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Comment by sobellian | Hacker News Reader

Okay so even assuming all of SpaceX's numbers, which is extremely optimistic, even if we're an angel's advocate and assume that they spend all this money on engineering and optimize their launch costs and their satellite costs and they don't hit any hiccups, and DCs on Earth stay pretty much the same and don't get any added efficiencies. Even then over every time period orbital is still more expensive. And it gets particularly punishing the longer you extend the analysis period as the satellites need to get replaced while the DCs don't spontaneously combust all their infra.

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I don't think those numbers are optimistic, I suspect they've already designed the sat in CAD and that's what the calculation spat out; it's probably quite accurate. The physics of this sort of thing are quite well known and SpaceX already has experience with the type of satellite that will be needed. There's no need for them to rely on napkin math.

Cost is a different matter of course, but it seems incongruous to me that after being confronted with the fact that your power density assumptions were off by a factor of 2x you would continue to insist ChatGPT's weird assumptions about manufacturing costs scaling linearly with mass are accurate. As was already pointed out upthread, even if all the calculator's other assumptions are correct they can turn a profit if they get the per satellite cost (excluding the cost of the GPUs) below $2 million. I think the only big question mark here is launch cost.

Upthread comment and therefore the premise of your $8/W target is wrong. As I explained, I plugged in all the announced engineering parameters for Starmind, $8/W, and $76/kg launch. It ties terrestrial over a 5yr period (the slider default) but gets crushed over a 10yr period. Naturally a longer time window is prudent absent some world-ending calamity in 5 years that renders the need for compute irrelevant. And even the 5yr tie is very sensitive to these parameters and requires everything to go right.

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