The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
I actually do. The math is more strained than anything present. But a lot of people are rejecting it out of hand without doing anything back of the envelope. Truth is, barring a seismic shift in how we permit data centers on the ground, it takes a within-the-envelope decreases in launch costs to make space-based data centers profitable. Which is then just a cheat code for building a Dyson sphere.
> Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now?
They all explode all the time. Starship has also been consistently improving its suborbital flight characteristics. I don’t see a good argument for a fundamental design fuckup in the data we have.
> But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour?
This is nonsense. But within ten years? I think so. At least, we don’t have a good reason to reject that with current data. And that would make the cost equation flip to favoring space-based infrastructure. Which, honestly, is not the answer I expected. (I’ve done aerospace stuff for a while. Most of the back-of-the-envelope math fails. It failed for space-based solar power. It failed for asteroid mining. And it currently fails for space-based data centers. But let launch costs dip a bit, or permitting delays and risks rise a bit, and the equation balances sooner than one would think.)