It will take significant tech development and massive capital spending to make orbital data centers a reality, but as Sean noted, with “opposition happening around the country to data centers in general,” executives like Musk and Jeff Bezos may be thinking, “The engineering challenge may be less than the social challenge back here” on Earth.

Sean: This has been a trend — I would say a rapidly forming trend — over the last half year to a year, and we have different examples of it. We have SpaceX; I feel like in some ways, Elon Musk was late on this trend. And for the moment, let’s set aside the actual mechanics and the viability of data centers in space. We could talk about that in a second if we want, but —

Kirsten: We have a really good story we’ll link to in the show notes, by the way. One of our most recent hires, Tim Fernholz, is amazing. He writes all about the physics and the constraints of that.

Sean: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting engineering challenge. It’s a really interesting physics challenge. It’s a really interesting orbital mechanics challenge. But it’s something that clearly a bunch of companies and people are going to try and chase. [There’s] going to be SpaceX doing it, with a kind of variance of what they’re already working on with their Starlink network.