Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm lately. It also requires loads of band-end computing capability to do the near-miraculous things that it does. So far, that "compute," as it's known in the tech industry, has been based entirely on the ground. But is there an economic reason to do it in space? Some people seem to think so, as there has been a growing interest in space-based data centers. Let's take a look at why.

Space-based data centers have several advantages over ground-based ones. The first and most obvious is the near-unlimited amount of space in space. Second, there are plenty of potential options for novel power and cooling technologies that can't exist back on Earth. Third, using a space-based data center as a relay point for information could cut down on lag in data transfer between continents. Let's look at each in turn.

One of the significant constraints for data centers is space—they require large amounts of it, and it is expensive in the areas where they are most needed (i.e.

SpaceX was back at the launch pad Sunday with an updated rocket to finish off a Starlink mission it tried to send up earlier this month.

A Falcon 9 on the Starlink 10-2 mission lifted off at 1:15 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 40 amid cloudy skies with 22 more Starlink satellites for the company's growing internet constellation that now numbers more than 6,100 satellites in orbit.

The launch came nine days since SpaceX last attempted to knock out the mission on June 14. That attempt had a rare scrub as the countdown clock reached 0 and the rocket was ultimately brought back from the pad to allow for last week's ASTRA 1P satellite launch to go up instead.

But the Starlink satellites returned to the pad, this time with a new first-stage booster, which flew for the 11th time and made another recovery landing on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceX did not reveal what was wrong with the original booster that was trying to fly for the 16th time.