We've run a dozen missions in LEO aboard the ISS. Any steps to remove the friction to launch and increase the cadence is a good thing. Spending a few weeks in LEO missions like this typically land in the Australian outback
We do education outreach to K-16 learning institutions around the world. There are many things that can be studied in the near absence of gravity. Fluids are a huge area of research (surface tension, sedimentation, etc). We germinate seeds and look for genetic changes, people study brain organoids, artificial retinas, crystals, et al
Space datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.
FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.
The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That’s not as cheap as it could have been if they didn’t start out acting like scaled-up shady local real estate developers trying to build condos on protected wetlands, but it will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.
> SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy.
Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.
Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions. The oil and gas industries are notoriously uncaring about the people near their operations, but they recognized what needed to be done to smoothly operate in Alaska, and they just did it. There’s a lot of fantastic reasons to dislike the oil and gas industries, but that’l is what mature big business looks like.
Psychotic? Likely. Arrogant? Unquestionably. Maniacal? Utterly. Cunning? Indeed. Delusional? Arguably. But, I wouldn’t call them idiotic, per se.
It’s also very much about GPU-focused data centers. They’ve been installing essentially illegal (with shaky loopholes) gas-powered turbines on site with no emissions control to speak of, in populated areas. They’ve made local governments sign NDAs, under false promises of huge economic development and job creation, preventing them from telling residents that the big real estate project in town was a giant data center. Cartoonish.
Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
It depends on the company building the data center and the competence of the government approving the plan. https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/rural-louisiana-roa...
I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.
I don't think the entire nation would ban data centers. The problem is that tech companies are building them on cheap land. Which usually means land that has little water and is better used for food or oxygen or things other than a massive one-story building.
Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.
Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.
The problem is data centers produce absolutely colossal amounts of noise that can be heard and felt for miles. Even if water is a non-issue, the noise isn’t.
People are complaining because they are building data centers near people, and data centers produce prodigious amounts of noise pollution. They should be building them far away from civilization, where the low frequency noise has plenty of distance to attenuate.
It’s still cheaper to build in a completely undeveloped desert with no neighbors and costly utility hookups than space. By orders of magnitude. That gap will never be materially close.
Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.
As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.
If Starship launches end up in the $20 million range they would be easily economical. Running cable isn't free.
Nah, they'll just bite the bullet and build the data centers in remote Canada or Finland or somewhere else no one's complaining (ignore Greta as per usual) and tap into the local hydropower resources. Might take a tad longer and cost slightly more money than in [quasi-lawless US state], but other than that, no problem. Aluminium smelters (basically a solid form of electricity export) in Quebec and Siberia have been doing that for decades already (like 20GW private-ish hydropower).
Wish they'd find a good spot in no man's land and do geothermal.
If cities are banning datacenters, we can
a. put them a few miles outside urban centers
b. put them in space
Which is a cheaper, better option?
You aren’t necessarily wrong but thats a dumb reason for space data centers to be good ideas.
You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.
I don't really understand this perspective. The margins for data centers are such that they could pay massive subsidies to state and local governments and put them in the middle of nowhere with BTM power, and almost all that opposition would evaporate overnight. And you'd still come out way ahead of space-based DCs. They're not doing this yet because they don't have to.
Is it dumb and impractical when NIMBYs and folks directly opposed to your political agenda want to prevent any and all terrestrial datacenter development?
Yes, it is still easier to find somewhere else on earth.
What’s wrong with not wanting a datacenter in your backyard?
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So there are a few breakthrough therapeutics that rely on samples crystallized in microgravity. One of them is Keytruda or Pembrolizumab, a PD-1 inihibitor used as a neo-adjuvant in cancer therapy.
Historically, there was an issue with dosing pembrolizumab, as the manufacturing process was creating large uneven crystals that required physicians to process at the clinic to ensure proper dosing, but in microgravity? The crystallization is just gorgeous. absolutely beautiful
Take a look at this image, https://issnationallab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/merck_...
Left hand side are the crystals grown on the ground. Right hand side is 0g.
That change made it possible to turn it into a safe injectable that patients could take at home. And they were able to recreate those conditions on Earth, https://issnationallab.org/iss360/merck-lab-publishes-pembro...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6889310/
This is more of a scientist said at a conference to another scientist kind of story, but apparently, they got some seed crystals from the ISS that are now used on Earth.
https://techconnectworld.com/World2025/a.php?i=602
You can do a lot more than make just seed crystals. It turns out that cells in our body are inside of a 3D environment with forces / tension acting in all directions. When you smoosh these in a lab (very literally) and try to observe how a drug behaves in a model cell / model organ, then it doesn't have the same physical constraints acting on it. BUT in 0g that's different. In 0g, cells behave slightly more similarly to how they behave in vivo and that could be a huge difference maker for drug discovery.
One breakthrough drug alone is worth more to humanity than what the ISS has cost across its lifespan.
https://iafastro.directory/iac/paper/id/89939/abstract-pdf/I...
Quite a bit of money have been raised on the premise that certain things can be easier to make in space than on earth due to gravity, which creates sedimentation
Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results
Here is something that I never imagined there was a use case for. Anyone has any idea of the commercial needs for such a device?
The primary one I've been sold on is types of crystal growth is just better up there. But due to the excess expense, the only thing that fits the bill is experimental edge case pharmaceuticals that have massive price tags that insurance mostly covers.
If the automation improves far beyond what we currently have available, maybe this means microchip manufacturing in the future, but we aren't at all there yet from the fab side of the equation.
Material science and manufacturing are two that have always seemed interesting to me, particularly monocrystalline stuff like semiconductors, optics, and metallurgy.
Varda uses the low gravity environment of space to create medicines that work better than when they're made on Earth.
Don't think Varda (or anyone else) has ever sold any space produced drug? It's all very much experimental small scale. Realistically, something has to be super potent and super expensive to even consider it (that rules out anything mainstream).
Not that anything is really produced in space either, more like passively transformed into some crystal form from a liquid state or whatever. Environmental assistance more than anything else.
There's a lot of fundamental science to be done in space; some forms of crystal are much easier to grow, chemical reactions and biological interactions etc. etc. For reference, it wasn't long ago NASA was trying to figure out if spiders could form webs in space.
Spoiler alert: they can.
"When gravity is involved, the golden orb spiders will happily build their asymmetrical webs, and sit facing downwards waiting for prey. In space, their webs were more symmetrical, however when there was light, the spiders used it as a reference point and built their webs as if the light was the opposite to 'downwards'."
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-happens-to-spiders-... (with video)
This is an old idea, dating back to at least the 1940s. Many experiments have already been done in microgravity environments.
In the 1960s, they used sounding rockets to do experiments on how molten metals solidify in microgravity, with manufacturing applications in mind.
In the 1970s, they ran experiments, also on sounding rockets, on melting and solidifying materials without letting them touch a container: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19840059952
More recently, many microgravity experiments have been performed on the International Space Station. Experiments were done on protein crystal growth aboard the ISS in 2000, just a couple of years after it was launched. (I think it took some time to get the experimental facilities up and running.)
Here’s an assortment of links on the subject, starting with a good overview:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/applications-within-re...
https://issnationallab.org/research-and-science/space-resear...
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/the-benefits-of-microg...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001550
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150023126
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/manufacturingscience/...
I wonder where this leaves Varda? Tough to win when your ride is also your competitor.
Yah I’m also interested in the implications here. Varda is an awesome company and I would have hoped they saw a great exit for such great engineering.
was thinking the same thing. they have raised a lot of $ also
Just reading the headline I was expecting this to be some sort of health subscription
It did mention medications. Perhaps pharmaceutical companies will charge 20% more for medications that are produced in space vs those produced on Earth?
It sounds like a super villain weapon.
If you manufacture there how do you recover it?
The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.
So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.
Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):
https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...
Do they offer same day delivery ?
> If you manufacture there how do you recover it?
The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.
Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.
You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.
They have thrusters and do controlled re-entry, at a location of their choosing.
The uppermost parts of the atmosphere are very dynamic, with changes in solar activity causing them to contract and expand on a scale of hours. And this is very significant for the amount of drag felt by re-entering objects. Because of this, if you slowly deorbit something naturally through drag, you are not going to be able to pick the destination, or even know where it ends up until very close to it falling down. So instead you intentionally lower the perigee so that it deorbits in a controlled manner.
Didn't know that, shouldn't have assumed. Wish I could fix my third sentence...
Thanks for the correction!
Doesn't sound dangerous at all.
Dropping stuff from space is inherently dangerous. Huge amounts of effort go into making it safe.
You realize they know how to land these things right? Are you aware?
This is amazing. Especially for biotech. A robot can do biotech in microgravity.
It would be nice if SpaceX published GNSS pseudodistance/carrier phase from all Starlink satellites. It would give excellent realtime tomographic information about the ionosphere...
Here's the thing I might not love Elon or everything he does and there are plenty of things to disagree with him about and I won't comment on him as a person
But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.
Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.
Elon turning the concept of space into the vanity project of a mentally unstable man child kinda sucks though. Makes it hard to give a shit knowing he is personally profitting from it.
Not just profiting from it, but then reinvesting that money into subverting democracy
*attempting to subvert democracy. But he may yet succeed.
I dunno, based on yesterday, the ROI on that seems to be kind of shit.
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There's that one photo with a dummy driver in a red tesla and in the background you can see the earth. I think it's one of the best photos ever, part of it is the absurdity of the fact that it exists at all.
He denied it, but it was absolutely a reference to the opening sequence to the cult classic Heavy Metal.
Yes, he turned space from an obscure realm of nerds into a cringe man-baby grifter domain.
We just need someone who can pass the purity test and then we can all celebrate these things. Until then we're not allowed to feel happy about it.
Seig heils do fail my purity test. I think the bar is reasonable and he has spectacularly failed to clear it.
Purity tests, the guy has indirectly killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids through the cancellation of US AID and you're calling this a "purity test", maybe go fuck yourself ?
Where have millions of children died because of lack of USAID funds?
Isn't it exhausting being like this?
It is exhausting to fight for what’s right but god bless the people who try.
Well that's not very kind.
You can hate this man but he is doing things others don't even dream about. He almost makes them look easy.
Looks cool and if they could make chips in space, it will be beyond crazy. It will be over time and way over budget but in the end will be insanely profitable.
He essentially put a price on this, and now you can just factor this into manufacturing and if something can be made there and numbers make sense, it will be made there.
worlds most expensive colocation rack
Why is it called microgravity and not freefall? Cus afaik you are experiencing almost the same force of gravity as you would on the surface, you are just constantly falling.
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Space is 12% of their overall revenue for Q3 2026 down from 20% in 2025 due to AI outpacing connectivity and space (connectivity is also more valuable than space). Investing in SpaceX is investing in an AI and ISP company that has a slightly profitable space R&D lab.
Bullish*
lol, you obviously don't have kids if you think that's the kind of stuff they ask you.
Maybe their kids are gifted.
Or perfect little rhetorical devices
Any idea what the price difference will be? (e.g. 20% less, 50%, 90%?)
I read that SpaceX's engines deliver a bit more thrust at a bit less mass than NASA engines. But the kicker was SpaceX's were 1/200th the cost. From the cost angle it's very interesting observing space activities going from mostly public to mostly private.
Howdy Ted! It has been a while! Hope you're doing well! Glad that you're still at it. SSGL misses you! <3