Posted by angadh 6/26/2025
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I speculate that in particular militaries might be interested.
- lots of cheap power - deploy 100s of ASICs, let each of them fail as they go
It's a crowded field, you have to do something to stand out!
More realistically, just drop a thermally conductive cable down to low solar orbit. Absolutely unlimited.
A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg range; Starship’s main purpose is to massively reduce launch costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full reusability is in place.
Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not that far.
The original “white paper” [1] also does acknowledge that a separate launch is needed for the solar panels and radiators at a 1:1 ratio to the server launches, which is ignored here. I think the author leaned in a bit too much on their deep research AI assistant output.