Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.

Everyone gets caught up in the thermal management stuff and the power density stuff and whatever but to me that's a red herring.

The real issue is that Tesla has never known the ability to produce solar panels at scale and Musk said in that recent interview with Dwarkesh that he intends to do all the solar production in house.

So where's he getting the sand from? How are they going to purify it at scale? How are they going to turn it into ingots and then wafers and then cells and panels when they haven't even been able to produce a slim fraction of panels without all those extra steps over the past decade for their roofs?

And if the goal is to have the industrial capacity to do all this in a few years and produce solar panels on the scale that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just lay those bad boys down en masse on Earth and solve the impending climate crisis and our current energy shortages?

It just doesn't make sense.