According to multiple media reports, Elon Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, will soon file its IPO prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and expected to raise over $75 billion. If successful, this will be the largest IPO in human history, far surpassing Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $29.4 billion, and will also be the most anticipated IPO of the year.
Interestingly, in February 2026, SpaceX unexpectedly acquired xAI, another AI company owned by Musk, and incorporated "Orbital Data Centers" into its core strategy: leveraging the vacuum of space for cooling and continuous solar power to deploy AI computing capabilities into low Earth orbit. Musk believes that, in the long term, space-based AI is the only way to achieve scalable growth.
At the same time, NVIDIA is also actively investing in this direction. It has invested in the orbital data center startup Starcloud, which successfully launched an NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit in November 2025, achieving the world’s first AI large model training and inference in space.
As SpaceX sends AI computing power into space, many are beginning to wonder: if Bitcoin mining also relies on computing chips and can harness solar energy, could it also be moved into space? But this question is, in fact, far more complex than most people realize.
A satellite, a solar panel, a mining rig
Mining is a competitive mathematical process. Millions of mining machines worldwide operate simultaneously, racing to be the first to solve a specific hash value; the winner receives the Bitcoin reward for the current block. This process is known as Proof of Work, and it incurs a massive electricity cost. The global Bitcoin network consumes approximately 20 gigawatts continuously, equivalent to the total industrial electricity usage of a medium-sized country. Miners' profit margins are largely determined by electricity prices—when electricity costs rise, profit margins shrink.
The endless sunlight in space perfectly corresponds to the most critical cost variable in Bitcoin mining: electricity.
In Earth's orbit, solar radiation intensity is approximately 1,380 watts per square meter—six times the average ground-level intensity—and is unaffected by clouds, day-night cycles, or seasons. On a specific geosynchronous Earth orbit, satellites can receive sunlight nearly continuously, enabling constant power generation. By attaching mining rigs to the back of solar panels and launching them into orbit to mine nonstop, this is the fundamental logic behind space mining.
In December 2024, Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd published a technical analysis that advanced this idea from concept to an engineering blueprint. He proposed the concept of “solar mining panels”: mounting ASIC chips directly on the back of solar panels, with the front facing the sun to generate electricity and the chips on the back consuming that power for mining, while the entire structure radiates waste heat in both directions.
Space cooling is a counterintuitive challenge. On Earth, chip heat can be dissipated through air convection; however, in the vacuum of space, where there is no air, heat can only be removed via radiation. Todd’s calculations show that, without additional cooling hardware, this structure reaches a thermal equilibrium temperature of approximately 59°C in orbit—well within the chip’s normal operating range. If this temperature seems too high, simply tilting the panel slightly away from the sun to reduce its exposed surface area can further improve heat dissipation.
Communication is similarly surprisingly simple. The communication between miners and mining pools essentially involves receiving new block headers and submitting computational results, generating about 10 MB of data per day—less than the data consumed by streaming a single song. Communication latency in low Earth orbit (500 to 1,000 km above Earth) ranges from 4 to 30 milliseconds, resulting in a stale block probability of less than 0.01%, which is on the same order of magnitude as the vast majority of ground-based miners, with no meaningful difference. In fact, Blockstream has been broadcasting the full Bitcoin blockchain globally via geostationary satellites since 2017, proving that combining satellites with blockchain has never been an unsolved challenge.
So if it's physically feasible and the engineering framework is viable, why hasn't it been widely adopted? The reason is that rocket transportation costs are too high.
Economic calculations that are impossible to work out
Delivering cargo to low Earth orbit using SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket currently costs approximately $2,720 per kilogram.
Peter Todd estimates that a complete 20-kilowatt space mining system, including solar panels, radiators, ASIC chip arrays, structural supports, and communication modules, weighs approximately 1,600 to 2,200 kilograms. At current prices, the cost of a single launch alone would range from $4.3 million to $6 million.
How much hashing power does this system contribute daily, and how many coins can it mine? Researcher Nick Moran provided the answer: daily earnings of approximately $92.70, equivalent to about $34,000 annually. The payback period exceeds 100 years.
Starcloud's CEO, Philip Johnston, calculated that the launch cost must be reduced to under $200 per kilogram for space mining to have a basic business case—meaning costs still need to fall by a factor of 13.
SpaceX’s Starship is widely regarded as the key to achieving this leap. Fully reusable, Starship could theoretically reduce launch costs to under $100 per kilogram—or even lower—forming one of the foundational assumptions behind SpaceX’s IPO vision for a space-based data center. However, when or whether this cost curve will materialize remains an unresolved variable.
Another challenge is the automatic adjustment of Bitcoin’s global mining difficulty. The Bitcoin protocol recalculates the total network hash rate every two weeks and automatically adjusts the mining difficulty to maintain an average block time of approximately 10 minutes. In other words, if a large number of space mining rigs enter the market and significantly increase the network’s hash rate, the mining difficulty will rise accordingly, proportionally reducing profits for all miners—including those in orbit.
There are always people busily searching for treasures in this world.
Nevertheless, a number of startups are working to advance this.
Starcloud, formerly known as Lumen Orbit, is the company closest to real-world implementation and the most important case study in the entire sector. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Raymond, Washington, it is backed by the angel funds of NFX, Y Combinator, a16z, Sequoia Capital, and NVIDIA. The company has raised approximately $200 million in funding. The CTO previously spent ten years working in Airbus’s Defense and Space division, and the Chief Engineer previously led the Starlink project at SpaceX.
In November 2025, Starcloud successfully launched its first satellite equipped with NVIDIA H100 GPUs into orbit, running Google’s Gemma language model and transmitting the first human-generated AI message ever produced in space. In March 2026, Starcloud announced that its second satellite would simultaneously carry Bitcoin ASIC chips and NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPUs, aiming to become the first organization in history to mine Bitcoin in space. Additionally, the company has applied to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval to deploy a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites, with a long-term vision of building a total of 5 gigawatts of computing infrastructure in orbit.
SpaceChain is an industry pioneer in this field, co-founded by former Bitcoin Core developer Jeff Garzik and Zheng Zhong. Since 2017, SpaceChain has launched at least seven blockchain payloads into satellites and the International Space Station. In June 2020, Garzik executed the world’s first Bitcoin transaction in space, transferring 0.0099 BTC from an orbit 400 kilometers above Earth, using a multisignature wallet node installed on the space station by SpaceChain. SpaceChain’s core focus is on securing blockchain transactions through orbital nodes—not active mining—by storing private keys in space, making them physically inaccessible to any hackers or governments on Earth.
Cryptosat, founded by two Stanford PhDs, currently operates three satellites in orbit, primarily providing tamper-resistant orbital cryptography services. In 2023, Cryptosat participated in Ethereum’s largest-ever trusted setup ceremony (KZG Ceremony), generating partial random parameters via orbital nodes to ensure, at an institutional level, that these parameters could not be controlled by any single ground-based entity. It is exploring another possibility for space-based blockchain: not mining, but making the entire crypto-economic system harder to attack.
From Orbit to Market: What This Means for Mining
For currently operating Bitcoin mining companies, space mining does not pose an immediate competitive threat, but the continued efforts by numerous startups demonstrate that the significant cost-reduction potential it represents still holds substantial appeal and imaginative possibilities for the industry. This also indirectly reflects the structural cost pressures currently facing the entire sector.
After the 2024 halving, global hash rate and difficulty have continuously reached new all-time highs, with energy costs accounting for 70% to 90% of total operating expenses. In this context, those who can securely obtain clean electricity at the lowest cost will have the deepest moat. Hydropower, wind energy, and associated natural gas resources in the United States, the Middle East, and Africa are becoming the primary drivers behind the next wave of mining acquisitions and site selections.
The logic of space mining is the ultimate extrapolation of the above trend: if cheap electricity on Earth will eventually become scarce due to competing demand, then go where energy is most abundant—outer space.
Of course, if the Starcloud-2 satellite were to mine the first Bitcoin in 2026, it would be like a single grain of sand falling into the ocean compared to the global hash rate of over 900 exahashes per second. But the symbolic significance itself carries powerful impact. Just like the 2020 space transfer of 0.0099 BTC, its value lies not in the amount, but in proving that such a feat is possible.
From SpaceX’s IPO narrative to NVIDIA’s orbital computing strategy, and now to Starcloud’s ASIC satellite initiative, a pattern is emerging: space is becoming the next battleground for computing infrastructure. AI computing has led the way, and Bitcoin computing is quickly following suit.
On that day, the global digital network described in Nakamoto's whitepaper could transcend Earth, floating in space, seeking new opportunities.