[jccooper]

The idea here is that the economics of launch are changing with Starship such that the "incredible cost" and "overspeccing" of space will become much less relevant. There's a world where, because the cost per kg is so low, a data center satellite's compute payload is just the same hardware you'd put in a terrestrial rack, and the satellite bus itself is mass-produced to not-particularly-challenging specs. And they don't have to last 30 years, just 4-ish, when the computer is ready for retirement anyway.

Will that come to be? I'm skeptical, especially within the next several years. Starship would have to perform perfectly, and a lot of other assumptions hold, to make this make sense. But that's the idea.

[willis936]

My point is even if it were free to put things in space and radiation did not need mitigation, you're still paying a lot to have hardware that can't be maintained. If it were cheaper we wouldn't be doing online maintenance on Earth. Name a single datacenter on the rocky surface of the Earth that is opting to not have maintenance.