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Image Credits:David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images 10:28 AM PDT · July 13, 2026 Sam Altman and Elon Musk traded barbed social media posts over the weekend, drawing new attention to the gap between vision and reality for the space compute business. Responding to Musk accusing him of being a scammer, Altman said, “homeboy you’re the one sellling [sic] public market investors on short-term space datacenters.” Setting aside “homeboy,” Altman is saying what a lot of experts have concluded but public market investors seem to be ignoring: Space data centers are not going to be a serious business anytime soon. SpaceX’s plans to launch a fleet of orbital data centers to perform AI inference tasks are the main driver behind the company’s two-trillion-dollar valuation. Bullish analysts say that the potential for that processing power to fuel SpaceXAI’s models or act as an orbital neocloud are unprecedented in the AI boom. But when you talk to subject-matter experts — whether it’s the entrepreneurs behind other space data center start-ups, the team at Google developing that company’s orbital compute project, or engineers who have done the numbers for fun — you find the same answer: This isn’t going to make a big dent until we have much cheaper rockets and the ability to produce high-powered satellites at low cost, en masse. Musk’s answer to this is easy to predict: Starship, SpaceX’s huge new rocket, is expected to make its thirteenth test flight as soon as July 16. If Musk’s team can get that vehicle to the point where it flies again and again, the data center business case could close. But even if the company successfully recovers both stages of the rocket on this test flight, operational reusable flight will still likely be years away, and space data center launches will likely take a back seat to SpaceX’s commitments to NASA and to building out its own Starlink network. SpaceX also conceded during its IPO road show that Starship may not be fully reusable in the near-term and will need to throw each of its second stages during each launch, which would put a kibosh on economical space data centers. That’s why Musk’s rejoinder—”we start flying them next year”—falls a bit flat. There’s no doubt that SpaceX could launch a satellite equipped for high-speed data processing next year, but the big question is when it will be able to launch and manufacture them at scale. And that’s likely a question for the 2030s. Topics When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal. View Bio

Space is becoming the next frontier in longevity research.A British startup just launched self-run chemical experiments into orbit, in the hopes zero-gravity data might shine a light on a group of disease-causing proteins too difficult to study on Earth. But first they need to check their autonomous laboratory will work in space.Mass Balance’s grapefruit-sized apparatus containing chemicals, sensors and control elements to keep the chemicals functioning launched on a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning. Contained in a 10 centimeter (4 inch) pod built by Austrian company Tumbleweed, the experiment will orbit the Earth for a couple of months, automatically measuring and beaming back down data about how the live cells grow, react, and function under weak gravity.It’s the first test of a system that the company hopes could yield high-quality data unobtainable on Earth, where stronger gravity introduces effects like convection, through which heat flows, and sedimentation, where heavier compounds sink, muddying data collection.‘“When you take away gravity, a lot of weird and wonderful things happen, some of which will be very valuable for life sciences and pharma,” Mass Balance co-founder and chief executive officer Toby Call says in an interview. “It sounds wild today, but the goal is really to make space boring, reliable, and just another research environment.”This research environment could be crucial to imaging disordered proteins, he says, which are responsible for age-related diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and certain cancers.On Earth, these proteins constantly change shape, making them difficult to image. That creates a gap in training data for life sciences models like Google’s AlphaFold, leaving them unable to predict how disordered proteins will behave—and respond to medicines.But in space, scientists believe some disease-driving disordered proteins may be easier to study and analyze. Call plans to generate data by running tests on disordered proteins under micro-gravity and use it to train an AI model adapter which fills in the gaps – with the model, data licensing, and data access driving revenue for his firm.For now though, the company is just testing its operating system and data capture. Tuesday’s mission will take an industrial biocatalyst into space, which will break another chemical compound down. The platform will monitor the process using light to confirm that the chemical reaction takes place as planned.Several other biotech startups are attempting to develop orbiting laboratories. In May, British firm BioOrbit launched a test unit growing ultra-pure, stable crystals which can be turned into injectable cancer medications, while American-owned Varda Space Industries is similarly working on processing pharmaceuticals under microgravity. Unlike these two firms, Mass Balance is not trying to bring its system back to Earth intact, which will spare it some of the larger engineering challenges of ensuring it can withstand the extreme heat and stress satellites experience when returning through the Earth’s atmosphere.“Microgravity is a new tool that is under-exploited,” Call says.