Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?

That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.

There’s a weird thing in discussions about space. Lots of people just don’t like space, it makes them think they’re being blasted with science fiction.

So much criticism of space seems to fall into a few categories:

  1. They think there were ever any serious engineers who thought STS was a good idea, (rather than congressional-pork, which is what it always was), and thus assume actual space technologists are basically always wrong about the possibility of ever creating anything new and reliable
  2. They think cost/kg to LEO is somehow a physical law, and can never be improved on
  3. If they accept that SpaceX might actually have better technology that allows new things, they still refuse to wrap their heads around 2-3 orders of magnitude cost reductions due to improved technology, they update, but mentally on the order of “it will be 50% cheaper, no big deal”
  4. They just hate Elon Musk. On this one, I’m at least sympathetic

Space based data centers are probably not going to happen in the next decade, but most criticism (including this article) just reads as head-in-the-sand criticism, not serious analysis. I’m still waiting for more serious cost-benefit analysis assuming realistic Starship mass budgets.

If I worked for SpaceX, I imagine I’d focus more on just getting more Starlink mass in orbit for at least 3-4 years, but after that, we might have spare capacity we might want to spend on orbital power loads like this.

I think the interest in outer space comes from the lack of an atmosphere to absorb the sunlight/power.