[schiffern]

With today's very high orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that the desert is cheaper.

With very low orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that space would become cheaper. Solar panels have no atmosphere/night/seasons and are always pointed at the Sun, no cover glass for hail, no 24h battery either. Radiators are 1/10th the area of PV which is very doable.

The question is, where exactly is the tipping point between those two extremes, and will Starship reach that? Opinions on this naturally bifurcate depending on one's feelings about Elon Musk.

I wouldn't be too worried because SpaceX engineers put a great deal of effort into reflection mitigation, including developing a space-rated mirror able to have an RF signal fire transparently through it.[1] The strategy is to bounce all the sunlight away from Earth, which makes satellites darker than even (hypothetically) covering a satellite in Vantablack.

[1] https://youtu.be/MNc5yCYth5E?t=1717

[konschubert]

I don’t want to be foolishly dismissive, but I just don’t see how launch costs could be small enough to compensate for the huge overhead of putting things into space and maintaining things in space as opposed to literally any other place on earth.

I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to tell us that this is economical to show the numbers

[rlt]

Ok I’ll try:

Starship becomes “fully and rapidly reusable”, needing little to no refurbishment between launches. Then the lower bound of launch costs is just the expendables (methane, oxygen, nitrogen) which could cost as little as $1M per launch.

SpaceX uses custom silicon (produced by “TeraFab”) that can run at higher temperatures then the radiative cooling requirements goes down significantly and a 100 kW satellite might weight around 1 ton.

Starship should be able to launch at least 100T payload. Assuming they could fit that many, that puts the launch cost per 100 kW at $10,000, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of the chips alone, even if it’s off by a factor of 10.

Obviously a lot needs to go right for this to happen, but it’s not impossible.

[nullocator]

Counter argument:

Before the cost of flying very heavy shit and dealing with all the problems of operating that shit in space goes to zero, the cost of doing it terrestrially will go to zero. The idea that shooting any amount of payload into space could some how be more economical than just not doing that is completely bonkers and laughable.

It's like people completely forgot that there was 15+ years of connectivity infrastructure build out on earth before Musk did his shittier space version, not the other way around.

[schiffern]

Transport doesn't "go to zero." Terrestrial transportation is already fully reusable, so it doesn't have the same cost headroom for improvement vs orbital launch.

Thanks, I really needed this post. I'm saving this for when people inevitably try to re-write history by saying "we didn't need Elon, because did anyone really doubted space-based AI would be the winner?? It was obvious all along because blah blah... <insert 20/20 hindsight>"

[iknowstuff]

You thought you made an actual counter argument there?