Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

How would you power them in the ocean? One of the attractions of space is the free power (the other apparently being less regulations, which may also not apply to the ocean).

I don't know if Musk, or anyone else, has talked about the economics of not being able to (economically) fix things in space. Presumably the idea would be to avoid components that fail more rapidly like mechanical hard drives (use SSDs instead), and to have redundancy so that even if one component fails it doesn't mean the whole satellite/node is now useless.

He must have done the math that at the anticipated failure rate each satellite would pay for itself before failing and needing to be replaced.