Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacLog | Hacker News Reader

Your math seems off, 1 ton is 1000kg, but your point still stands at $200 million plus the overhead of containment and transport to starship. This is far more economical that I expected.

But also this is the price to orbit. As the escape velocity is 1.5x higher we can probably assume the same or a greater increase in cost. Maybe you could just justify a really high orbit? It would take a long time for it to build up.

View on HN

The main risk is taking off, you'd want something well protected and capable of surviving starship blowing up at any point during ascent, including returning safely to earth and impacting. You'd probably want to (unusually) launch over land - perhaps Alaska/Canada, to make retrieval easier should it fail before reaching orbit.

Once it's in a low orbit, the extra shielding isn't needed as much as it's not going to fall back to earth quickly, so boosting from there to a high orbit would reduce the mass needed to be transported.

In theory you could maybe do it for say $4b/yr all in.

How many orbital solar collectors could you use to concentrate energy and beam the equivalent energy currently produced by nuclear plants to a desert based collector?

Yeah, I didn't even consider this. But at what point does orbital solar energy start to make sense?

I wonder what the $/kg before we can just send up solar panels that last 100+ years and provide continuous microwave beams of clean energy to ground stations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com