# Starship development and progress \[previous title: Will Musk's starship reach orbit this year?\]

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/starship-development-and-progress-previous-title-will-musks-starship-reach-orbit-this-year/967583>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Tags:** elon-musk\
**Created:** [July 7, 2022, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/starship-development-and-progress-previous-title-will-musks-starship-reach-orbit-this-year/967583 "2022-07-07T22:05:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1625

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2026, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/starship-development-and-progress-previous-title-will-musks-starship-reach-orbit-this-year/967583/1625 "2026-09-26T16:09:37Z")

</div>

> [@xtenkfarpl](#):
>
> This seems to me to be almost as silly an idea as the old powersat idea that keeps coming up.

Here’s an FQ discussion about the topic (talking mostly about the factual advantages and disadvantages relative to current ground-based data centers).

> [@AI data centres (datacenters) in space!](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-data-centres-datacenters-in-space/1031098):
>
> So commercial artificial intelligence operations (OpenAI, Anthropic and so on) require some high-performance processors with high power and cooling requirements. Now there is a trend of talking about putting such data centres in space. SpaceX and some others are betting the farm (and probably your funds) on this. A few months ago, I was seeing articles like [this one](https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/), saying the cooling would be a limiting factor because there’s no convection up there. Plus: solar power is still not as abundant…

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/starship-development-and-progress-previous-title-will-musks-starship-reach-orbit-this-year/967583)._
