Comment by thephyber
17 hours ago
Almost none of the parent’s bullet points are solved by building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit.
The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit.
Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers in.
This whole things screams a solution in search of a problem. We have to solve the traditional data center issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience, etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical space data centers, but they are all already solved for terrestrial data centers.
In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?
But none of those are usable, right? It will take decades of work at least to get a commercial grade mining operation going and even then the iron, titanium, aluminum would need to be fashioned...
Ah, I see the idea now. It is to get people to talk about robotics and how robots will be able to do all this on the moon or wherever.
Instantly pumps Tesla stock here now on earth!
That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon. That probably works out more expensive than launching the whole thing to LEO