hostile radiation, what the fuck is even the point of a data centre in orbit? "Sorry, I can't access my files right now, the data centre is over the Indian Ocean". "Yeah, I've sent the email - it'll be delivered in fourty-three hours when the satellite is next in range of London". Yes, I'm being facetious but what possible benefit could there be for having ten thousand tiny, low-power data centres - of which you can only access one or two at a time - versus the obvious, existing, cheaper, proven alternative?
As far as I know, there are no more orbital deadzones. We've got so many satellites, if not Starlink, I'm sure some other satellites could do the job of relaying to ground stations. We get live video of boosters landing in the middle of the ocean after all.
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(4 replies)
Very useless and expensive idea.
They solve a couple issues but introduce a host of others.
If you focus on the couple issues solved, you're obviously biased.
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(7 replies)
Like with Starlink, it's all about orbital dominance.
If Starcloud is about data storage out reach of terrestrial events (attacks and desasters), then it's irrelevant whether the performance can compete with terrestrial systems. In fact the paper neither mentions flops or bytes.
Looking at starlink, it must be possible to run at least some computational power in space.
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(2 replies)
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!