Motivation and Framing
I love space. I live and breathe it. I'm lucky enough to brush the heavens with my own metal and code, and I want nothing more than a booming orbital space economy that creates the flywheel that makes space just another location we all work and visit. I love AI and I subscribe to maximum, unbounded scale. I want to make the biggest bets. I grew up half-afraid we'd never get another Apollo or Manhattan. I truly want the BigThing.
This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers.
Before we do the classic engineer thing and get nerd sniped by all the shiny technical problems, it's worth asking the only question that matters: why put compute in orbit at all? Why should a watt or a flop be more valuable 250 miles up than on the surface? What economic or strategic advantage justifies the effort required to run something as ordinary as matrix multiplication in low Earth orbit?
That "why" is nearly missing from the public conversation. The "energy is cheaper, less regulations, infinite space" arguments just ring false compared to the mountains of challenges and brutal physics putting anything in space layers on. The discourse then skips straight to implementation, as if the business case is obvious.
Personal Positioning
I'm not here to dunk on anyone building real hardware. Space is hard, and shipping flight systems is a credibility filter. I'm annoyed at everyone else. The conversation is full of confident claims built on one cherry-picked fact and zero arithmetic. This is a multivariable physics problem with closed-form constraints. If you're not doing the math, you're not contributing, you're adding noise and hyping for a future we all want instead of doing the hard work to actually drive reality forward.
Core Thesis
The target I care about is simple: can you make space-based, commodity compute cost-competitive with the cheapest terrestrial alternative? That's the whole claim. Not "space is big." Not "the sun is huge." Not "launch will be cheap." Can you deliver useful watts and reject the waste heat at a price that beats a boring Crusoe-style tilt-wall datacenter tied into a 200–500 MW substation?
If you can't beat that, the rest is just vibes. GPUs are pretty darn happy living on the ground. They like cheap electrons, mature supply chains, and technicians who can swap a dead server in five minutes. Orbit doesn't get points for being cool. Orbit has to win on cost, or it has to admit it's doing something else entirely. If it's an existential humanity play, that's cool too, but it's a slightly different game.
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