An Orbital Data Center of a Million Satellites is Not Practical!
Recent filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on January 30, 2026 (here), imply that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has proposed a massive “orbital data center” constellation of up to one million satellites in low Earth orbits (as reported here).
Putting aside the devastating light pollution from this constellation to astronomical observatories worldwide (as discussed here), the physics behind this initiative makes little sense.
Refrigeration in space is more challenging than on Earth because standard systems rely on gravity to manage liquids and gases. With much lower gravity, the oil used to lubricate traditional compressors can clog the system, and heat cannot rise away from components through natural convection (as discussed here and here).
Given the solar flux of about a kilowatt per square meter, the envisioned total system power of 100 gigawatts requires an effective area of 100 million square meters in solar panels, altogether making a construction that measures ten kilometers on a side. Splitting the collecting area between a million components still requires that each component will have a solar array that is ten meters in length. A linear alignment of just ten components stretches across roughly the full height of the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket (98 meters).
A million satellites in low Earth orbits pose a serious risk for collisions, where the debris would catastrophically trigger a cascade chain reaction of collisions with fragments through the so-called Kessler Effect (as discussed here). The burning debris would have bad consequences for the Earth’s atmosphere and ground.
The timeline for the construction of this constellation will likely be lengthened by the current challenges facing Starship. Building a suitable factory on the Moon will probably take many decades. The use of an electromagnetic catapult to launch the satellites is an unproven technology. The entire project sounds more like a speculative science fantasy than a believable technological project.
But speaking about science fantasy, the imagined constellation represents a miniature version of a Dyson Sphere, a concept envisioned in a 1960 paper here by the physicist Freeman Dyson who suggested that advanced technological civilizations might wish to harness a larger fraction of the energy output of their host star than their parent planet intercepts.
In 2023, I published a paper here which suggested that as the host star brightens up during its natural evolution, it might separate Dyson sphere components apart and launch them to interstellar space. There, the pieces of a broken Dyson Sphere may appear as thin interstellar objects which are pushed around by radiation pressure, similarly to the behavior of the first recognized interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua (as described here). If Elon Musk will get his way through the FCC, then billions of years from now — the brightening Sun (as calculated here) might push such space relics out of the Solar System where extraterrestrial astronomers might find them with their telescopes.
Elon Musk is probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky-Way over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the Big Bang.
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Space exploration remains an inspiring reality. Through the 38 gigabytes per day of data streaming from Artemis II through laser communication, we are able to see amazing high-resolution photographs of the Moon, Earth and sunset from the far side of the Moon. The surface of the Moon was smooth since it started as molten rock, but now it is scarred with numerous craters from asteroid impacts. May humanity live-long and prosper in space!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005–2026), and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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