Sam Altman’s talk about the space data center is what most experts already believe

Sam Altman and Elon Musk exchanged scathing posts on social media over the weekend, drawing new attention to the gap between vision and reality for the space computing business.

Reply to Misk accusing him Being a crook, Altman He said“, “Homeboy, you’re the one selling (sic) public market investors on short-term space data centers.”

Aside from the “home,” Altman says what many experts have concluded, but public market investors seem to ignore: space data centers aren’t going to become a serious business anytime soon.

SpaceX’s plans to launch a fleet of orbiting data centers to perform AI inference tasks are the perfect solution Main driver Behind the company’s valuation of $2 trillion. The possibility of using this processing power to power SpaceXAI models or serve as a new orbital cloud is unprecedented in the AI ​​boom, optimistic analysts say.

But when you talk to experts on the subject – be it so Entrepreneurs behind Other startups in space data centers, Team at Google Develop an orbital computing project for that company, or their engineers I did the numbers For fun – you’ll find the same answer: This won’t make much of an impact until we have much cheaper rockets and the ability to produce high-powered satellites at low cost, en masse.

Musk’s answer to this question is easy to predict: Starship, SpaceX’s massive new rocket, is expected to make its 13th test flight on July 16. If Musk’s team can get that vehicle to the point where it flies over and over again, the data center business case could be over.

But even if the company succeeds in recovering both stages of the rocket on this test flight, a reusable operational flight will likely take years, and space data center launches will likely take a back seat to SpaceX’s commitments to NASA and building its Starlink network.

SpaceX also admitted during its IPO that Starship May not be completely reusable In the near term, it would need to carry out every second phase during every launch, which would put the kibosh on economic space data centers.

That’s why musk Reply– “We’ll start flying them next year” – he gets a little static. There’s no doubt that SpaceX could launch a satellite equipped for high-speed data processing next year, but the big question is when it will be able to launch and manufacture it at scale. This is probably a question for the 2030s.