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by JPLeRouzic
6 days ago
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> *Orbital rings* I love megastructures, but I think it will take us a thousand years before we possess them (as a species). > *Higher energy density than chemical fuel* That’s true, but it’s a general problem that applies to rockets too as Tsiolkovsky recognized back in 1896! A burning Starship in the Indian Ocean doesn't look like either as vision of the future, but rather like an ugly cyberpunk dream. |
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Orbital rings… I think are more like a century or two. Physical possibility and affordability will I think take only 25-100 years[0], the rest being politics getting to the point nobody shoots it up.
[0] if you believe Alphabet's estimates about how fast SpaceX can reduce costs, estimated in the context of orbital data centers, it would only take 10.
I think this is overoptimistic, as the Alphabet paper assumed 370,000 tons[1] getting launched as the process for reducing costs, and I think Musk runs out of other people's money before that point.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468