we will see tomorrow, won't we :)

But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.

Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.

I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.

But for what payload?

Before Starlink we only send up like 1k ton of payload.

Starlink is the only reason why it jumped to 3k tons.

So SpaceX builds all of this to send its own stuff up which is basically only Starlink and in the future its own competition (amazon and leo). For something which is only consumed by 10 million customers right now and they increased the price for starlink which makes it even less competitive.

And Spacex has to send up Starlink every 5 years which keeps revenue low and Starlink is hard llinear growth as one Starlink Satelit can't handle that much traffic.

If his IPO makes all of that money, he will entertain us with funneling billions into a system which will then deliver a handful people onto mars if even.

A person on mars doesn't make money, it costs money.

Whats the goal here?

uh.. orbital data centers? Are we on the same page? 1.25B a month for half a gigawatt, with it rising up to 1g is the deal they just made with anthropic (total deal size 2-2.5B a month). Starship cost is probably something like (y = (400m - 20m*(0.85)^t + 20m, where t is times starship is launched. At 30 launches, they are close to their target of $20m. Falcon 9 has launched 649 times, they've resused the same booster 34 times. a single nvidia NVL72 rack's peak performance is around 135w so 1gw (1,000,000 kW /135 kW per rack‚ is 7,407. each rack weighs around 1.47 metric tons. so you have 7407/1.47t = 10,888.29t+ 15,243.606 (plus 15,243.606 is for an additional 140% for foldable radiator and solar panels... so 26,131.9t to orbit for 1gw of compute. each starship can do 100T, so 26,131.9t/100 gives us 261.32 starships. given the cost curve earlier:

Total Cost = ∫₀²⁶¹ (380 * 0.85ᵗ + 20) dt

  Total Cost = F(261) - F(0) 
             ≈ 5,220.00 - (-2,338.19) 
             ≈ 7,558.19

So $7.5B for the required tonnage to space. 3 million to $3.5 for each rack is 7407 * 3.5m = 25,924.5b. + 7,558.19 is 33b. if we can rent 1gw for $2-3b a month we get buyback in 13ish months? Literally best business model ever. if they last 5 years, each gw is worth $160-180B for the cost of $33B. once block 4 comes out with 200t... AGI ;)

Starship has launched today and hasn't finished everything it needs to even proof that it works reliable. For a Datacenter you need to put it higher than low orbit.

After that, you will need to start to even develoop server racks full of GPUs for space. You literlay need to engineere from scratch a cooling system which will be a few hundred square feed big. You need to be able to transfer massive amount of energy reliable from a small GPU rack to all of this area.

Than you need to send a few thousand of these constalations up there. Every single micrometeroid, sun storm, broken component means loosing a whole rack immediadlty.

Then you need to actually verify that you can send up all of that infrastructure in space and keep it alive there.

Then you have to assume a certain amount of lifetime which will be a lot shorter than on earth and you can't sell it of. These resources are gone.

To all of this cost, you will have to add latency, data syncronisation between racks has to be complelty engineered from scratch too. We talk about 100 of gigabits between these small constelations.

In the same timespan with a lot less money, you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere on the aquator or just as south in texas as possible. You can service it, you can upgrade it, no issues.

all of these are already solved with starlink besides the high orbit. The real problem is power.

>you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere

Can you? from where i'm sitting it's pretty illegal to build a datacenter in the united states. There has literally been hundreds of projects to build data centers around the US that have gotten canceled due to NIMBY's. Collosus itself is plagued by lawsuits.

All those things you listed aren't deal breakers, and maybe some earth based compute will be used but we simply don't have enough power, political will or the legal system to be able to push these data centers through.

So despite the fact that it is theoretically "Cheaper" to build a ground based system, and it will take 261 starship launches just for a single GW... The math is still mathin'. $33B to make $180B.