None of the 4 new design concepts now offer as credible a price tag as the SERT designs, simply because sufficient funding has not yet been available to evaluate the uncertainties and develop sharp cost estimates. But in at least 3 of the 4 cases, there is excellent reason to expect that costs will be much less than 17 cents / kWh when we get there. There are important risks – but with all 4 options together, the objective risk of not being able to beat coal or fission on cost is probably less here than with any other technology large enough to meet all the world’s energy needs.Why are we wasting time and money on ethanol again? Another company thinks 2500MW of space based solar power plants for $4b is doable. A similar nuclear reactor would come to ~$18b. 2021-09-01: With starship, this now seems feasible and perhaps inevitable.
Assuming a 70% transmission loss from orbit (beaming power by microwave to antenna farms on Earth is inherently lossy) we would need 60TW of PV panels in space. Which is 60k GW of panels, at 1 km^2 per GW. With maximum optimism that looks like somewhere in the range of 3k-60k Starship launches, at $2M/flight is $6b to $120b ... which, over a period of years to decades, is chicken feed compared to the profit to be made by disrupting the 95% of the fossil fuel industry that just burns the stuff for energy. The cost of manufacturing the PV cells is another matter, but again: ground-based solar is already cheaper to install than shoveling coal into existing power stations, and in orbit it produces 4x as much electricity per unit area. Even if Musk doesn't go there, someone is going to get SBPS working by 2030-2040, and in 2060 people will be scratching their heads and wondering why we ever bothered burning all that oil. But most likely Musk has noticed that this is a scheme that would make him unearthly shitpiles of money (the global energy sector in 2014 had revenue of $8t) and demand the 1000s of Starship flights it will take to turn reusable orbital heavy lift into the sort of industry in its own right that it needs to be before you can start talking about building a city on Mars.
2024-05-10: Space-Based Solar Economics
Lifecycle engineering assessments from NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy demonstrate that space-based solar power beamed to Earth fails the economic and environmental bar: electricity delivered from orbit would cost $0.61–$1.60/kWh—12 to 24 times more expensive than terrestrial solar and wind combined with battery storage. Furthermore, the massive embodied energy of launching gigawatt-scale orbital rectennas results in higher lifecycle emissions per kilowatt-hour than ground-based solar. backreaction.blogspot.com
2025-11-10: Orbital Hyperscale Data Centers
An evaluation of tech giants' proposals to deploy hyperscale AI compute clusters into low-Earth orbit. Continuous orbital solar flux and radiative cooling directly into the 3 Kelvin vacuum of deep space overcome terrestrial grid power queues once Starship lowers launch costs to under $50/kg. nextbigfuture.com
2026-08-10: Hyperscale Orbital Compute PPAs
Analysis of multi-gigawatt hyperscale AI computing agreements: as terrestrial utilities face decadal transmission queues, tech giants are contracting dedicated modular nuclear and orbital compute capacity to ensure uninterrupted frontier training scaling. nextbigfuture.com
2026-09-10: Orbital Compute Economics
Wall Street's $160B/GW space datacenter cost projections erroneously model expendable launch vehicles: fully reusable Starship architectures reduce launch costs below $50/kg, bringing orbital compute capital costs to parity with terrestrial facilities while eliminating grid interconnection queues and cooling water consumption. nextbigfuture.com