SpaceX. Tesla. Starlink. X. The Boring Company. xAI… developing and owning ANY of these modern-day marvels would be an achievement. Two would be astonishing, and three, MIRACULOUS. But all of them?
On the eve of the SpaceX IPO, Steve, Scott and Bill try to figure out how this soon-to-be-TRILLIONAIRE pulls all this off?
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The orbital altitude, shading and antenna size don’t really matter anymore. Very low altitude satellites can shoot signals up to Starlink which then shoots the signal around the planet by laser and then pops the signal down to the fastest ground link. At high orbital velocities the shadow of the earth lasts only a few minutes and a few capacitors in the circuit board or in the solar cell can cover that. All the memory is power independent anyway with built in nanobatteries. We already have cell phone sized antennas that can use the highest frequencies and lowest altitude antennas.… Read more »
When Elon went to China he bought a Chinese school satchel and shirt for his son X asha Xii and it is rumored to have cost more that Xi’s entire wardrobe. The satchel was silk and shirt had silver thread. Even if untrue the rumor is devastating to Xi in his high heal shoes.
I wish I was smart enough to be employed by Musk. To have a front row seat to achieving things once thought to be impossible. It’s like “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” with the Red Queen telling us that she “thinks of six impossible things before breakfast.”
Pursuant to Bill’s comments on imagination vs business sense, a good example is Star Trek. Lots of imagination about space travel, strange new worlds and boldly going where no man has gone before. But they fall back to a socialist society. “We don’t work for money, we work to improve ourselves.” This denies human nature and the imaginary socialist they display clearly won’t work as we know.
LEO solar irradiance power 1,365 W/m². Space-grade cells might see (@ very best) 50% efficiency, yielding 680 W/m². 100,000 x 1gW (10^5 * 10^9 = 10^14 W) needs minimum of 147,058,823,529 sqm (36,339,026 acres) of panels which is ~ land area of Montana! [not including added area for installation & damages & eclipse every ~ 1.5 hrs] Jasus, would be great to be ‘low bidder’ panel supplier for this boondoggle. Now imagine China, Russia, India, etc. ALL adding their own to an already congested orbit? Talk about fuster cluck. Would global cooling soon follow, culminating w/ice ball earth, along w/mass… Read more »