Data centers in space: Four big obstacles and Elon Musk's ambitious timeline

This image provided by NASA-TV shows the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft taken from Canadarm2's video camera as Dragon approaches the International Space Station, Friday, May 25, 2012. In foreground is a portion of Canadarm2. Expedition 31 Flight Engineers Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers will use the Canadarm2 robotic arm to grapple the supply ship Friday morning with the berthing to the Earth-facing side of the station’s Harmony node following. Dragon is scheduled to spend about a week dockedUncreditedOrbital data centers would be a help to the massive AI buildout, but a number of major advancements need to come before they're really practical. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is aiming for a launch in late 2027, but other industry watchers say significant scale is more likely to come in the 2030s. "It's a next-decade event," according to Evelyn Chow, portfolio manager at Neuberger. "We'll need to see significant satellite launches over the next four to five years, and a concomitant buildout of connectivity, before we can start to contemplate true scale in orbital data centers," she told "Squawk Box Asia" on Wednesday. Blaine Curcio, the founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, says the 2030s...