Elon Musk wants to put data centers in space. Four big obstacles stand in his way. The timeline is ambitious. You know what that means in Musk-speak. Add three years and a few billion dollars.
The obstacles are radiation, cooling, launch costs, and latency. Radiation fries electronics. Space is cold but also hot and there's no air to move heat around. Rockets are expensive even when they don't explode. And speed of light limitations mean your ping time to a satellite is worse than dial-up in 1997.
But retail traders heard "space" and "data centers" in the same sentence and already converted their Roth IRAs into whatever penny stock manufactures thermal paste for zero-gravity applications.
The ambitious timeline likely means Musk tweeted a date while sitting on a toilet at 3am. His engineers will find out about it the same way you did. They will smile through the pain. They will update their resumes. Three of them will quit to start a company that does the exact same thing but with better work-life balance and worse funding.
Here's what actually happens. The first prototype launches in 2029. It works for eleven days. The second one launches in 2031 and works for three months before a solar flare turns it into a very expensive piece of space junk. By 2033 the project is quietly mothballed. Musk tweets that it was always meant as a proof of concept. The real goal was the friends we made along the way.
You will never get your money back. The data center will never process your trade. But you can tell people at parties that you invested in the future. They will nod politely and refresh their drinks.
Four obstacles is actually underselling it. The fifth obstacle is that nobody asked for this.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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