alt Hacker NewsJust on a mass basis it falls apart.
Best cost to orbit I am seeing is $1500/kg. A GPU rack is ~1500kg. Let’s imagine you can take a terrestrial data center rack, no scaffolding, solar panels, radiators, radios, propellant, or propulsion. Fly it into orbit, kick it out the airlock, and let it work through magic. That’s $2.2 million to get into position.
Industrial power rates are cheap, say $.10/kwh, but pretend you sign terrible deals, and it costs you $.30/kwh to run and cool a terrestrial GPU rack. A 150kw unit will then be (150x24x365x.3) =$394k/year.
You can operate the terrestrial version for 5.7 years before the two hit parity.
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LunaSea • today at 10:25 PM
$1500 / kg seems incredibly low considering that launching a simple 1U cube sat costs roughly $200,000.
Yes for now; Alphabet is optimistic costs will come down.
They're projecting the learning curve, that the more you do it the cheaper it gets, continues arbitrarily far.
However, they recon it will take SpaceX launching 370,000 tons to LEO to make the costs come down enough to be worth it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
Even my bull case put that 10 years off, which is so far away it lacks relevance just because tech moves so much faster than that timescale; my bear case says that's about 45 years off.