Bitcoin in orbit: Could mining move into space?

Starcloud wants to mine Bitcoin in orbit

Starcloud plans to put Bitcoin mining hardware aboard its Starcloud-2 satellite, expected to launch in 2027. The startup is primarily developing orbital data centers for artificial intelligence, but its next spacecraft is designed to accommodate different types of computing equipment.

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Among them will be ASICs, the specialized machines used to mine Bitcoin. Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston has estimated that mining hardware costs roughly $1,000 per kilowatt of power consumed, compared with around $30,000 for high-end GPUs. If the company is already putting solar-powered computing infrastructure into orbit, relatively inexpensive mining equipment could give it another way to use the available electricity.

“We’ll have some Bitcoin mining ASICs on the second spacecraft,” Johnston said while discussing the project. “This thing will be the first to mine a coin in space.”

Bitcoin mining is becoming a tougher business

Back on Earth, miners have been confronting a less futuristic problem: making enough money from Bitcoin. The 2024 halving cut the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, while rising competition, network difficulty and electricity costs have continued to squeeze margins. By June 2026, average hashprice, a measure of how much revenue miners earn from their computing power, had fallen to a record monthly low.

For a growing number of miners, AI offers another way to make money from the infrastructure they already have. Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Cipher and IREN are among the companies that have signed deals or redirected capacity toward AI and high-performance computing, where long-term contracts can offer more predictable returns than Bitcoin mining.

When electricity becomes more valuable than Bitcoin

The shift toward AI has revealed something interesting about the mining business. For some companies, the most valuable asset may no longer be the machines producing Bitcoin, but access to large amounts of electricity.

Large miners already have sites with substantial grid connections, cooling systems and other infrastructure needed to operate data centers. Those assets have become particularly valuable to the AI industry, where electricity demand is rising rapidly and connecting a new large computing facility to the grid can take years.

At the same time, turning a Bitcoin mine into an AI data center is not as simple as swapping ASICs for GPUs. It requires far more expensive hardware, different networking equipment and more sophisticated infrastructure. The miners’ advantage, then, is not that they already have AI-ready data centers, but that they already control one of the resources that is hardest to secure.

Starcloud is moving in the opposite direction. The company is building infrastructure for AI from the ground up, but now wants to see whether some of the available power can also be used to mine Bitcoin.

Why space could appeal to miners

Mining has always been unusually sensitive to the price and availability of electricity. That has taken the industry to hydroelectric regions, renewable-energy projects and sites where energy would otherwise be difficult to monetize.

Space offers a much more radical version of the same proposition. Satellites in suitable orbits can receive sunlight for long periods, potentially giving computing equipment access to abundant solar energy without competing for grid connections on Earth.

The obstacles are equally unusual. Every ASIC has to be launched into orbit, withstand radiation and operate in an environment where repairs are extremely difficult. Falling launch costs may improve the economics, but replacing broken equipment remains far easier in Texas than hundreds of kilometers above Earth.

Cooling is another complication. Space is cold, but the vacuum does not allow heat to escape through convection. Powerful computers instead need radiators to release the heat they generate, making thermal management a major engineering challenge for any large orbital data center.

Bitcoin has been to space before

Bitcoin's relationship with satellites did not begin with mining. Blockstream Satellite has broadcast Bitcoin blockchain data using communications satellites since 2017, allowing users with the necessary equipment to receive blocks without a conventional internet connection.

SpaceChain went further, putting blockchain nodes into orbit and later sending hardware to the International Space Station to explore space-based transaction security. But neither project moved Bitcoin's energy-intensive proof-of-work process off Earth.

How far can mining follow cheap power?

A handful of ASICs in orbit will not compete meaningfully with industrial mining farms on Earth. Starcloud first has to show that its broader orbital data center model works, including the economics of launches, power generation, thermal management and equipment that cannot easily be repaired.

But the experiment adds an unusual twist to the transformation already underway on Earth. As Bitcoin miners turn toward AI in search of better returns, Starcloud is testing whether AI infrastructure might eventually create a new place for Bitcoin mining, this time beyond Earth.

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