Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

"Companies are wasting money by pouring funds into the orbital data center 'bubble' because the economics do not work. This is due to the prohibitive costs of launching hardware and the immense technical challenges of cooling these orbital datacenters in the vacuum that is space."

"Orbital datacenters must be able to survive extraordinary swings in temperature, from 100 degrees kelvin to 400 degrees kelvin and that doing so will require specialized components (like solar panels) that cost roughly 1,000 times more than their terrestrial counterparts."

"Maintaining such complex infrastructure would require a fundamental shift from sending astronauts into space to sending engineers to perform necessary maintenance, a capability that does not currently exist."

Gartner analyst Bill Ray argues that orbital datacenters represent a wasteful investment bubble that cannot economically serve terrestrial computing demands. The fundamental obstacles include extreme costs of launching hardware, specialized components that cost 1,000 times more than Earth-based equivalents, and severe technical challenges in managing temperature swings from 100 to 400 degrees Kelvin in space's vacuum. Maintaining such infrastructure would require engineers in space, a capability that doesn't currently exist. Additionally, laser-based data transmission from orbit to Earth faces disruption from atmospheric clouds, creating inconsistent transfer speeds. Ray suggests orbital datacenters may eventually serve only space-based applications, such as processing satellite imagery.

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