November 4, 2025
Orbiting outrage
Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design
Google’s space AI plan sparks flame war: cooling vs Musk promises
TLDR: Google proposed solar-powered AI satellites in orbit, boasting a lab laser link and endless sunshine. The comments erupted: skeptics want answers on heat and control, Musk fans say it’s inevitable by 2035, and many ask why not just build giant solar data centers on Earth instead.
Google floated a moonshot called Project Suncatcher: solar-powered satellite swarms carrying AI chips (think Google’s TPUs) linked by lasers, soaking up near-constant sunlight to fuel mega-compute in orbit. Their lab demo beamed 800 Gbps each way—cool on paper, but the comments? Absolute inferno. The top reaction: “Now do cooling.” Users pointed out the International Space Station devotes huge hardware just to heat management, and it doesn’t even run a GPU farm. Skeptics called the omission of cooling from the “key challenges” list non-serious, while others muttered “AI bubble” vibes and asked why not build massive solar data centers on Earth instead.
On Team Optimist, one commenter dropped Elon Musk tweets proclaiming space data centers by 2035, sparking cheers of inevitability. Meanwhile, space vets warned: keeping satellites flying kilometers apart to hit tens of terabits per second is a “good luck with that” problem, with formation control headaches and radiation lurking. The meme-fest was real: “Datacenters IN SPACE!!!1!!” vs “Out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” The vibe? A classic internet showdown—rocket hype meets thermal reality, with Google playing the moonshot card and commenters playing referee. Buckle up; this debate has escape velocity.
Key Points
- •Google unveiled Project Suncatcher to explore space-based, scalable AI infrastructure using solar-powered satellite constellations.
- •A preprint details challenges and design elements, focusing on high-bandwidth inter-satellite links, orbital dynamics, and radiation effects.
- •The system targets dawn–dusk sun-synchronous LEO to maximize solar energy and reduce battery requirements.
- •Inter-satellite links aim for tens of Tbps using multi-channel DWDM and spatial multiplexing, enabled by close-formation flying.
- •A bench-scale demonstrator achieved 800 Gbps each way (1.6 Tbps total) with a single transceiver pair, validating high-throughput optical communication.