Is moonshot idea simply talk?

Even at $US800 million, SpaceX would have become the most valuable private company in the world – surpassing OpenAI, according to analysts from investment bank Morgan Stanley, who took these media reports seriously enough to warrant their own investor report.

SpaceX would attain 13th place on Wall Street’s S&P 500.

Whether this valuation is justified is another matter entirely.

SpaceX has a good revenue-generating business called Starlink, which uses a constellation of satellites that provide internet connectivity for consumers and telecommunications companies including Telstra.

But it is nowhere big enough to justify a market value in the trillions.

Musk, who has not yet managed to commercialise Tesla’s plans for self-driving cars or the creation of an army of robots, has moonshot ambitions for SpaceX to deliver space data centres.

Using his social media platform X, Musk commented on SpaceX’s planned future entry into orbital data centres, describing them as “by far the fastest way to scale [compute] within 4 years because easy sources of electrical power are already challenging to find on Earth”.

He has a point.

Morgan Stanley notes that “while space-based data centres face a number of challenges (orbital debris, data governance, etc), at-scale orbital compute clouds also have a number of benefits vs traditional data centres ranging from power (receive full solar constant in space), to cooling (space is -270°C), and reduced latency for the growing [total adressable market] of edge-devices vs long-haul terrestrial paths”.

Loading

Musk isn’t alone in these lofty ambitions – there’s a number of tech companies including Google, whose Project Suncatcher aims to build constellations of solar-powered satellites carrying its custom TPU [AI chip] hardware to serve as space-based AI/computing data centres.

Nvidia is positioning itself for the orbital data centre frontier by supplying high-performance GPUs [graphics processing units] and other critical infrastructure.

But there are plenty of giant ideas that fall to Earth when practicalities collide with them.

Musk has proven to be the world’s greatest salesman. Let’s see if he can better that by expanding that title to best salesman in the universe.