Sam Altman and Elon Musk traded barbed social media posts over the weekend, with Altman accusing Musk of "selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters." Altman's comments reflect what many experts believe: space data centers are not going to be a serious business anytime soon. SpaceX's plans to launch orbital data centers for AI inference are a key driver behind the company's $2 trillion valuation, but subject-matter experts from startups, Google's orbital compute project, and engineers all agree this won't make a big dent until rockets are much cheaper and high-powered satellites can be produced at low cost en masse. Musk's response that "we start flying them next year" falls flat because while SpaceX could launch a single satellite equipped for data processing, the key question is when they can launch and manufacture them at scale — likely a question for the 2030s. SpaceX conceded during its IPO road show that Starship may not be fully reusable in the near-term, requiring throwing away each second stage, which would undermine the economics of space data centers. Even if Starship's 13th test flight succeeds, operational reusable flight is still likely years away.
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