I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Cool That.

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I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Cool That.<br>Orbital AI, by way of Hugo Drax, Captain Link Hogthrob, the unforgiving physics of cooling in space — and a barn in Sweden.

Jeffrey G. Reid<br>Jun 04, 2026

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A Still from Pigs in Space c.1977<br>“Our TPUs are headed to space!” — Sundar Pichai<br>…with the Tedious Inevitability of an Unloved Season

Of course, if it has anything to do with space, Elon Musk will comment: “Great idea lol.”<br>Tears in Rain is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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November 2025. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X: “Our TPUs are headed to space!”1 The exclamation point is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Google was announcing Project Suncatcher — a constellation of eighty-one solar-powered satellites, in a tight one-kilometer cluster, in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, carrying Google’s Tensor Processing Units and connected by free-space optical links. An orbital AI data center. The two-satellite demonstration mission is planned for early 2027, in partnership with Planet. The gigawatt-scale version is, per Pichai, about a decade out.2<br>Musk’s inevitable praise was not idle or casual. Of everyone in this conversation, Musk is the one with the most direct stake in the answer being yes. Every orbital data center vision on offer — Google’s included — rests on a single bedrock assumption: that SpaceX’s Starship will drive the cost of reaching orbit down far enough, fast enough, to make the arithmetic close. A plan to put data centers in space is, mechanically, a plan to give SpaceX billions. Musk sells the rockets.3 So “Great idea lol” may be the most informative thing anyone said that week — not because it tells you orbital data centers are a good idea, but because it tells you who gets paid if we try.<br>Pigs! In! Spaaaace!

Almost fifty years earlier, Jim Henson put pigs in space.<br>The Muppet Show’s second season debuted Pigs in Space — Captain Link Hogthrob, First Mate Piggy, and Dr. Julius Strangepork, aboard the Swinetrek, thrown each week against perils they were plainly not equipped to handle. Captain Link Hogthrob’s signature move was to deliver pompous gravitas while standing in front of a control panel he clearly did not understand.<br>Henson wasn’t mocking space; he loved it. Pigs in Space was an affectionate parody of space opera — the gravitas, the operatic pose, the way 1970s television turned the cosmos into a stage for human posturing in latex jumpsuits. Star Wars premiered in May 1977; followed by countless space operas cut from the same mold. By 1979 the space craze pushed out For Your Eyes Only (which had been announced as the next Bond movie at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me) and gave us the high camp space opera of the Bond oeuvre: Moonraker.<br>Defying my Efforts to Provide an Amusing Death for You

Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, is an aerospace billionaire. He owns a company that builds rockets, satellites, and space shuttles. He has plans. The plans involve space colonization, an orbital space station, a stockpile of nerve gas, and the deliberate genocide of humanity, after which he will repopulate Earth from orbit with a selected stock of physically perfect specimens — a eugenicist with a velvet voice and a Mao-collared jacket.4 He has style, class, and a megalomaniacal superiority complex, which he expresses with imperious poetic relish.<br>Drax goes to space because his plan only works from up there.<br>That is the actual structure of the plot. You cannot poison the whole surface of the Earth and then repopulate it from anywhere on that surface; you have to be above it — to deliver the gas worldwide, and to keep your master race alive while everyone below suffocates. Orbit is not merely Drax’s escape from the law; it is the one place his scheme physically works. He has a private rocket fleet. He has a successful business. He has a vision.<br>In 1979 this was campy. In 2026 it is the centerpiece slide of three different keynotes — and a pillar of the bull case for the most valuable rocket company on Earth — which has since merged with its founder’s AI company expressly to build data centers in orbit.<br>Drax’s Progeny

Jeff Bezos, at Italian Tech Week in Turin in October 2025: within ten or twenty years, he said, “we’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space,” and they will beat the cost of the terrestrial kind. Eric Schmidt, 2025: took control of the rocket company Relativity Space, and told Congress the AI build-out is industrial “at a scale that I have never seen in my life.”5 Elon Musk, the month before Pichai’s post, on his own plan to do the same thing by scaling up Starlink V3. Pichai, with the exclamation point.6<br>The structural pose is identical to Drax’s, minus the genocide and the deliciously camp writing. But look at who strikes it. Every evangelist for orbital data centers...