this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it's a multi-decade operation and doesn't look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody's excited to talk about.
It's going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you'll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
Actually i was more thinking of crude metallurgy and materials processing. You could quite easily get aluminium from lunar regolith, and also tons of silicates. This allows you to produce shielding, radiators and the structural elements of solar panels without having to kaboom-boom the tons of raw material from the Earth. And it's not particularly high-tech stuff either, just some furnaces and basic extruding would go a long way. If you just have to ship the delicate electronics from Earth you're already saving a lot.