"It really seems like anyone with some renders and a white paper written by someone being gassed up by an overly agreeable AI can get VC funding these days."
You can get more power from solar on the ground, cheaper, because it isn’t in space and they’ll get deorbited which is worse than vandalism because the entire thing is now gone.
I’m not disagreeing and saying they won’t do it, I’m just saying it’s an incredibly stupid idea.
That just increases the land space required though which makes it harder to get it built upfront, but I agree, land based solar, even taking 3x+ the land required + battery backup is probably still cheaper given they’ll last 20 years or more.
Ground projects like that take years to complete as well, between finding a spot, permitting, building it etc and to some extent time is money in this current environment.
Weight wise, they can launch 50 AI datacenters per launch with Starships 100T capacity, but volumetric wise I don’t know how well they can fold these up and if they’ll actually reach 50, but lets say they can get 50. I honestly have no idea if they can.
That’s 7.5MW of solar panels deployed each launch which will be coming off a factory line launching multiple times a week. They did 123 starlink launches in 2025, so thats 922.5MW solar capacity launched in a year if they did that with the AI sats, but they’ll likely do way more if starship actually works.
You can’t build an almost 1GW solar array (edit and datacenter) on land that quickly.
(edit2: Oops I didn’t do the 3x+ for the 1GW solar i mentioned above, it would need to be 4-5GW on land so it can overproduce to store enough in the batteries for overnight)
The downside of course is it’s only going to last 5-10 years. That’s a lot of costs to try to recoup in that time frame.
You can get more power from solar on the ground, cheaper, because it isn’t in space and they’ll get deorbited which is worse than vandalism because the entire thing is now gone.
I’m not disagreeing and saying they won’t do it, I’m just saying it’s an incredibly stupid idea.
That just increases the land space required though which makes it harder to get it built upfront, but I agree, land based solar, even taking 3x+ the land required + battery backup is probably still cheaper given they’ll last 20 years or more.
Ground projects like that take years to complete as well, between finding a spot, permitting, building it etc and to some extent time is money in this current environment.
Weight wise, they can launch 50 AI datacenters per launch with Starships 100T capacity, but volumetric wise I don’t know how well they can fold these up and if they’ll actually reach 50, but lets say they can get 50. I honestly have no idea if they can.
That’s 7.5MW of solar panels deployed each launch which will be coming off a factory line launching multiple times a week. They did 123 starlink launches in 2025, so thats 922.5MW solar capacity launched in a year if they did that with the AI sats, but they’ll likely do way more if starship actually works.
You can’t build an almost 1GW solar array (edit and datacenter) on land that quickly. (edit2: Oops I didn’t do the 3x+ for the 1GW solar i mentioned above, it would need to be 4-5GW on land so it can overproduce to store enough in the batteries for overnight)
The downside of course is it’s only going to last 5-10 years. That’s a lot of costs to try to recoup in that time frame.