[sschueller]

The point-to-point travel with starship is the one that urks me the most. It is completely unrealistic and will never happen. They have Zürich, Switzerland as a destination. There is no place in all of Zürich to facility such a thing, you will blow out every window in the city at each launch. Absolutely ridiculous that anyone would take this serious.

Also don't get me started on data centers in space idea...

When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?

[duskwuff]

And even that pales in comparison to their estimate of a $22.7T (T!) market for their AI "enterprise applications".

As a point of reference, the GDP of the United States is roughly $30T.

[Zigurd]

Space manufacturing is in there too. The international space station is 27 years old. One reason to spend tens of billions of dollars on ISS was the idea that it would be used to run experiments that would make space manufacturing practical. Space manufacturing is a perennial project on ISS. Still no space factories or space products, much less profits.

But there's Starlink. What's a telecom provider worth per customer? Value starlink double or triple that, maybe. And that's about it.

[dogwalker5000]

> When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?

In all likelihood, neither.

[flowerthoughts]

> There is no place in all of Zürich to facility such a thing, you will blow out every window in the city at each launch.

While you're right, I'd be more sceptical due to politics. The people around Lake Zürich are up in arms over wind turbines. Even solar panels on mountain sides are too much (though that's hopefully less about noise.) I can't imagine the uproar if someone wanted to fire rocket engines regularly there.

[ted_bunny]

"Also don't get me started on data centers in space idea..."

I may have bought a few bridges in my day, but at least bridges are a thing that exists.

[Gud]

I live in Zürich and feel uncomfortable about this.

There is no way people in Switzerland will vote yes to this.

[sschueller]

You don't even need a vote. It's technically not feasible, it is that far fetched from reality.

[ryandvm]

I dunno, data centers in space seems even more outlandish than P2P space travel. The math on the orbital data center idea indicates that these things would need hundreds of thousands of square meters of radiative cooling. Absolutely bonkers that anyone is falling for this shit.