My explanation of why it's stupid :
- space has no air.
- you need air to disperse heat quickly.
- radiating the heat away is horribly slow.
- re-capturing the heat for energy is quite difficult
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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TLDR?
It would be possible but extremely difficult and expensive to launch even a single rack, and it’s not scalable beyond maybe 1% of existing compute capacity, and the entire thing is a giant grift with the only purpose to prevent Elon Musk from losing all his money.
Ridiculous idea. Instead, we should build our mighty datacentres in the chilly ocean of the ice moon Europa, which contains twice as much water as all the world's oceans combined. By the time the waste heat turns the ice-moon into a water moon, then a steam-moon, we'll have built up enough compute to compute new ice-moons into existence from scratch
I know let's break up data centers into millions of small satellites that are designed to degrade and lose orbit in 5 years.
How to make something that is ridiculously expensive way more expensive. Is this propaganda for private space corporations!?