WASHINGTON: Seventy-five years ago, the idea of harnessing the power of the skies was little more than fantasy spun by futurists like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Elon Musk's mega-merger of his companies xAI and SpaceX this week brings this sci-fi dream a step closer.
NASA engineers and technologists have speculated for nearly two decades about moving energy-hungry computing off the planet. More recently, the idea has captured the attention of Big Tech including Alphabet and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. The physics made sense, the solar energy was abundant. Still, the challenges seemed insurmountable.
Musk, though, known for betting on seemingly far-out theories and getting them to work, may finally be laying the groundwork to make data centres in space a reality. He is armed with the world's busiest satellite launch fleet, an AI startup, and an appetite for infrastructure that stretches from Earth to vacuum.
"In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale," Musk said on Monday. "To harness even a millionth of our Sun's energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilisation currently uses! The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space." The merger sharpens investor focus on how he might overcome big hurdles through a tightly woven ecosystem of rockets, satellites and AI systems, to take AI infrastructure beyond Earth. It comes just as SpaceX is preparing for a potential $1.5 trillion IPO. SpaceX has sought permission to launch up to 1 million solar-powered satellites engineered as orbital data centres, far beyond anything currently deployed or proposed. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX describes a solar-powered, optical-link-driven "orbital data-centre system," though it did not say how many Starship launches would be required to scale the space data-centre network to an operational degree.
"Compute in space isn’t sci-fi anymore," said David Ariosto, author and founder of space intelligence firm The Space Agency. "And Elon Musk has already proven himself capable across multiple domains."
Advocates argue space-based data centres would be a cheaper alternative to data centres on Earth, thanks to constant solar energy and the ability to dump heat directly into space. But some experts have warned that big commercial gains are years from reality as the concept faces daunting challenges and is fraught with technical risks: radiation, debris, heat management, latency, and formidable economics that include high maintenance costs.
"There's some real challenges here, and how do you then make that cost-effective?" said Armand Musey, founder of Summit Ridge Group, who said the financial details of a project such as this was hard to model because the "technical unknowns haven’t been clarified."
"But never say never," said Musey, who called Musk's track record "unbelievable." "I think a large part of it is, it’s a bet on Elon. His success is really hard for people to ignore."
Even with Musk's ambitions, data centres in space may not be achievable for another decade, some experts have said.
The underlying physics behind space-based infrastructure is not new. Harnessing solar power in orbit dates back to Cold War-era research, when the US Department of Energy and NASA studied space-based solar power concepts in the 1970s, ultimately concluding that launch and materials costs made them impractical.
What makes Musk's efforts different is that his companies have more direct control over key elements of the system - from the rockets that will carry the hardware, to the links to beam data back to Earth, to a Musk-owned social network to generate demand for cheap AI computing.
"SpaceX has structural advantages that few others can match. It controls the world's most active launch fleet, has demonstrated mass production of spacecraft through Starlink, and has access to substantial private capital," said Kathleen Curlee, a research analyst at Georgetown University.
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