Last year, the European Space Agency and a game developer got a little satellite, orbiting Earth in space, to run Doom in real-time. The lure of doing something perfectly normal on terra firma in the utterly hostile environment of space is just the preserve of a handful of coders, though, as two companies are hoping to be the first to have a data center and, believe it or not, a chip foundry in orbit.
This might seem like a colossally expensive thing to do, but when one of the aforementioned companies just happens to be Google, you know that the upfront cost probably isn't an issue. With the name Project Suncatcher, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Google is hoping to design a special solar panel system to power all of its data centers.
