These endless conversations about how it can never work are so boring. The only difference between scenarios where it will and won't work are (often unstated) assumptions about launch cost. Launch cost is the whole ball game, as any problem can be solved with more mass. So the whole discussion can be summarized as "I think Starship will fail to meet its launch cost targets" vs "I think Starship will work". It's fashionable to bet against Elon these days but historically it has been a bad bet on long timeframes...

So like I don't get to use my degree except to tutor kids and answer physics questions and the like, so indulge me for a second because this doesn't make much sense to me. So like the endgame is to create a new Pryor, OK facility in space, right? It doesn't make sense if we're not shipping something that's about the same as what you can build on Earth.

Epoch.AI says that this facility has 100,000 TPU chips, eats 370 megawatts of electricity, but designed to get rid of up to 480 megawatts of heat. Sun power is 1.36 kW/m^2, which is something like 7 megawatts per football field (assuming ~5000 m^2), but you have to put up something like 3-5x that because solar panels are only 20-30% efficient, right? Assume that you can arrange it so that the solar panels are one side, the radiators on the other, you can maybe get away with only 300-400 football fields maybe? So like 1.5 million m^2 or 1.2 km wide, right? At LEO, 650 km, you have (1.2km)/(650 km) * 180 degrees/pi is 0.11 degrees or 6.6 arcminutes of visual size. The moon is only like 30 arcminutes. And the paper talks about how they're going to not do one big monolithic construction but an oval of fridge-sized objects separated out 2-3 times this size -- so like I don't see how you get another Pryor, OK size data center in LEO without basically having it look like a second, smaller moon flying across the sky 10 times per day.

And if this were a wildly successful idea are we talking about having like 5-10 of them, a few for each big frontier lab? This just sounds like we're talking about the most profound shift to our night skies since we started having to deal with light pollution in our cities.

Capacity factor of orbital solar PV panel: 97%

Capacity factor of terrestrial solar panel: 23%

Retail cost per watt for terrestrial panel: under 45c

Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450

Annual performance degradation of terrestrial solar panel: under 0.5%

That of space-grade solar panel: up to 2%

Life span of terrestrial panel: about 2x that of space panel.

Total difference in cost per watt feeding a DC load in space vs on land: about x400

And that's ignoring launch costs. It makes absolutely zero sense. And given the scale of production and investment in manufacturing, terrestrial is likely to stretch even further ahead in the cost stakes.

Recent and related:

Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49837350 - Sept 2026 (96 comments)

Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606 - Sept 2026 (551 comments)

Four short videos (~10 minutes total) about Suncatcher:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAeFjVYtuU34

The usp of data centres in space is extraterritoriality. That's all it is.

Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.

The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.

They couldn't stabilize their footage ? My Google phone's videos aren't shaky like that.

Cool, we will finally have actual data to see if that’s possible or not. My understanding is that doing compute in space for ML is pretty absurd, but the discussion will be way more interesting with real numbers.

I still think it’s mostly a way to put pressure on politicians, « you either give us tax cut, fast tracked permits, and let us do what we want with the land or we go to space and you get no benefits »

This is obviously for the Golden Dome. Missile interception for ICBMs only works in space and they need the hardware and AI for classifiers (decoy/not_decoy) and for targeting in space, too.

For civilian purposes this would be even more dystopian. Communication satellites and propaganda from space have always existed, but AI manufactured mass slop and propaganda from space really raises philosophical objections.

When did they do this? I didn’t hear of any SpaceX launches besides the falcon launch yesterday for a government spy satellite. I wonder if this one was also bundled in.

In other news, Howard Hughes explored the deep sea for purely civilian purposes ...