Orbital Data Centers Yes or No

Eager Space. There's been a lot of talk about orbital data centers recently. Instead of collecting solar energy in space to send back to Earth, the idea is to move the energy consuming computer server data centers off the planet into orbit and just move data around. Something we know how to do. It's an interesting idea, but what is not clear is whether it is actually a practical idea. We're going to go through what it will take to build a data center in low Earth orbit like the one that Axiom is proposing here. What's your prediction? Practical or not practical? I'm going to make a lot of assumptions along the way. Feel free to choose your own numbers if you think that I'm offtarget. Let's start at the small end and I'm going to arbitrarily pick 250 servers as the target. In a terrestrial data center, that would take up about six racks of space. And many companies have their own data centers of this size. The big companies have much larger data centers. These are the Microsoft data centers in Quincy, Washington. You'll need to squint to pick out the cars in the parking lots. We'll need some space for our servers. I don't know exactly how much space to allocate. So, I'm just going to ask the European Theos Alenia folks to build us a module like the lunar gateway halo module. That gives us 125 cubic meters or 4,400 cubic feet of space to use. That may seem like a lot of space for 250 servers, but we do need space for power distribution, cooling, control systems, and communication electronics. We also need systems for station keeping and alignment to keep us in the right location and pointed in the right direction. We also need to power our servers. I'm going to pick 500 W of power use per server. And that puts the overall power requirements at 125 kW. There will be inefficiency in power conversion. There will be other systems using power including ground communication and the solar panels will degrade over time. And it's good practice to have some headroom in any design. I'm going to double the power requirements up to 250 kW and that will be our solar power target. We will need panels that can easily be produced in high volume and are reasonably cheap.