Sam Altman, responding to the allegations made against him by Mask, said, "You are the one who sells short-term space data centres to investors in the public market." He noted that many experts believed that space data centres would not become a serious commercial model in the short term.
Potential of space data centres
SpaceX plans to launch a series of orbital data centres to carry out the AI reasoning mission, a major driver of the company ' s $2 trillion valuation. However, many industry experts, including entrepreneurs of other space data centre start-ups, Google ' s orbital computing project team and engineers conducting related calculations, have indicated that significant progress in this area will be possible only if the cost of rockets is significantly reduced and high-power satellites can be produced on a large scale.
Mask's response and challenge
Mask may respond that SpaceX's new rocket Starship is expected to fly its thirteenth test flight on 16 July. A commercial case for a data centre could be established if the team in Musker were to allow the rocket to be repeated. However, even if the two stages of successful recovery of the rocket were to take years of real reusable flight, the launch of space data centres could be delayed by SpaceX ' s commitment to NASA and its Starlink network.
Future outlook
SpaceX also acknowledged in its IPO road show that Starship may not be fully reusable in the short term and may need to abandon phase II in each launch, which would have an impact on the economic space data centre. So, Mask's response — “We start flying next year” — seems pale. There is no doubt that SpaceX could launch a high-speed data-processing satellite next year, but the real question is when these satellites can be launched and manufactured on a large scale, which may wait until the 1930s.