We've run a dozen missions in LEO aboard the ISS. Any steps to remove the friction to launch and increase the cadence is a good thing. Spending a few weeks in LEO missions like this typically land in the Australian outback
We do education outreach to K-16 learning institutions around the world. There are many things that can be studied in the near absence of gravity. Fluids are a huge area of research (surface tension, sedimentation, etc). We germinate seeds and look for genetic changes, people study brain organoids, artificial retinas, crystals, et al
Any indication what the price difference might be? (e.g. 20% less, 50%, 90%!?)
I read that SpaceX's engines deliver a bit more thrust at a bit less mass than NASA engines. But the kicker was SpaceX's were 1/200th the cost. From the cost angle it's very interesting observing space activities going from mostly public to mostly private.
Space datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.
Low Earth Orbit isn't suitable for unpressurized/exposed semiconductor manufacturing for two main reasons:
1) it's not a true vacuum
2) worse, the atmosphere at that altitude is mostly atomic oxygen (O), which is extremely reactive and oxidizes everything
FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.
The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That’s not as cheap as it could have been if they didn’t start out acting like scaled-up shady local real estate developers trying to build condos on protected wetlands, but it will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.
> SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy.
Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.
Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions. The oil and gas industries are notoriously uncaring about the people near their operations, but they recognized what needed to be done to smoothly operate in Alaska, and they just did it. There’s a lot of fantastic reasons to dislike the oil and gas industries, but that’l is what mature big business looks like.
Oh yes, there is lots of money going to the places near me getting DCs. Specifically to the politicians who conveniently happen to own the land the DCs are built on or construction companies that are building them.
It’s also very much about GPU-focused data centers. They’ve been installing essentially illegal (with shaky loopholes) gas-powered turbines on site with no emissions control to speak of, in populated areas. They’ve made local governments sign NDAs, under false promises of huge economic development and job creation, preventing them from telling residents that the big real estate project in town was a giant data center. Cartoonish.
Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
It's hard for the citizens who live nearby to learn about all of that when the idiotic SV execs forced their civic leadership to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Somehow, they just recently learned that was a bad idea.
They did see it coming. Thus all the secrecy, and why datacenters in space have seen so much attention the past few years.
Maybe they didn't predict the magnitude and vitriol of the backlash, but NIMBY resistance to all infrastructure projects has only been growing over the years. For example, wrt solar and wind power. It was obvious data centers were going to see at least as much resistance because you need to build the data centers and more power generation.
Do data centers in space make less sense than build outs in more accommodating countries? Not necessarily. It's not an either/or thing, and it all depends on the concrete bottom line numbers. In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything. More accomodating countries tend to be poorer with worse infrastructure, so there are more unknown risks. And you don't need to develop or manage a foreign workforce, which is why 100% of Silicon Valley jobs didn't instantly jump to India or Poland.
I think they couldn’t see it because they’re steeped in the cult of AI, and far too arrogant, maniacal, et al to read the room. I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.
I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.
The majority of data center bans on the ballot passed. I undertsand theres a little schadenfruede in calling them idiotic, but the outcome doesnt realy scream competence. These execs arent beating the allegations if not being able to pass a ninth grade civics class
> FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans
If you have the technical chops to set up a data center in space — with no connections to the electrical grid or municipal water, you can use your technology to build your data center with the same specs right here on earth in 90% of places that you think are issuing "bans".
A remote town with a population of 43 will be happy a data center to employ 3 locals, but data center operators aren't doing that today because they want tax breaks tiny towns can't give, and infrastructure tiny towns don't have. Space is a red herring.
I think the data centers would get a lot less push back if they were built using new solar and/or wind power in places that have abundant water, and maybe further away from residential areas. Yes that is more expensive than what they are doing now, but it is still almost certainly cheaper than building in space. Heck, putting data centers in the ocean is probably cheaper than space.
It’s still cheaper to build in a completely undeveloped desert with no neighbors and costly utility hookups than space. By orders of magnitude. That gap will never be materially close.
Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.
As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.
I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.
I don't think the entire nation would ban data centers. The problem is that tech companies are building them on cheap land. Which usually means land that has little water and is better used for food or oxygen or things other than a massive one-story building.
Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.
Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.
Data centers in urban areas definitely see massive resistance. Seattle straight up banned any new data centers with a capacity over 20 MW, even though water is a non-issue, and we have tons of industrial land in the south of the city.
The problem is data centers produce absolutely colossal amounts of noise that can be heard and felt for miles. Even if water is a non-issue, the noise isn’t.
Neither is a problem in the sense that both noise and water consumption can be mitigated with some minor (relative to the total cost of a project) capital investments. If these were rational objections, states and municipalities could simply issue noise codes and water access caps, then let the companies figure out how to work within the lines. Instead, we’re left with blanket bans
No, it’s not the noise it’s the power consumption. Your locale becomes a power consumption hog so your off-peak hours and your peak hours become very similarly priced. Noise can be dampened, the power bill cannot.
This is actually a meme/fake videos on the internet, where they add random noise over their videos while recording a datacenter to make it seem really loud.
Realistically you can only hear it if you're within 30-50 feet of the data center, unless there's a separate diesel/natural gas generator.
People are complaining because they are building data centers near people, and data centers produce prodigious amounts of noise pollution. They should be building them far away from civilization, where the low frequency noise has plenty of distance to attenuate.
People are complaining because of propaganda online. My middle school age children think data centers are evil and we don't have any around us nor have they ever seen one.
Nah, they'll just bite the bullet and build the data centers in remote Canada or Finland or somewhere else no one's complaining (ignore Greta as per usual) and tap into the local hydropower resources. Might take a tad longer and cost slightly more money than in [quasi-lawless US state], but other than that, no problem. Aluminium smelters (basically a solid form of electricity export) in Quebec and Siberia have been doing that for decades already (like 20GW private-ish hydropower).
Finland only has limited hydro capacity that is needed for load-following due to the prevalence of wind power. It makes no sense to waste it for baseload generation. Additionally, the last major hydro power plant was built in 1976. All subsequent attempts have been massively controversial.
A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.
I don't really understand this perspective. The margins for data centers are such that they could pay massive subsidies to state and local governments and put them in the middle of nowhere with BTM power, and almost all that opposition would evaporate overnight. And you'd still come out way ahead of space-based DCs. They're not doing this yet because they don't have to.
You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.
they are not gonna law itself back to stone age by making data centers illegal, it's just too much money, security implications to chain yourself up just because a few politicians wants a few votes and "enviromentalists" demands it. Don't forget there are people that are ok with data centers.
Power and heat radiation are the solved problems at scale in LEO. 50+% of solar energy is attenuated by the atmosphere, so panels can be huge and thin and flimsy in zero-G and get twice as much power as on the ground. Space-Based solar power plants are being actively explored by the US, UK, Chna, and Japan. The real hitch is how to send the power to the ground via microwave without also needing a receiver 20+ km across that lightly crisps birds flying above it.
If the thing that needs the power is in orbit already, all you're doing is sending data, something Starlink already has figured out.
The impractical part is shielding, maintenance, and a modular design that can be remotely maintained from the ground. When you're already running a high-cadence launch schedule, those costs and issues narrow, and you can swap out a component within days.
Again, it makes sense on paper. It might not be more practical than a data center on the ground, but there would be trade-offs.
One thing that I haven’t seen represented as a risk in space based datacenters is the satellite reentry debris pollution. We are essentially allowing a constant rain of heavy metals, silicon, arsenic, and other nasty things if this idea goes to scale.
Even if all the technical issues can be worked out, which I doubt, the incentives are there to pump as many as possible up there. I don’t think we want to live with that raining down on us all.
Is it dumb and impractical when NIMBYs and folks directly opposed to your political agenda want to prevent any and all terrestrial datacenter development?
So there are a few breakthrough therapeutics that rely on samples crystallized in microgravity. One of them is Keytruda or Pembrolizumab, a PD-1 inihibitor used as a neo-adjuvant in cancer therapy.
Historically, there was an issue with dosing pembrolizumab, as the manufacturing process was creating large uneven crystals that required physicians to process at the clinic to ensure proper dosing, but in microgravity? The crystallization is just gorgeous. absolutely beautiful
This is more of a scientist said at a conference to another scientist kind of story, but apparently, they got some seed crystals from the ISS that are now used on Earth.
You can do a lot more than make just seed crystals. It turns out that cells in our body are inside of a 3D environment with forces / tension acting in all directions. When you smoosh these in a lab (very literally) and try to observe how a drug behaves in a model cell / model organ, then it doesn't have the same physical constraints acting on it. BUT in 0g that's different. In 0g, cells behave slightly more similarly to how they behave in vivo and that could be a huge difference maker for drug discovery.
One breakthrough drug alone is worth more to humanity than what the ISS has cost across its lifespan.
Quite a bit of money have been raised on the premise that certain things can be easier to make in space than on earth due to gravity, which creates sedimentation
Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results
Material science and manufacturing are two that have always seemed interesting to me, particularly monocrystalline stuff like semiconductors, optics, and metallurgy.
Don't think Varda (or anyone else) has ever sold any space produced drug? It's all very much experimental small scale. Realistically, something has to be super potent and super expensive to even consider it (that rules out anything mainstream).
Not that anything is really produced in space either, more like passively transformed into some crystal form from a liquid state or whatever. Environmental assistance more than anything else.
There's a lot of fundamental science to be done in space; some forms of crystal are much easier to grow, chemical reactions and biological interactions etc. etc. For reference, it wasn't long ago NASA was trying to figure out if spiders could form webs in space.
"When gravity is involved, the golden orb spiders will happily build their asymmetrical webs, and sit facing downwards waiting for prey. In space, their webs were more symmetrical, however when there was light, the spiders used it as a reference point and built their webs as if the light was the opposite to 'downwards'."
The primary one I've been sold on is types of crystal growth is just better up there. But due to the excess expense, the only thing that fits the bill is experimental edge case pharmaceuticals that have massive price tags that insurance mostly covers.
If the automation improves far beyond what we currently have available, maybe this means microchip manufacturing in the future, but we aren't at all there yet from the fab side of the equation.
This is an old idea, dating back to at least the 1940s. Many experiments have already been done in microgravity environments.
In the 1960s, they used sounding rockets to do experiments on how molten metals solidify in microgravity, with manufacturing applications in mind.
In the 1970s, they ran experiments, also on sounding rockets, on melting and solidifying materials without letting them touch a container: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19840059952
More recently, many microgravity experiments have been performed on the International Space Station. Experiments were done on protein crystal growth aboard the ISS in 2000, just a couple of years after it was launched. (I think it took some time to get the experimental facilities up and running.)
Here’s an assortment of links on the subject, starting with a good overview:
One of the most interesting things about SpaceX, they just keep adding to their stack of internal capabilities. And with those capabilities, more and more things become doable for them that most can't do.
The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.
So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.
Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):
Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.
You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.
They have thrusters and do controlled re-entry, at a location of their choosing.
The uppermost parts of the atmosphere are very dynamic, with changes in solar activity causing them to contract and expand on a scale of hours. And this is very significant for the amount of drag felt by re-entering objects. Because of this, if you slowly deorbit something naturally through drag, you are not going to be able to pick the destination, or even know where it ends up until very close to it falling down. So instead you intentionally lower the perigee so that it deorbits in a controlled manner.
It did mention medications. Perhaps pharmaceutical companies will charge 20% more for medications that are produced in space vs those produced on Earth?
It would be nice if SpaceX published GNSS pseudodistance/carrier phase from all Starlink satellites. It would give excellent realtime tomographic information about the ionosphere...
Here's the thing I might not love Elon or everything he does and there are plenty of things to disagree with him about and I won't comment on him as a person
But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.
Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.
There's that one photo with a dummy driver in a red tesla and in the background you can see the earth. I think it's one of the best photos ever, part of it is the absurdity of the fact that it exists at all.
Elon turning the concept of space into the vanity project of a mentally unstable man child kinda sucks though. Makes it hard to give a shit knowing he is personally profitting from it.
Purity tests, the guy has indirectly killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids through the cancellation of US AID and you're calling this a "purity test", maybe go fuck yourself ?
You can hate this man but he is doing things others don't even dream about. He almost makes them look easy.
Looks cool and if they could make chips in space, it will be beyond crazy. It will be over time and way over budget but in the end will be insanely profitable.
He essentially put a price on this, and now you can just factor this into manufacturing and if something can be made there and numbers make sense, it will be made there.
Why is it called microgravity and not freefall? Cus afaik you are experiencing almost the same force of gravity as you would on the surface, you are just constantly falling.
Space is 12% of their overall revenue for Q3 2026 down from 20% in 2025 due to AI outpacing connectivity and space (connectivity is also more valuable than space). Investing in SpaceX is investing in an AI and ISP company that has a slightly profitable space R&D lab.
We do education outreach to K-16 learning institutions around the world. There are many things that can be studied in the near absence of gravity. Fluids are a huge area of research (surface tension, sedimentation, etc). We germinate seeds and look for genetic changes, people study brain organoids, artificial retinas, crystals, et al
I read that SpaceX's engines deliver a bit more thrust at a bit less mass than NASA engines. But the kicker was SpaceX's were 1/200th the cost. From the cost angle it's very interesting observing space activities going from mostly public to mostly private.
From Wikipedia, at 300km the atmosphere is around 80% atomic oxygen https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Msis_atmospheric_com...
Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.
Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...
https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...
I mostly agree with you, and obviously there is a lot of intelligence in the valley, but there doesn't seem to be much wisdom.
Maybe they didn't predict the magnitude and vitriol of the backlash, but NIMBY resistance to all infrastructure projects has only been growing over the years. For example, wrt solar and wind power. It was obvious data centers were going to see at least as much resistance because you need to build the data centers and more power generation.
Do data centers in space make less sense than build outs in more accommodating countries? Not necessarily. It's not an either/or thing, and it all depends on the concrete bottom line numbers. In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything. More accomodating countries tend to be poorer with worse infrastructure, so there are more unknown risks. And you don't need to develop or manage a foreign workforce, which is why 100% of Silicon Valley jobs didn't instantly jump to India or Poland.
I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.
https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/how-many-anti-da...
If you have the technical chops to set up a data center in space — with no connections to the electrical grid or municipal water, you can use your technology to build your data center with the same specs right here on earth in 90% of places that you think are issuing "bans".
A remote town with a population of 43 will be happy a data center to employ 3 locals, but data center operators aren't doing that today because they want tax breaks tiny towns can't give, and infrastructure tiny towns don't have. Space is a red herring.
Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.
As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.
Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.
Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.
Realistically you can only hear it if you're within 30-50 feet of the data center, unless there's a separate diesel/natural gas generator.
A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.
a. put them a few miles outside urban centers
b. put them in space
Which is a cheaper, better option?
Power and heat radiation are the solved problems at scale in LEO. 50+% of solar energy is attenuated by the atmosphere, so panels can be huge and thin and flimsy in zero-G and get twice as much power as on the ground. Space-Based solar power plants are being actively explored by the US, UK, Chna, and Japan. The real hitch is how to send the power to the ground via microwave without also needing a receiver 20+ km across that lightly crisps birds flying above it.
If the thing that needs the power is in orbit already, all you're doing is sending data, something Starlink already has figured out.
The impractical part is shielding, maintenance, and a modular design that can be remotely maintained from the ground. When you're already running a high-cadence launch schedule, those costs and issues narrow, and you can swap out a component within days.
Again, it makes sense on paper. It might not be more practical than a data center on the ground, but there would be trade-offs.
Even if all the technical issues can be worked out, which I doubt, the incentives are there to pump as many as possible up there. I don’t think we want to live with that raining down on us all.
Historically, there was an issue with dosing pembrolizumab, as the manufacturing process was creating large uneven crystals that required physicians to process at the clinic to ensure proper dosing, but in microgravity? The crystallization is just gorgeous. absolutely beautiful
Take a look at this image, https://issnationallab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/merck_...
Left hand side are the crystals grown on the ground. Right hand side is 0g.
That change made it possible to turn it into a safe injectable that patients could take at home. And they were able to recreate those conditions on Earth, https://issnationallab.org/iss360/merck-lab-publishes-pembro...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6889310/
This is more of a scientist said at a conference to another scientist kind of story, but apparently, they got some seed crystals from the ISS that are now used on Earth.
https://techconnectworld.com/World2025/a.php?i=602
You can do a lot more than make just seed crystals. It turns out that cells in our body are inside of a 3D environment with forces / tension acting in all directions. When you smoosh these in a lab (very literally) and try to observe how a drug behaves in a model cell / model organ, then it doesn't have the same physical constraints acting on it. BUT in 0g that's different. In 0g, cells behave slightly more similarly to how they behave in vivo and that could be a huge difference maker for drug discovery.
One breakthrough drug alone is worth more to humanity than what the ISS has cost across its lifespan.
https://iafastro.directory/iac/paper/id/89939/abstract-pdf/I...
Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results
Not that anything is really produced in space either, more like passively transformed into some crystal form from a liquid state or whatever. Environmental assistance more than anything else.
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-happens-to-spiders-... (with video)
If the automation improves far beyond what we currently have available, maybe this means microchip manufacturing in the future, but we aren't at all there yet from the fab side of the equation.
In the 1960s, they used sounding rockets to do experiments on how molten metals solidify in microgravity, with manufacturing applications in mind.
In the 1970s, they ran experiments, also on sounding rockets, on melting and solidifying materials without letting them touch a container: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19840059952
More recently, many microgravity experiments have been performed on the International Space Station. Experiments were done on protein crystal growth aboard the ISS in 2000, just a couple of years after it was launched. (I think it took some time to get the experimental facilities up and running.)
Here’s an assortment of links on the subject, starting with a good overview:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/applications-within-re...
https://issnationallab.org/research-and-science/space-resear...
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/the-benefits-of-microg...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001550
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150023126
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/manufacturingscience/...
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/optical-f... https://thedailypost.digital/how-microgravity-made-zblan-cou...
If you manufacture there how do you recover it?
So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.
Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):
https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...
The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.
The uppermost parts of the atmosphere are very dynamic, with changes in solar activity causing them to contract and expand on a scale of hours. And this is very significant for the amount of drag felt by re-entering objects. Because of this, if you slowly deorbit something naturally through drag, you are not going to be able to pick the destination, or even know where it ends up until very close to it falling down. So instead you intentionally lower the perigee so that it deorbits in a controlled manner.
Thanks for the correction!
But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.
Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.
https://goalkeepers.gatesfoundation.org/report/2025-report/#...
Looks cool and if they could make chips in space, it will be beyond crazy. It will be over time and way over budget but in the end will be insanely profitable.