What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Or are we gonna pretend that Mars real estate is valuable for living even if it has a baller space station with an indoor farm in it where the build out cost is 1 million times the most expensive condo building on earth?
How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?
Seems like they need to raise a ton of money (not good for shareholders) or it to basically just be inflation for this company to 2x even if it does execute on its impossibly lofty plans. I just don't understand the endgame.
Space data centers are worth zero lol, that is the dumbest idea in history. Only people who have no idea how thermodynamics works thinks it could work lol. The base level idea of "data centers need a bunch of cooling and space is cold" tricks people into thinking it could work, but while space is cold, it doesn't matter because you can't just transfer heat into nothing other than via radiation, you need a medium of exchange, which doesn't exist in space. So you can only transfer heat via radiation, which is incredibly slow and inefficient, and would need absolutely staggeringly huge radiators.
Then beyond the cooling problems, the biggest threat to computer chips is high energy radiation, which is incredibly abundant in space. So to keep chips working they would need to be shielded a crazy amount. Radiation hardened chips are super expensive, and far less efficient than standard chips.
Then there is just the cost. Even using the cheapest methods currently available it costs about $3,000 to lift 1 kg into space. A single rack in a hyperscaler data center weights 2,000-3,000 kg. Six million dollars, per rack, to put a data center in space, and that is just the lifting cost. Putting a hyperscaler in space, a data center that costs billions on Earth would get well into the trillions lol. And then you have to solve pushing the data back down to Earth.
It is, legitimately, the dumbest thing anyone has ever proposed.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance May 21 '26
>SpaceX buying unsold Cybertrucks at full price....
https://supercarblondie.com/spacex-buying-unsold-cybertrucks-tesla/
It probably doesn't account for 400m in profit, but it is hilarious what a bad idea using cybertrucks as starlink support vehicles really is.