This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.

The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he shoots from the hip.

Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.

It's research to collect data, and it's not your money, what do you care?

Because it takes so much attention away from projects that would be worthwhile.

For instance? Which projects would benefit from more public attention?

Solving climate change by mostly eliminating fossil fuel use, antibiotic resistant bacteria with new antibiotics, eliminating risks of pandemics generated from meat agriculture, creating novel antimycotics, curing various cancers, and reversing shrinking peace, freedom, privacy, and middle classes around the world to name a few.

> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.

Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.

> Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it

Ha, peak HN. Everyone else is idiot.

The idea was from Google in a November 2025 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19468). Musk started talking about this only later in December 2025.