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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement.

Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).

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Aerospace industry has a long history of missing lower cost/kg to orbit. I'm extremely suspicious of $500/kg, which is about a third of today's cost.

OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.

SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.

OTOH they have achieved many things that experienced people said were impossible or would never make financial sense.

OTOH they have a huge batshit crazy fanbase of boot lickers who are so gullible they'll believe and parrot anything Elon says.

SpaceX created reusable rockets that can fly back to the launch platforms and land gracefully. Hard to blame people for becoming fans. Before them stuff like this only existed in kerbal and sci-fi.

Becoming a fan of someone or something is great!

Accepting everything they then do, forever, even when it's obviously nonsense, is what gets you called a "huge batshit crazy fanbase of boot lickers".

This "idea" is great party conversation. It's probably doing a great job of shoving around the Overton window, too (perhaps the real goal here?). It's, uh, not realistic, and anyone who is seriously "all in" on it (you're allowed to consider it and to dream, that's not the same as being all in) is not worth taking seriously no matter how much of the oxygen in the room they're using up.

Never on time, but always eventually.

...on time.

the first booster landing after delivering a payload to orbit was quite something and made a serious stir in the industry.

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