zlacker

>>lawren+(OP)
Lots of funny comments here, but does anyone actually have a good argument against this idea?

It seems both ridiculous and obvious.

>>owenpa+Y3
It's one of those ‘Is a space elevator a good idea?’ vibe questions. In theory, sure, inevitably civilization does this in passing if it continues on pace for another hundred or so years, because at minimum at some point you've already tiled the Earth and automation has brought cost of remote handling down to zero.

But it's also, the proposal is to build a 4km x 4km array in space, and the main reason to do this now rather than say a data center in the Sahara is permitting, skipping storage, and solar utilization. The last two are rather silly reasons when the cost of solar panels is taking a nosedive and cheap energy enables dumb storage solutions, and permitting, well, let's just take as given that it's right and permitting really is that hard. That still only gives you an advantage after you scale to the point your permits would be denied, and whereas a Falcon 1 didn't really have competition so could get away with cost inefficiency, a mini compute cluster in space is competing against a terrestrial server rack.

None of the arguments seem physically implausible. Launch can get to <$5m/Starship. You can build 20km² of solar and radiation. You can hook up 5 GW of compute with remote space vehicles. It's just really shockingly hard in an Apollo sort of way. Somehow I doubt the permitting will be easy either.