Comment by piva00
19 hours ago
Very drastically, the ISS solar panels can generate up to 120kW of power, look at the size of its radiators needed to cool it down.
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
19 hours ago
Very drastically, the ISS solar panels can generate up to 120kW of power, look at the size of its radiators needed to cool it down.
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?lang=...
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
300GW / 120kW = 2.5 million satellites, I don't think SpaceX can launch 2.5 million satellites. Even less keep replenishing all the ones needing decommissioning after 3-5 years, no maintenance can be made, so on and so forth.
It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.
Indeed; though one thing I've found researching this is that the exact numbers are all over the place, so for some it's "let's make a single giant DC" and others are "let's make one million small ones", with mass estimates for each bird in the bigger constellations varying from 1200 kg (at 120 kW, which is an absurd ratio) to about 8000 kg.
Like I said higher up, at this scale, if you want to make your own fantasy plan you can draw a contiguous ring filling a single orbit.
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