All spaced out on an IPO

THE euphoria surrounding stocks related to space exploration or exploitation of extraterrestrial resources in the wake of the SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) needs to be treated with a dose of caution.

While the excitement is understandable, given the size of the IPO, the commercial viability behind the ambitious goal to build colonies on Mars and deploy orbital data centres (DCs) to house massive artificial intelligence (AI) compute is unproven, with technological challenges that will be insurmountable for a good long while.