Why space data centers? What advantage this would have? Cooling will be a big issue, while it is easily solved on the planet earth, as we have water, air that can transfer heat away.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
Desert land is free. Floating data centres in the middle of the pacific is free.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
Far easier for someone like Iran or China or the US to take out an LEO satellite than an underground data centre, or even a surface on in the case of DCs in US or China.
It's also pretty easy to launch another one into orbit to replace it? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. We can have all these options simultaneously. The easiest targets are where the faster paced more offensive action is going to be.
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
Are you suggesting for a fact that Iran as the guidance and targeting systems to identify specific LEO objects, and fire missiles at those targets with accuracy?
I'm saying I don't think Iran has the capability and the difference in capabilities between America and China on one hand, and Iran on the other is so different that I'm perplexed as to why they would even be mentioned in the same sentence.
I'm actually not even sure your suggestion is true. Theoretically they don't need to launch a missile and could attempt to infiltrate a data center instead. They're secure but not that secure against a determined enemy with any amount of real training.
Launching something into orbit is much harder than intercepting something because to intercept you don't need to reach orbital velocities. You can just go up and boom. The velocity of the target does the rest. Tracking it really isn't such a hard thing these days.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
If you build a pyramid with the base pointing to the sun (as solar), and a "height" about 5 times the base in constant shadow, with decent internal circulation, that will operate at sub-20C just from the two radiative sides pointing away from Earth (you make the earth pointing sides reflective)
in space 1m2 of thin metal will radiate those 785 watt. No fan, no heatpump, nothing. Only the launch cost. Which given the projected Starship launch cost will be cheaper than installation on Earth.
