We’re Already Building Data Centers In Space

There’s not a lot of literature out there around this, but some of our most forward-thinking scientists and engineers have their sights on re-imagining the solar system – at least, large parts of it.

If you think that the Dyson swarm is some kind of new-fangled vacuum cleaner, you’re going to have to do some heavy reading to catch up. Basically, the idea is that we can source energy in space, using large numbers of satellites that basically “swarm” together. But the dream doesn’t end there, and some of the thinking around the ultimate result has the real estate of the local star’s territory looking a little different.

I’ll explain.

On a new podcast that I host with my colleague Alex Wissner-Gross, we interviewed none other than Philip Johnston of Starcloud, a company that already has some incredible design under its belt. Johnston and his company are famous for developing orbital data centers, plugging Nvidia chips into satellites, and training the first AI in space. And Johnston had some quite advanced ideas about what’s possible with these systems, although Alex ended up really pushing the envelope himself in several ways.

Toward the beginning, Johnston explained a little bit about the current process and what the company’s goals are now that they’re flush with investor money. Starcloud, he said, has filed with the FCC for a design involving 88,000 satellites for a yield of around 20 gigawatts.

Playing Around in Space

From there, we quickly got to some of the grand designs that my co-host envisions for the coming age, starting with the idea of Dyson swarms generating a sun-synchronous orbit halo that we could see from Earth at dawn or dusk. He also suggested that we could print messages in the sky.

“That’s not in the (FCC) application,” Johnston said with what I would characterize as a wry chuckle.

There’s another part of this back and forth, almost right out of the gate, where Alex asks:

Later, Johnston brought up a partial approach.