Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
52 comments
·June 26, 2025energywut
Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.
Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries
Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?
Latency? Highly variable.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.
Radiation shielding? Not free.
Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!
Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.
There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
ggreer
If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight.
The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks.
For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
All satellites launched from the US are required to have a decommissioning plan and a debris assessment report. In other words: the government must be satisfied that they won't create orbital debris or create a hazard on the ground. Since these satellites would be very large, they'll almost certainly need thrusters that allow them to avoid potential collisions and deorbit in a controlled manner.
Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries. If cost to orbit per kg plummets and the price of batteries remains high, they'll have a chance. If not, they're sunk.
I think they'll most likely fail, but their business could be very lucrative if they succeed. I wouldn't invest, but I can see why some people would.
wkat4242
Yes cooling is difficult. Half the "solar panels" on the ISS aren't solar panels but heat radiation panels. That's the only way you can get rid of it and it's very inefficient so you need a huge surface.
PaulDavisThe1st
seems oddly paradoxical. ISS interior at some roughly livable temperature. Exterior is ... freakin' space! Temperature gradient seems as if it should take of it ...
... and then you realize that because it is space, there's almost nothing out there to absorb the heat ...
GolfPopper
Servers outside any legal jurisdiction. Priceless.
mandevil
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal warrant etc.
This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
bigiain
While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...
reaperducer
nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them.
Nations come and go. In my lifetime, the world map has changed dozens of times. Incorporate in a country that doesn't look like it's going to be around very long. More than likely, the people running it will be happy to take your money.
runako
[Mild spoilers for _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez below]
> Servers outside any legal jurisdiction
Others have weighed in on the accuracy of this, with a couple pointing out that the people are still on the ground. There's a thread in _Critical Mass_ by Daniel Suarez that winds up dealing with this issue in a complex set of overlapping ways.
Pretty good stuff, I don't think the book will be as good as the prior book in the series. (I'm only about halfway through.)
_carbyau_
:-) I appreciate your snark and the ad campaign reference.
But if international waters isn't enough (and much cheaper) then I don't think space will either. Man's imagination for legal control knows no bounds.
You wait (maybe not, it's a long wait...), if humankind ever does get out to the stars, the legal claims of the major nations on the universe will have preceded them.
nkrisc
Pretty worthless unless the execs live in space too.
notahacker
The 'Principality of Sealand', anywhere else on the high seas or Antarctica have their issues with practicality too, but considerably less likelihood of background radiation flipping bits...
paxys
Unless the company blasts its HQ and all its employees into space, no, they are very much subject to the jurisdiction of the countries they operate in. The physical location of the data center is irrelevant.
peterbonney
Exactly. Government entities have a funny habit of making their own decisions about what (and who) is and is not subject to their jurisdiction.
psds2
Who would be willing to provide connectivity to servers that are exploiting being outside legal jurisdiction for some kind of value?
edm0nd
Dozens upon dozens of illicit shady bulletproof hosting providers.
2026, we will get ransomware from space!
The RaaS groups have hundreds of millions of dollars so in theory they actually could get something like that setup if they wanted.
ronsor
Anyone with a ground station aimed at the datacenter satellite.
bobthepanda
Given that most of the major powers have satellite shootdown ability this isn't worth all that much if you're causing enough trouble.
FredPret
Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.
Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.
notahacker
The best argument I've heard for data centres in space startups is it's a excuse to do engineering work on components other space companies might want to buy (radiators, shielding, rad-hardened chips, data transfer, space batteries) which are too unsexy to attract the same level of FOMO investment...
chatmasta
Yes, and also just because a space data center isn’t useful today doesn’t mean it won’t be required tomorrow. When all the computing is between the ground and some nearby satellites, of course the tradeoffs won’t be worth it.
But what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?
We may as well get ahead of the problems we’ll face and solve them in a low-stakes environment now, rather than waiting to discover some novel failure scenario when we’re nearing Mars…
paxys
Bandwidth - negligible
kolbe
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
notahacker
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
energywut
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
malfist
You answered it yourself, a sun synchronous orbit negates the need for large battery systems.
energywut
Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.
kemotep
Here is a video that I think thoroughly covers the challenges a datacenter in orbit would face.
ericyd
This site is unusable on my mobile android phone, even tried multiple browsers. The body text extends beyond the window and I can't scroll or zoom to fit.
v5v3
Same for me.
But does work if I rotate phone to landscape mode.
trhway
My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, and thus it will get down to about 5000 GPU for the same weight and launch cost.
Paradoxically the datacenter in LEO is cheaper than on the ground, and have bunch of other benefits like for example physical security.
ggreer
If you read Starcloud's whitepaper[1], they mention using a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. This would keep the solar panels in sunlight except for occasional lunar eclipses (which would basically be scheduled downtime, since their plan is to use these data centers for AI training).
quantified
And all of humanity will be watching these arrays orbit, for the financial benefit of whom? I'm happy to remember the wild night sky.
fsh
I wonder if Starcloud is some kind of social experiment to figure out which is the dumbest possible idea that still somehow gets investors.
SirFatty
"...dumbest possible idea.."
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
wlesieutre
Solar roadways!
MarkusQ
Recently had a conversation of space based solar power pros and cons screech to a halt when someone said "Well what about space based geothermal?"
Metacelsus
maybe on Io :)
varelse
[dead]
Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.