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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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This is an interesting report but I want to highlight one section in particular:

At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center. [...]

[...] However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include preprocessing data from Earth-observation satellites, real-time detection and tracking of hypersonic missiles, and active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit.

We're not really debating if space compute is feasible, we're just debating if it will scale. Given that it's technically possible and useful in niche functions, small space datacenters are probably going to be made. Whether bigger ones will follow is an open question.

Indeed. It's quite clear that you can compute in space. My contention is that it will not be cheaper than terrestrial computing (contra Elon), large satellites (100+ MW range) will be infeasible (given the technology under discussion), and small satellites will not be useful.

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