Alphabet holds approximately 551 million shares of SpaceX (trading under the ticker SPCX), valued at roughly $94.1 billion, which represents about a 4% to 6% stake in the company.

Does anyone understand the math behind this bit?

> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth....

How are they solving the heat dissipation issues?

Whenever I hear about this I can't help but be reminded of the Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer, where a hugely-expensive commercial project was actually part of a secret CIA initiative to recover a Soviet submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

I'm not sure that's truly the case here, but it does seem like the tech Project Suncatcher is working on has at least some overlap with requirements for military SIGINT and in-orbit imagery processing.

If data centers in space end up being economically viable, then I don't see how anyone can catch SpaceX. They are ten years ahead in both launch capability and satellite manufacturing.

I didn't have time to watch the videos, but in the text I didn't see anything that addresses data center operations requiring manual intervention.

Swapping out obsolete or failing TPUs. Rewiring or replacing connections. "Listening" for sounds indicating an equipment failure.

What are the proposals to address these needs?

And just like that Elon Musk shifted the overton window away from "unthinkable" on yet another topic.

> Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure

It’s very confusing to have a project related to space called a moonshot project.

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lowkey insane that it will end up cheaper to shoot your datacenter into space than get it past the county board permitting process.