Comment by scrivna
14 hours ago
Orbital datacenters is just an excuse of a reason to merge the two companies when there’s nothing else tying them together. They won’t actually happen.
14 hours ago
Orbital datacenters is just an excuse of a reason to merge the two companies when there’s nothing else tying them together. They won’t actually happen.
SpaceX will run out of things to profitably launch with Starship once they launch Starlink V3 (a few hundred launches per year), and orbital datacenters provides effectively unlimited launch demand. Like Starlink was for Falcon 9, orbital datacenters are a way to fully leverage the insane launch cost advantage and launch capacity that Starship brings to the table.
I see your point. All this launch capacity is coming online but, once Starlink is built out, who is going to buy it? Surely Starlink maintenance isn't big enough [edit: maybe it is, it's hard to get my head around the number of sats]
The datacenters in space thing just doesn't make sense to me. Datacenters get their value from scale which is why they're so freaking massive here on earth. I just don't see any datacenter in space being big enough (unless built over multiple lifetimes) to use let alone profitable/desireable. What am i missing?