Comment by hvb2
1 month ago
> If starship is around $100m per launch right now, they can launch 300 ships with the IPO. or 30,000T in orbit.
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
we will see tomorrow, won't we :)
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
But for what payload?
Before Starlink we only send up like 1k ton of payload.
Starlink is the only reason why it jumped to 3k tons.
So SpaceX builds all of this to send its own stuff up which is basically only Starlink and in the future its own competition (amazon and leo). For something which is only consumed by 10 million customers right now and they increased the price for starlink which makes it even less competitive.
And Spacex has to send up Starlink every 5 years which keeps revenue low and Starlink is hard llinear growth as one Starlink Satelit can't handle that much traffic.
If his IPO makes all of that money, he will entertain us with funneling billions into a system which will then deliver a handful people onto mars if even.
A person on mars doesn't make money, it costs money.
Whats the goal here?
uh.. orbital data centers? Are we on the same page? 1.25B a month for half a gigawatt, with it rising up to 1g is the deal they just made with anthropic (total deal size 2-2.5B a month). Starship cost is probably something like (y = (400m - 20m*(0.85)^t + 20m, where t is times starship is launched. At 30 launches, they are close to their target of $20m. Falcon 9 has launched 649 times, they've resused the same booster 34 times. a single nvidia NVL72 rack's peak performance is around 135w so 1gw (1,000,000 kW /135 kW per rack‚ is 7,407. each rack weighs around 1.47 metric tons. so you have 7407/1.47t = 10,888.29t+ 15,243.606 (plus 15,243.606 is for an additional 140% for foldable radiator and solar panels... so 26,131.9t to orbit for 1gw of compute. each starship can do 100T, so 26,131.9t/100 gives us 261.32 starships. given the cost curve earlier:
Total Cost = ∫₀²⁶¹ (380 * 0.85ᵗ + 20) dt
So $7.5B for the required tonnage to space. 3 million to $3.5 for each rack is 7407 * 3.5m = 25,924.5b. + 7,558.19 is 33b. if we can rent 1gw for $2-3b a month we get buyback in 13ish months? Literally best business model ever. if they last 5 years, each gw is worth $160-180B for the cost of $33B. once block 4 comes out with 200t... AGI ;)
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