Gregory Falco

@MarioNawfal Just FYI - Orbital data centers don't make sense most of the time. We did the math.

🚨🇺🇸 ELON AND BEZOS RACE TO PUT DATA CENTERS IN ORBIT - BECAUSE EARTH'S POWER GRID CAN'T HANDLE AI SpaceX is raising $30 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation to build space-based data centers. Blue Origin's had a team working on orbital AI infrastructure for over a year. Sam Altman tried buying rocket startup Stoke Space this summer to join the race. The pitch: move power-hungry AI compute into low Earth orbit where there's unlimited solar energy 24/7, natural cooling from the vacuum of space, and no real estate costs. Earth's electrical grids can't scale fast enough for AI's exponential compute demands. Space sidesteps the constraint entirely. Here's the economics that might actually work: Terrestrial data centers face three brutal costs-power, cooling, and land. A 300 GW data center on Earth requires massive electrical infrastructure, cooling systems that consume 40% of total power, and expensive real estate near power sources. In orbit: solar panels generate continuous power with no weather or nighttime. Space's near-zero thermal environment cools chips passively. No land to buy. And SpaceX's reusable rockets just made launch costs drop by 90%. Google and Planet Labs are testing satellite-mounted AI chips in 2027. Early systems will need thousands of satellites to match one large terrestrial data center's capacity-but that's the starting point, not the limitation. Why SpaceX wins this race: Elon controls the only operational heavy-lift reusable rocket system on the planet. Starship-when fully operational-will drop launch costs another order of magnitude. China, Russia, and Blue Origin can't match that deployment speed or cost structure. SpaceX also has Starlink's existing orbital mesh network. They're planning to use upgraded Starlink satellites as AI compute nodes-leveraging existing infrastructure instead of building from scratch. Bezos has Blue Origin and AWS but no operational heavy-lift capability yet. Altman has capital but no launch system. Elon has both the rocket and the AI company (xAI) and the satellite network. That's a structural advantage nobody else can replicate quickly. The actual technical challenges nobody's discussing: Latency. Speed of light from orbit to Earth creates baseline delays that kill real-time applications. High-frequency trading? Autonomous vehicles? Not happening from space. This works for batch processing, model training, long-inference tasks-not interactive applications. Maintenance. A failed server on Earth gets swapped in hours. A failed satellite needs a service mission or replacement launch. You can't hot-swap components in orbit easily or cheaply yet. Scale. Thousands of satellites needed to match one terrestrial data center. That's massive coordination, space traffic management, and collision avoidance complexity. Plus space debris concerns multiply. Upfront capital. Building and launching thousands of compute satellites costs tens of billions before first revenue. Only a handful of entities can finance that. But here's why it might actually work: AI training runs are getting so massive they're consuming entire power grids. Microsoft just bought a nuclear power plant to run data centers. Google’s considering building dedicated power plants. At some point, moving compute off-planet becomes cheaper than building more Earth-based infrastructure. Launch costs are dropping exponentially. Starship aims for $10-20 per kg to orbit-versus thousands per kg on traditional rockets. At that price, space-based compute becomes economically competitive for specific workloads. Solar is unlimited and free once panels are deployed. No fuel costs. No grid dependency. No outages from weather or infrastructure failures. Within 5 years, we'll see the first operational orbital data centers handling AI training workloads that can tolerate latency. Within 10, they could represent 10-20% of global AI compute capacity. This isn't science fiction anymore people. The economics are approaching viability. The technology exists. The capital is mobilizing. And Elon controls the critical bottleneck-cheap access to orbit. The wildest part? If this works, the next step is lunar data centers with even more power and cooling advantages. And yes, crypto mining on the moon becomes economically rational once you have cheap transport and abundant solar. Welcome to the era where space isn't just exploration-it's infrastructure. Earth's power constraints just created a $100+ billion orbital industry. Source: Bloomberg, WSJ, ZeroHedge, @elonmusk, @SpaceX

The Safety of AI-enabled systems is critical to our future. We need to govern this in a scalable way. Check out our paper Governing AI Safety through Independent Audits published in @NatMachIntell with an amazing set of international coauthors. FREE ACCESS rdcu.be/cpgDK

This is how we should protect critical infrastructure from ransomware...in case anyone's listening out there :)thebulletin.org/2021/06/how-to… @JohnsHopkinsIAA @StanfordCISAC @StanfordCyber @SpaceISAC @sultanofcyber @JHUAPL @Harvard @BelferCyber @BelferCenter @MIT_CSAIL @csail_alliances

@BenjaminSchafer Now maybe people will finally read my dissertation on negotiating with critical infrastructure cyber terrorists 🤣

Space Hacking anyone? Excited to share an episode I was in for the Science Channel! sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/space… @csail_alliances @MIT_CSAIL @Kennedy_School @BelferCyber @BelferCenter @StanfordCyber @StanfordCISAC @JHUCaSE @JohnsHopkinsIAA @JHUAPL @SpaceandCyber @SpaceISAC #spacelaser

Looking for a great place to learn more about how we're helping to #SecureSpace? Head over to our YouTube Channel! youtube.com/channel/UCXgr4…

@StanfordCISAC @StanfordCyber @JohnsHopkinsIAA like @WatermanReports shared - let's keep pace with the tech world this time around. @SpaceandCyber #spacelasers #spacecyber

🛰️Join us for an in-depth discussion, led by @bleddb, featuring @drspacejunk, @CP_Hunter, @JLauren_Napier, @ChrisNewman1972, @anulikesstars on the realities behind the rhetoric of arms racing, rivalries and other types of hype in space! ❗️⬇️Register here: eventbrite.com/e/competing-fo…

@SpaceandCyber @iafastro Phenomenal work! Cannot wait to check them both out!

We're excited to announce that we have TWO papers accepted for #IAC2021 @iafastro 🥳 The title's of our papers are: - 'Space as NATO's Operational Domain: The Case of the Cyberthreats against GNSS' - 'Ground Station as a Service: A Space Cybersecurity Analysis'

Pretty cool stuff: Hackaday: CubeSat For Under $1000?. hackaday.com/2021/04/28/cub… #spacehack #democratizespace via @GoogleNews

Does anyone know of a good radiation-hardened micro GPU? We're going to do some deep learning at the far edge... in space :) #spacetechnology #spaceeconomy #spaceindustry #deeplearning #ai @SpaceandCyber @ADelgadoBonal

Excellent piece by my colleague at Harvard Belfer @schneierblog on AI hackers. The future is already here. #infosec belfercenter.org/publication/co…

@gregfalco is prof at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA). His research entitled Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems was highly influential in the recent Space Policy Directive-5, which shared the same title. 🚀 Register here ⬇️⬇️

💡📢Join our webinar on Space and Cybersecurity next week with @GregFalco and Alexandra Stickings (@rusi) 🚀 ⏳14th April ⏰ 1 PM EST / 7 PM CET REGISTER here: spacegeneration.org/event/pg-space…

Ever consider the needs of autonomous systems to thrive? #spacehabitats #autonomy #spacesecurity @ResearchGate: researchgate.net/publication/34…

Proud to have contributed to this upcoming report. Nice work @theNASEM #Energysector #CybersecurityNews Check out "The Future of Electric Power in the United States: Public Briefing" on Eventbrite! Date: Thu, Feb 25 • 20:00 GMT eventbrite.com/e/the-future-o…

RUMINT: Former Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.) is said to be Biden admin pick for NASA administrator, killing several birds with one stone: strong relationship with POTUS, congressional savvy. Pam Melroy is on deck as his deputy, bringing technical chops to bear. @Genevaexpat

@BenjaminSchafer @erica_fischer Oh, this is just the beginning :) they haven't even begun to show us how they can control the grid yet...

"A computer hacker gained access to the water system of a city in Florida and tried to pump in a "dangerous" amount of a chemical." Water is a critical lifeline for communities. I hope we can understand what happened here to protect towns worldwide. bbc.com/news/world-us-….

"Cybersecurity specialists in government can continuously try to purge attackers from networks, often to no avail, or they can adopt a different strategy—one of endurance," says CaSE researcher Gregory Falco in a @BulletinAtomic op-ed ow.ly/iQCu50DHJDs #Eweek2021 #JHUEweek

@CathieDWood @CathieDWood right now, the process for blocking feels relatively arbitrary as I spoke with @BobbyAllyn @NRP about on NPR this morning. We need a better way to address controversial content. npr.org/2021/01/21/959…

We should have an open discussion about censorship in this country.