Sam Altman and Elon Musk exchanged visible social media posts over the weekend, drawing new attention to the gap between vision and reality for their space computing ventures.
When Musk accused him of being a fraud, Altman said, “You’re the one selling public market investors on short-term space data centers.”
“Homeboy” aside, Altman said it’s a conclusion many experts have reached that public market investors seem to be ignoring. Space data centers won’t be a serious business anytime soon.
SpaceX’s plan to launch a series of orbital data centers to perform AI inference tasks is a key driver in valuing the company at $2 trillion. Optimistic analysts say the potential for processing power to fuel SpaceXAI’s models or serve as an orbital neocloud is unprecedented in the AI boom.
But if you talk to experts in the field, whether they’re entrepreneurs at other space data center startups, the Google team developing their company’s orbital computing project, or engineers crunching numbers for fun, you’ll find the same answer. It won’t be a huge hit until we have much cheaper rockets and the ability to mass-produce high-powered satellites at low cost.
Musk’s answer to this is easy to predict. SpaceX’s massive new rocket, Starship, is expected to make its 13th test flight on July 16. If Musk’s team can get to the point where those vehicles can continue to fly, the data center business case could be closed.
But even if the company successfully recovers both stages of the rocket from this test flight, reusable flight operations will likely still be years away, and the launch of a space data center will likely take a backseat to SpaceX’s commitments to NASA and building its own Starlink network.
SpaceX also acknowledged during its IPO roadshow that Starship may not be fully reusable in the near term and that it would have to throw out a second stage each time it launches, which would be a huge blow to economical space data centers.
This is why Musk’s “we’ll start flying next year” answer is a bit dull. There’s no doubt that SpaceX will be able to launch a satellite with high-speed data processing capabilities next year, but the big question is when it will be able to launch and manufacture it at scale. And that’s likely a question for the 2030s.
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