The viability of space DCs seem to depend entirely on the existence of higher latency, lower throughput, single card to single server workloads, which IMO isn't the primary class of workload today (and if one holds the belief that frontier models will maintain their dominant position, this will remain rack/row/facility level, which isn't viable for orbital facilities to handle as currently designed).
If that workload does expand in usage, and the economics of orbital DCs make sense (with high launch costs, zero ability to do maintenance, and weight penalties for shielding and radiators), then surely ocean based data centers (e.g. Panthalassa) make more sense (lower 'launch' costs, high but existant latency on maintenance, no weight penalties), and if those make sense then surely the distributed land based facilities (e.g. Rune Energy) or home based facilities (e.g. Span XFRA) make even more sense (easier maintenance, low/no permitting overhead because they're covered by existing permits, reasonable quality terrestrial fiber internet).
And putting things in the ocean is only marginally less idiotic due primarily to sea water being corrosive, wet, and full of creatures that tend to want to grow all over anything.
Microsoft did attempt ocean racks in a sealed container , and it sounded like the 3 year test ended successfully but was not renewed.
I presume the cost of setup, teardown, lead-time, low power density when scaled up, and lack of convenient access for mid-life repairs made it not worth the trouble
The only use case for datacenter in space is to have high communication speed with satellites that have low compute. Though that does beg the question of why not just add more compute to those satellites going forward.
Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.
And all those conclusions take is cost to space to reduce 15 times; new cooling tech that isn't used anywhere to work at scale but only in space (if ground datacenters can use it too, their cost decrease); that ops cost line to not do anything useful so it can be just dropped; those 10mm radiation shields to not weight anything, because they didn't enter the costs; and that ground datacenters to use more expensive tech than they use today (just not improving is not enough).
We will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.
Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.
How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.
All of this sounds a lot like how ULA, ESA thought reusable rockets were a pipe dream. These are engineering challenges, not physical laws that need to be broken.
The article makes several big assumptions that are questionable (experimental cooling can scale, permit issues on land will only become worse, etc). But more importantly, their analysis of the risks of placing a data center in orbit is completely off. They mention that it costs tens of millions to launch a missile to destroy a satellite, and it might be cheaper to simply replace it (based on launch costs). But one strike can hit many targets, those targets may contain hardware costing multiple times the value of their launch, and you will be out of compute while you scramble to launch a replacement. We can also assume that placing big fat valuable targets in space would have many actors wondering how to make it cheaper to destroy them.
For those reasons alone, and because compute will become more and more strategic for defense, I find it very hard to believe that data centers in space will represent even 5% of all compute in the next 10 years. I think a higher proportion will rather be underground or in bunkers than in space.
Space is like the deep ocean, you never really know what's lurking in the shadows. A well placed pebble, a pellet of paint or a beam of microwaves could ruin a fragile satellite without being none the wiser.
If you want a safer datacenter you put it underground and you can safely assume that if it's hit by a bunker buster you have much much bigger problems.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a nuclear plant to power data centers than to launch the data centers into space? Nuclear is expensive, but rockets, orbital infrastructure, and giant cooling radiators aren't exactly budget options.
That’s just not true. For the same cost as a nuclear plant of some rated power, you can build far more solar, wind, and batteries.
The pro-nuclear propaganda is suspiciously associated with people with a history of also wanting to build nuclear weapons. The Liberal Party of Australia is an example — they seem very interested in overpriced nuclear power and obtaining nuclear powered subs capable of launching nuclear tipped missiles.
What happens to all the rare earth materials once the space DC have been decommissioned? Isn't it a horrible waste of the already hard to come-by resources to send it to a disposable trash heap in space, all in the name of forever chasing profits?
The real main purpose of putting data centers in space is not economic, and it’s not to guard against threats from major powers who could easily destroy them. It’s so that the ultra rich can have data centers that the rest of us cannot destroy. I make no argument about whether we should be thinking of doing so or not, but it is interesting to think of the implications is it not? And it certainly fits the personalities involved and their public statements.
Even if data centres in space become cost-effective, what's the point? The only non-contrived answer that I can think of is to avoid NIMBYism, but pushback against data centres can't be that bad.
Isn’t “space grade” a result of high space launch costs? If it becomes cheap enough to launch hardware into space, it doesn’t need to last as long to meet ROI.
Even if they aren't financially viable, I think they're attractive because companies want to keep certain kinds of data/processing on everyone/everything someplace where there's a lower chance of government regulation (gdpr/etc).
If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).
Underlying this seems to be the assumption that those pesky governments, pushed around by public opinion, will keep on blocking or delaying terrestrial data centres, but space-based ones will be fine.
The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.
I fail to see the economic case. You will need very large solar arrays and radiation hardened components, both of which make it uneconomical compared to a data center on Earth. This is another of Musk's genius ideas like the tunnels that were supposed to be carrying us under cities by now.
It's difficult to imagine any sort of compute in space given the state of the art rad hardened processor is about as fast as a computer Apple sold in 1998.
You don’t have to imagine. The starlink constellation is a working and profitable massive deployment of orbital compute. (It doesn’t use rad hardened hardware as far as I can tell)
Musk's "genius idea" there was to (pardon the pun) derail high speed rail and other similar investments so he could sell more cars.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
The problem is that experiments into this by Google have concluded that radiation hardening is unnecessary. HBM memory far surpassed their expectations for survival, exceeding 5 years in their simulated proton beam on earth. Localized shielding for consumer equipment is more than enough, especially combined with ECC.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode
> and becomes cheaper than any current terrestrial energy source at around $50/kg
Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.
Does gauging this based on Falcon 9 launch costs make sense now? SpaceX has already deployed two payloads of satellites using Starship. Falcon 9 is a deprecated system because SpaceX intends to use Starship for future payload missions.
We can't yet know the ultimate cost of Starship payloads. All we have is SpaceX projections of $10-100/kg. Maybe that is realized, maybe not. Given the scale of the LA launch site they're building, they intend to have the launch cadence to deliver lower launch costs than anything achieved with Falcon 9 or any other launch system ever created.
No we will not. The reason is simple: Space is not in the cloud, it is above. Anything that's not in the cloud is bad.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
> Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics
That cooling is already perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
It is absolutely a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics. It's a bet made by investors who don't know or care about the science, and are looking for a modal outcome of a failed company purchased by SpaceX or by an even dumber company looking to compete with SpaceX.
I recommend reading up on the results of Google’s project suncatcher. IMHO the results have provided a roadmap to space DCs with the only blocker being launch cost which are targeted to become economically viable in 2030s; sooner for spacex because they can lower their margins to zero or even negative for the launch itself.
The plan as I understand it is to pack it tightly with TPUs with liquid cooling out to radiators and flying a tight cluster of these next to each other using high bandwidth laser links. That lets you balance the amount of thermal radiation you need to emit vs the amount of TPUs in a single satellite. Thus it’s not a DC in a single satellite but more like a rack and then a bundle of racks flying beside each other.
As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.
I wouldn't put it past him to launch 20,000 of them before moving on to the next thing.
Or two. It's a broad range, but with his personality and prior history both are possible before he announces whatever the next pivot is.
Just, not a million. There's better things to do with the capacity to put a million up there, and better places to put a million (last I checked) 120 kW compute racks and associated PV systems.
The only place where a space data center makes sense is in Mars orbit to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be landed. Every thing else is a smoke and mirrors game to justify rolling a bunch of failed businesses into SpaceX.
What specifically do you disagree with from the article to say its Smoke and Mirrors? I think their analysis is reasonable and that it will reduce to a launch cost problem.
Giving it a quick look they're doing the same thing as everyone else and handwaving away really difficult engineering problems with some back of the envelope math that only looks at one or two aspects.
Like their section on collision avoidance isn't any more sophisticated than "Starlink has a great record so far" when we're talking about a very different scale of how much mass and surface area has to be moved around in a coordinated way.
This is in effect an editorial from two postgrads, not an actual detailed workup. I don't feel like spending time going into any more effort based on that.
Saying it is equivalent to launch costs is hand waving. Their "median" scenario would involve Starship working at the lower bound of their operational goal for it.
Even then. If you're building a million satellites, they only need to be about 42 meters long for you to make them into a contiguous ring in LEO. Smaller (22.5m) or fewer (537,000) for the same in a 200 km orbit around Mars.
Do that, and you can quickly bootstrap an orbital ring and make rockets obsolete from surface to orbit of either body.
In the case of Mars, the planet-wide dust storms make
it a good idea to locate your PV off-planet, and an orbital ring is also very convenient for that.
Structually, it barely matters. The physics works even if each element isn't joined contiguously to the next, it's just that if you do make it contiguous you can also use it for power delivery and worry less about elements drifting out of alignment.
Because it's held up by being in orbit (strictly: a bit faster than that), you can by the same process as a maglev hang a stationary-with-respect-to-ground cable off it; and because the cable is only as long as your orbit is high (~200 km or whatever) rather than the 36,000 km you'd need for a full space elevator, we don't need to invent any supermaterials for it.
The viability of space DCs seem to depend entirely on the existence of higher latency, lower throughput, single card to single server workloads, which IMO isn't the primary class of workload today (and if one holds the belief that frontier models will maintain their dominant position, this will remain rack/row/facility level, which isn't viable for orbital facilities to handle as currently designed).
If that workload does expand in usage, and the economics of orbital DCs make sense (with high launch costs, zero ability to do maintenance, and weight penalties for shielding and radiators), then surely ocean based data centers (e.g. Panthalassa) make more sense (lower 'launch' costs, high but existant latency on maintenance, no weight penalties), and if those make sense then surely the distributed land based facilities (e.g. Rune Energy) or home based facilities (e.g. Span XFRA) make even more sense (easier maintenance, low/no permitting overhead because they're covered by existing permits, reasonable quality terrestrial fiber internet).
I don't think we need that many words. It's an obviously preposterously stupid idea that has been promoted only to defraud investors.
Correct.
And putting things in the ocean is only marginally less idiotic due primarily to sea water being corrosive, wet, and full of creatures that tend to want to grow all over anything.
Microsoft did attempt ocean racks in a sealed container , and it sounded like the 3 year test ended successfully but was not renewed.
I presume the cost of setup, teardown, lead-time, low power density when scaled up, and lack of convenient access for mid-life repairs made it not worth the trouble
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/
This premise always struck me as a solution in search of a problem, which when implemented introduces even more problems.
The only use case for datacenter in space is to have high communication speed with satellites that have low compute. Though that does beg the question of why not just add more compute to those satellites going forward.
From the article:
Conclusions
Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.
And all those conclusions take is cost to space to reduce 15 times; new cooling tech that isn't used anywhere to work at scale but only in space (if ground datacenters can use it too, their cost decrease); that ops cost line to not do anything useful so it can be just dropped; those 10mm radiation shields to not weight anything, because they didn't enter the costs; and that ground datacenters to use more expensive tech than they use today (just not improving is not enough).
We will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.
We can just repurpose Deep Space 9, the Cardassians aren’t using it and nobody really cares about Bajor.
This is complete bullshit.
Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.
How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.
We’re not exactly short of land.
And no, space is not cold.
All of this sounds a lot like how ULA, ESA thought reusable rockets were a pipe dream. These are engineering challenges, not physical laws that need to be broken.
The article makes several big assumptions that are questionable (experimental cooling can scale, permit issues on land will only become worse, etc). But more importantly, their analysis of the risks of placing a data center in orbit is completely off. They mention that it costs tens of millions to launch a missile to destroy a satellite, and it might be cheaper to simply replace it (based on launch costs). But one strike can hit many targets, those targets may contain hardware costing multiple times the value of their launch, and you will be out of compute while you scramble to launch a replacement. We can also assume that placing big fat valuable targets in space would have many actors wondering how to make it cheaper to destroy them.
For those reasons alone, and because compute will become more and more strategic for defense, I find it very hard to believe that data centers in space will represent even 5% of all compute in the next 10 years. I think a higher proportion will rather be underground or in bunkers than in space.
Defense compute can move to bunkers, but that is probably small percentage of overall need
Space is like the deep ocean, you never really know what's lurking in the shadows. A well placed pebble, a pellet of paint or a beam of microwaves could ruin a fragile satellite without being none the wiser.
If you want a safer datacenter you put it underground and you can safely assume that if it's hit by a bunker buster you have much much bigger problems.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a nuclear plant to power data centers than to launch the data centers into space? Nuclear is expensive, but rockets, orbital infrastructure, and giant cooling radiators aren't exactly budget options.
Aalo Atomic is working with datacenter maker Crusoe.
There isn’t really any other option than nuclear.
Solar & wind can’t power industry.
That’s just not true. For the same cost as a nuclear plant of some rated power, you can build far more solar, wind, and batteries.
The pro-nuclear propaganda is suspiciously associated with people with a history of also wanting to build nuclear weapons. The Liberal Party of Australia is an example — they seem very interested in overpriced nuclear power and obtaining nuclear powered subs capable of launching nuclear tipped missiles.
Cost comparison: https://chatgpt.com/share/6af8ce92-bd10-83ec-88be-1f61051091...
What happens to all the rare earth materials once the space DC have been decommissioned? Isn't it a horrible waste of the already hard to come-by resources to send it to a disposable trash heap in space, all in the name of forever chasing profits?
Remarkably few comments are engaging with the actual assumptions, arguments, and calculations in the article. Beware vibes, in both directions!
[delayed]
The real main purpose of putting data centers in space is not economic, and it’s not to guard against threats from major powers who could easily destroy them. It’s so that the ultra rich can have data centers that the rest of us cannot destroy. I make no argument about whether we should be thinking of doing so or not, but it is interesting to think of the implications is it not? And it certainly fits the personalities involved and their public statements.
Since when have the public destroyed data centers?
There's a lot of long shot assumptions here, but I feel the biggest is $250/kg launch costs (let alone $100 or $50).
The long shot assumptions are only really applied in one direction as well, never really in favour of earth DCs.
Even if data centres in space become cost-effective, what's the point? The only non-contrived answer that I can think of is to avoid NIMBYism, but pushback against data centres can't be that bad.
It's really hard to get electronic "space grade" there is a lot more radiation there.
Also I wonder how long the ODC needs to operate to offset the energy spend on getting it in orbit.
Isn’t “space grade” a result of high space launch costs? If it becomes cheap enough to launch hardware into space, it doesn’t need to last as long to meet ROI.
One cool possibility is superconductance with a number of materials.
The catches:
o Shielding from the sun's light and radiant heat.
o And efficiently radiating the system heat into space (since there is no air to convect or conduct the heat away).
Even if they aren't financially viable, I think they're attractive because companies want to keep certain kinds of data/processing on everyone/everything someplace where there's a lower chance of government regulation (gdpr/etc).
If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).
GDPR does not care about where your servers are located.
If we don’t put data centers in the North Pole or in Antarctica, I really doubt that we put data centers in space.
Bro the North Pole doesn’t have land FYI
neither does space
Only if launch costs fall to 10% of current costs.
IMO, they need to fall below the land cost for the same computing power somewhere in a desert.
Earth has massive amounts of mostly unused land that is comparatively close enough by speed of light in fibre.
vs Space:
* Can drive a truck out there
* No limit on weight or dimensions (within reason)
* No giant explodey thing transporting it to into where it needs to be
* No constant falling towards the earth that needs to be averted with thrusters
* If building in the middle of nowhere there is also lots of space for solar panels
* Heat can be rejected into the atmosphere/earth/nearby bodies of water etc instead of radiation into the vacuum of space
* De-comissioning it doesn't also involve slamming a DC worth of mass into the atmosphere and burning up otherwise recyclable materials.
* You don't look like a doofus for doing bad math.
Drive through Nevada outside of Vegas and you’ll see land everywhere. Yet, solar plants still build out slowly. It’s more than just land availability.
Solar wind and magnetic storm will fry the data center into space junk …
Underlying this seems to be the assumption that those pesky governments, pushed around by public opinion, will keep on blocking or delaying terrestrial data centres, but space-based ones will be fine.
The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.
I fail to see the economic case. You will need very large solar arrays and radiation hardened components, both of which make it uneconomical compared to a data center on Earth. This is another of Musk's genius ideas like the tunnels that were supposed to be carrying us under cities by now.
It's difficult to imagine any sort of compute in space given the state of the art rad hardened processor is about as fast as a computer Apple sold in 1998.
You don’t have to imagine. The starlink constellation is a working and profitable massive deployment of orbital compute. (It doesn’t use rad hardened hardware as far as I can tell)
Musk's "genius idea" there was to (pardon the pun) derail high speed rail and other similar investments so he could sell more cars.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
The problem is that experiments into this by Google have concluded that radiation hardening is unnecessary. HBM memory far surpassed their expectations for survival, exceeding 5 years in their simulated proton beam on earth. Localized shielding for consumer equipment is more than enough, especially combined with ECC.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode
> and becomes cheaper than any current terrestrial energy source at around $50/kg
Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.
Does gauging this based on Falcon 9 launch costs make sense now? SpaceX has already deployed two payloads of satellites using Starship. Falcon 9 is a deprecated system because SpaceX intends to use Starship for future payload missions.
We can't yet know the ultimate cost of Starship payloads. All we have is SpaceX projections of $10-100/kg. Maybe that is realized, maybe not. Given the scale of the LA launch site they're building, they intend to have the launch cadence to deliver lower launch costs than anything achieved with Falcon 9 or any other launch system ever created.
No we will not. The reason is simple: Space is not in the cloud, it is above. Anything that's not in the cloud is bad.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
> Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics
That cooling is already perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
It is absolutely a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics. It's a bet made by investors who don't know or care about the science, and are looking for a modal outcome of a failed company purchased by SpaceX or by an even dumber company looking to compete with SpaceX.
I recommend reading up on the results of Google’s project suncatcher. IMHO the results have provided a roadmap to space DCs with the only blocker being launch cost which are targeted to become economically viable in 2030s; sooner for spacex because they can lower their margins to zero or even negative for the launch itself.
The plan as I understand it is to pack it tightly with TPUs with liquid cooling out to radiators and flying a tight cluster of these next to each other using high bandwidth laser links. That lets you balance the amount of thermal radiation you need to emit vs the amount of TPUs in a single satellite. Thus it’s not a DC in a single satellite but more like a rack and then a bundle of racks flying beside each other.
I have a few qualms with this:
As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.
Do we need to? Do we want to? Who is "we" here?
I thought this was one of these joke websites that just say "No."
I mean, Elon will probably shoot some GPUs up there and call it a success, but I'm not sure that should count as "data centers in space."
I wouldn't put it past him to launch 20,000 of them before moving on to the next thing.
Or two. It's a broad range, but with his personality and prior history both are possible before he announces whatever the next pivot is.
Just, not a million. There's better things to do with the capacity to put a million up there, and better places to put a million (last I checked) 120 kW compute racks and associated PV systems.
The only place where a space data center makes sense is in Mars orbit to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be landed. Every thing else is a smoke and mirrors game to justify rolling a bunch of failed businesses into SpaceX.
What specifically do you disagree with from the article to say its Smoke and Mirrors? I think their analysis is reasonable and that it will reduce to a launch cost problem.
Giving it a quick look they're doing the same thing as everyone else and handwaving away really difficult engineering problems with some back of the envelope math that only looks at one or two aspects.
Like their section on collision avoidance isn't any more sophisticated than "Starlink has a great record so far" when we're talking about a very different scale of how much mass and surface area has to be moved around in a coordinated way.
This is in effect an editorial from two postgrads, not an actual detailed workup. I don't feel like spending time going into any more effort based on that.
Saying it is equivalent to launch costs is hand waving. Their "median" scenario would involve Starship working at the lower bound of their operational goal for it.
Even then. If you're building a million satellites, they only need to be about 42 meters long for you to make them into a contiguous ring in LEO. Smaller (22.5m) or fewer (537,000) for the same in a 200 km orbit around Mars.
Do that, and you can quickly bootstrap an orbital ring and make rockets obsolete from surface to orbit of either body.
In the case of Mars, the planet-wide dust storms make it a good idea to locate your PV off-planet, and an orbital ring is also very convenient for that.
What would you like to make this orbital ring out of?
Structually, it barely matters. The physics works even if each element isn't joined contiguously to the next, it's just that if you do make it contiguous you can also use it for power delivery and worry less about elements drifting out of alignment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
Pangolin scales?
Goodness no, all subspecies are listed on Wikipedia as having various kinds of "Threatened" conservation statuses.
Maybe I missed something obvious, but how does an orbital ring make rockets obsolete for surface to orbit trips?
Because it's held up by being in orbit (strictly: a bit faster than that), you can by the same process as a maglev hang a stationary-with-respect-to-ground cable off it; and because the cable is only as long as your orbit is high (~200 km or whatever) rather than the 36,000 km you'd need for a full space elevator, we don't need to invent any supermaterials for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
"Failed businesses" is some insane cope.
The impulse to discredit someone's "art" because of their politics has always stuck me as incredibly juvenile.
It's as if people can't imagine competence - even in some narrow way - in someone who doesn't share all their exact beliefs.
It seems especially silly because literally every great man and woman of history shares only a tiny fraction of our modern beliefs.
Definitely need to see a Microsoft data centre in Uranus.
Sorry. Not sorry.
No.
We kinda already have IMO.
Starcloud-1 is already in orbit, and many other plans by them and other firms are already well into development.
And Lonestar has a backup server on the moon. Seriously.