Land is expensive, water is scarce, people don’t want sound pollution anywhere near them.

Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.

Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.

You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.

If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.

With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.

Solar capacity factor is 10-20%. So your state of the art chips are utilized 10-20%. That just makes no sense. Adding batteries help, but does not solve it entirely.

A million satellites isn't going to be 100 tons; even if they're all on the small side, say 100 kg each, the total is 100,000 tons, therefore by your numbers if they last on orbit for 3 years they'd double to triple the mass rate burning up on aero entry. I think SpaceX actually talking about 1-10 tons/satellite making this more like 10-100x if they last 3 years, but between AI hallucinations getting and Musk's increasing disconnect from reality (let alone political toxicity) this is basically irrelevant. SpaceX won't reach these higher masses to orbit spread over this number of satellites regardless.

Aggravatingly, I have seen research estimating that even the much smaller number of satellites currently in orbit is already enough to be unstable with regard to a Kessler cascade, and any question about the realism of Musk's goals from finance and engineering limits is clearly not enough to prevent this kind of scenario. Which may result in other governments interfering with his ketamine supply to make sure their satellites aren't caught up in one.

Simplest helpful thing for the Kessler problem is "just"* have fewer larger satellites, and if Starship actually delivers the launch costs necessary to make space-based data centres worth the bother vs. just buying some cheap desert land, I anticipate Musk getting managed upwards by his staff in this regard.

* nothing in space is "just"

Totally sidestepping the issue and refuting the words.

Regardless of how they fall, they still fall on the planet.

And this still ignores the massive atmospheric pollution of chemical rocket launch.

Space elevator would be a big help with launch, but the trash is still dropped on the ground, or in the ocean, in the end.

> Why are so many people just desperate to imagine environmental, economic, or social harm from any new technology or ambitious projects?

Rockets aren't new technology and they are not imagining the environmental harm. It has been known for a long time. It is just that with only ~300 launches per year (and about 35000 launches ever) the harm has not risen to the level of something that has to be limited.

A million data center satellites is a significant increase in that harm. Furthermore data center satellite are expected to have a service life of maybe 3-5 years so there will be an ongoing 200-370k replacements needing to be launched. That's 3.3-6.2k launches per year at 60 satellites per launch.

It won't be possible to keep the solar panels in full sunlight 100% of the time, so you need batteries too.

The math don't math. Too many young dudes watched too much space opera with big heavy armored spaceships that rumble when they fly. Real space is lightweight and fragile. We don't make data centers out of that stuff.

Yes it is trivial when humanity is burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and 300 tons of coal per second and 100 tons of natural gas per second.

Also they are not building them in 3D space with current tech. We clearly don't have it. Cars barely drive themselves in cities, they are decade behind building and maintaining a. datacenter in space.

ISS is not comparable, we don't have to keep GPUs in human-habitable temp ranges, and radiation speed goes way up with increased temps.

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today.

10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

Is there one organization you trust to run the space internet for everyone on earth?

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