Comment by anonymousiam

This is an interesting analysis, and I like the sliders that let you instantly show the impacts of system trades.

The one glaring hole that I see is the challenge of moving the data to/from the datacenter while it's on orbit. Bandwidth to/from space isn't free. FCC/ITU licenses are required, transmitters/receiviers/modems/DSP/antennas all add to SWAP (size, weight, and power). Ground-stations are needed to move the data up/down, but those have recently become a commodity too. Still, they're not free. (see: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station)

There is also the added latency between earth-based users and space-based datacenters, which may be a deal breaker for some applications.

Another issue I don't see covered are the significant differences between space-based hardware and terrestrial hardware. The space stuff needs to be radiation tolerant, and that usually makes it a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the terrestrial stuff, all other things being equal.

In the end, space-based datacenters are highly impractical even if you assume that Starship can put anything into orbit very cheaply.