Comment by trhway
1 day ago
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.
>You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
That is exactly what you do - just like with Starlink - toss out the panels with attached GPUs, laser transmitter and small ion drive.
Best estimates based on the publicly available data I can find are that solar panels make up 5-10% of the manufacturing cost of a starlink satellite.
There’s so much overhead you’re hand waving away to make your numbers work.
> 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.