Comment by trhway
1 day ago
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961
>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
Current cost to LEO is $1500 per kg
That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
I think the disconnect is that with starship they’re targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one on the ground, doesn’t suffer seasonality/weather, and doesn’t require battery storage for smoothing/time shifting, so you’d need to deploy many times the number of panels on earth. Our home array in North America over the course of the year generates something like 1/7th of its theoretical capacity, overproduces in the summer, and underproduces in the winter.
>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.
>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.
> with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
Yes, only doubling the capex. With the benefits of, hmm, no maintenance access and awful networking?
1 reply →
Any idea, what is the estimated cost of a Google TPU. It may not make sense for Nvidia retail price but at cost price of Google.
1 reply →
> jurisdiction
This is the big thing, but Elon's child porn generator in orbit will be subject to US jurisdiction, just as much as if they were in Alaska. I guess he can avoid state law.
If jurisdiction is key, you can float a DC in international waters on a barge flying the flag of Panama or similar flag of convenience which you can pretty much buy at this scale. Pick a tin-pot country, fling a few million to the dictator, and you're set - with far less jurisdiction problems than a US, Russia, France launched satellite.
> putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these discussions have no sense otherwise.
> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.
You are presented with a factual, verifiable, statement that starship has been promised for years and that all that's been delivered is something capable of sending a banana to LEO. Wayyyy overdue too.
You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!
What a cult.
2 replies →
1 KW of solar panels is 150€ retail right now. You are probably at 80€ or less if you buy a few MW.
(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)
installation of large solar plants is largely automated already
> will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer
And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.
A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
It looks like you’re comparing the cost of installing solar panels on the ground with the cost of just transporting them to orbit. You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
3 replies →
> it is SpaceX/Elon
The known scammer guy? Like these ideas wouldn't pass the questions at the end of a primary school presentation.
100 x 100 is 10,000.
The bean counters at NVidia recently upped the expected lifecycle from 5 years to 6. On paper, you are expected now to get 6 years out of a GPU for datacenter use, not 3-5.
My car costs far more per mile than the bare cost of the fuel. Why would starship not have similar costs?
To add space solar cell will weigh only 4-12kg as protection requirements are different.
source?
:| Did rough calculations with help of ChatGPT. In space it need not be hardened for rain, hail, wind and dust but for radiation and micro meteors.
3 replies →