A new space race is underway. But this one is not so much between nations as it is between tech companies.
The quest? Be the first to launch data centers into space.
The stakes? According to some astronomers, the night sky itself.
Why We Wrote This
While space-based data centers promise to alleviate Earth’s energy crisis, the next frontier of innovation hinges on designing orbital infrastructure that is sustainable and avoids creating a “dumping ground” in orbit.
This month, Elon Musk announced that his space-faring company, SpaceX, had merged with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, in an effort to launch 1 million satellites that could work together to form extraterrestrial data centers. Google’s Project Suncatcher proposed creating data centers in space by using lasers to transmit data between satellites in near proximity to one another. And late last year, a competitor named Starcloud launched a refrigerator-sized satellite into space – the first step toward its own orbiting data center.
None of this will be technologically easy. But tech companies claim that data centers in space could become more cost-efficient than the massive warehouses of computer servers devouring land, water, and electricity on Earth.
“Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment,” Mr. Musk said in a statement after announcing his merger. “By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space!”
However, some astronomers and economists are concerned that what might be beneficial to one environment might be harmful to another. There are already about 14,000 satellites in space. Sometimes, they collide. They also spawn space junk – everything from spent rocket boosters to loose bolts. On Jan. 30, for instance, one of Russia’s old spy satellites disintegrated into bits and pieces.
Putting sizable data centers into orbit could compound those challenges. In recent decades, there’s been a growing awareness that mankind could be repeating the mistake it made with the oceans, viewing space as an inexhaustible resource where we can dump things. Out of sight, out of mind. This has prompted scientists, economists, and politicians to focus on solutions that facilitate technological progress yet also reduce pollution of the orbital commons.
“Increasingly, people in this realm … are beginning to recognize that space is an environment, much as the Earth is an environment,” says Akhil Rao, a former NASA economist.
Still, in 2024, data centers in the United States accounted for 4.4% of the nation’s electricity consumption. A study last year from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute found that large data centers can consume 5 million gallons of water a day.
The trade-off on the other side of the environmental ledger is often less obvious. In 1978, astrophysicist Don Kessler co-wrote an influential paper about the potential consequences of an accumulation of satellites around the planet. Even without data centers in orbit, it’s getting cluttered up there.
Astronomers are particularly concerned about “the Kessler Effect.” That’s when orbital collisions create space junk, which begets even more collisions and even more debris. In 2009, for instance, a communications satellite slammed into a disused Russian military spacecraft. Each object was reduced to clouds of shrapnel that continued traveling around the planet. It takes about 11 years for gravity to bring smaller objects in lower orbits down to Earth.
There are currently 25,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who recently retired from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And that’s just the stuff we can see. Smaller objects, such as frozen globules of propellant expelled by satellites, whiz through orbit faster than bullets, becoming hazards for astronauts during spacewalks. In December, a spacecraft docked at China’s space station was rendered temporarily inoperable because of a damaged window after a suspected space-debris strike.
Unless there’s a cleanup, space might eventually become too hazardous to safely traverse. Time to call in the space garbage trucks.
A British and Japanese company called Astroscale is set to launch a debris-removal vehicle this year. It will shepherd disused satellites and rocket boosters into a lower orbit so that they’ll burn up reentering the atmosphere. Other cleanup technologies are being tested. In 2018, a European RemoveDebris satellite successfully captured an object in space with a polyethylene net. A Swiss company named ClearSpace is developing a vehicle with claw-like robot arms to latch onto satellites that need to be scrapped.
“China, which hasn’t in the past had such a great record on space debris, is actually the first country to have done a real debris-
removal action,” says Dr. McDowell. “In this case, in geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometers up, where they sent a tug up to a dead navigation satellite of theirs and towed it to a higher – what’s called a graveyard – orbit and released it there.”
There’s a common interest in solving the tragedy of the space commons, says Dr. McDowell. An organization named the
Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee provides recommendations about best practices. But these aren’t binding. In violation of the guidelines, Russia conducted a military test to blow up one of its satellites five years ago.
Many commercial companies, such as Starlink, have followed good disposal practices, says Dr. Rao, the former NASA economist. And they have an incentive to do so. If companies leave dead satellites in space, then they are creating risks for their own active satellites.
Still, compliance can be tricky. Satellites become less responsive to commands over time. By the time that satellites pass their expiration date, they’re no longer able to de-orbit.
Economists have been proposing incentive-based solutions. For example, regulatory agencies in various nations could charge companies a tax for as long as their satellite is in space. Agencies could issue a bond whenever a satellite is launched. The bond is only redeemable upon de-orbit. Money raised by the bond could be put toward space cleanup activities.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Among those clamoring for change are astronomers. Satellites create light pollution in the night sky, says John Barentine, former director of public policy for the International Dark Sky Association in Tucson, Arizona.
The man-made celestial objects, whose solar-paneled wings make them look like metallic dragonflies, reflect sunlight back down to the ground. They show up in astronomical images. Astronomers on the lookout for dangerous asteroids – such as the one that crashed in Russia in 2013 with a shock wave that injured 1,500 people and damaged buildings – say that the glint of satellites at dawn and dusk also makes it harder to spot things behind them. Data center satellites would be even bigger and brighter than regular ones.
“Thousands of bright satellites would actually degrade our ability to detect some of the threatening [near Earth objects],” explains Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, via email.
Today, the average person isn’t thinking a whole lot about space debris. That broader shift in thought will come, Dr. Barentine says, once the public understands how it affects them. That’s what motivated him to co-found the Center for Space Environmentalism last year. His goal is to bring extraterrestrial issues to public attention. That often starts with telescopes in backyards.
“Cultivating a closer relationship between humans and the cosmos through the medium of the night sky could be a way to increase appreciation for the space environment and its inextricable connection to our own environment,” Dr. Barentine says.
