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Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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What they don't show in a lot of SciFi is the mundane day-to-day stuff (AFAIK, the only shows that came close were Red Dwarf and Firefly.)
Problem is, things break. Connectors come loose. Temperature makes things brittle. Small debris cross pads and create shorts. Most automated manufacturing lines can catch assembly problems, but none have 0% failure rate. This is what post-deployment maintenance is for. Somebody shows up in a van with a bunch of test gear and replacement parts. They diagnose the problem, swap out a cable or board, and the business keeps humming.
Add IoT and fancy telemetry. Monitor sensors and run ML to do predictive analytics. It still requires someone in a cargo van with a bunch of spare parts.
If you put an installation in a remote location, under water, or in space, there are benefits. But you just multiplied the cost of basic maintenance. You can build in redundancies, but a small glitch at a single-point-of-failure could cascade to a catastrophe.
Microsoft and Google tried putting data-centers under water, and after years of trials they nixed it because of these issues. Multiply that for something far out in space.
Only alternative is to build failure into the business model. Something breaks, you just leave it to rot (or burn in the atmosphere) and send another container out. Maybe the finance math works out, but it sure is wasteful.
tl:dr: SciFi is fantasy. A clogged toilet is reality.
Don't disagree with your main point at all, just want to throw The Expanse into your list for shows that do a good job of showing things just break and it's catastrophic when they do it in space.