Starship’s economics will make such projects inevitable, if it’s not data centers it will be something else. Ideally, the solar panels will be efficient enough to minimize albedo.
A facility in space will likely have better uptime then a terrestrial facility with lower costs for disaster mitigation/insurance. The economics are surprisingly close when you do the back of the napkin kg math, but you can mass-produce orbital data centers in a way that’s not possible for terrestrial facilities.
Granted, the same pitch could have been made for orbital telecommunications vs terrestrial wires… that bet hasn’t paid off yet.
A facility in space will likely have better uptime then a terrestrial facility with lower costs for disaster mitigation/insurance. The economics are surprisingly close when you do the back of the napkin kg math, but you can mass-produce orbital data centers in a way that’s not possible for terrestrial facilities.
Granted, the same pitch could have been made for orbital telecommunications vs terrestrial wires… that bet hasn’t paid off yet.