zlacker

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.

>>Veedra+(OP)
> Launch can get to <$5m/Starship

What are you basing this on? Just the GPU’s to utilize 40MW will weigh nearly 100 metric tons (40MW / 700W * 1.7kg). Thats an entire Starship payload just for the GPU’s and absolutely nothing else.

Starship launches currently are $100 million and after adding in solar panels and radiator panels and radiation shielding you’ll need several of those Starship launches per single “40MW compute unit”.

How do you get this down to “<$5 million”?

>>reaper+Q
Starship launches are not currently any price.

The stated long run goal was $2-3m, per Elon Musk, and if you put aside practicalities like limits on how big the market is, and then not having a robust heatshield design yet, it's fundamentally coherent, because of full reuse.

If you're looking for more practical medium term numbers, Gwynne Shotwell suggested around the $50m mark would be an early price goal.

>>Veedra+t1
The stated goal of Tesla was self-driving, per Elon Musk. Him throwing up some number, deadline or idea he pulled out of his head doesn't convince me it is likely or even feasible.

>>atoav+a2
I'm not claiming $5m launch will happen. I claimed it could happen. It is in fact a coherent possibility. Heck, self-driving also, I took a Waymo just a few days ago. There's a big difference between doubting a specific company can do a thing and doubting the thing is plausible in principle.

>>Veedra+h3
Then we are on the same page here. The question in this case is if the math is mathing. Launch cost is one thing, but just judging by the pdf they fail to adequately address the fact that they will be the first people trying to build a sattelite that is required to dissipate heat by that amount into space.

Don't get me wrong, maybe space datacenters can be more efficient after decades of RND and maybe that RND is even worth it, but if you are the company who wants to convince me to give you money to reach that job you should not go like "cooling in space is free", because there is no such thing as free lunch in space engineering.

>>atoav+D6
> you should not go like "cooling in space is free",

It is baffling me how much I'm defending this proposal because I don't actually think it's a sensible company but they really really do not do this.

>>Veedra+E9
Not sure what brought me onto that track here, I just skimmed into it and was really baited by that first table comparing water costs to nothing.

The rest of the paper is a bit more sensible.