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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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 »