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

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rlt 21 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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nullocator 20 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	iknowstuff 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You thought you made an actual counter argument there?