Or, just saying, be critical of ideas and think them through, and take in what experts say about it, and determine for yourself what's up. If a bunch of people who usually seem to know what they're talking about think there's a legitimate shot at something you, as a fellow armchair analyst, think is completely impractical, it makes sense to go and see if maybe they know something you don't.
In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable.
If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.
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Or, just saying, be critical of ideas and think them through, and take in what experts say about it, and determine for yourself what's up. If a bunch of people who usually seem to know what they're talking about think there's a legitimate shot at something you, as a fellow armchair analyst, think is completely impractical, it makes sense to go and see if maybe they know something you don't.
In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable.
If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.