25B for debt for a company valued at 1.25 Trillion is petty cash territory. It will get written off at some point and that will probably be it. I don't think they'll be defaulting on that.
The point of Star link was orders of magnitude reduction in cost of launching thousands of satellites. Musk is talking indirectly about another order magnitude of further reduction of that via star ship; sorry if that wasn't clear.
> the physics and economics don't make sense
This is a popular assertion that despite all the experts chiming in is not that black and white. Clearly investors and Elon Musk beg to differ. Similar arguments were used against Star Link when that was still science fiction. And now it isn't. It actually seems like a good idea that at this point is being copied by others. And SpaceX is getting a lot of the launching business, for now.
I think it's mainly the economics that are the challenge here; not the physics. Implicit in the assertion is that launching the amount of mass needed would be prohibitively expensive. There are lots of engineering challenges as well.
> it's just easier and cheaper to build out the same thing on Earth
Maybe; but it seems challenging to scale there. Permitting and scaling energy generation are a problem right now. But I agree, it's more logical to fix that. But one does not exclude the other. We might end up with a lot of in orbit computation regardless. It's not an either or proposition.
The value proposition for Starlink was always pretty clear. A decent chunk of people have no good broadband internet access. Provide it, and they'll pay good money for it. It needed cheapish launch capability, which existed when it was proposed, and everything else about it was fairly mundane. It made economic sense.
Of course it's the economics, not the physics, that are the challenge. We have thousands of existence proofs that you can launch a computer into orbit and have it work. The question is not, can you do it. The question is, why would you do it instead of putting that same computing capacity in a building somewhere?
It's not an either/or proposition in general but it is at the small scale. If I'm going to spend a million dollars on computing equipment, I can spend it on a terrestrial installation, or a space installation, or put some if it towards each, but anything I put towards one takes away from the other. If the economics of a terrestrial installation are much better than a space installation, why would I allocate any of my money to space?
Most of the conversation here seems to boil down to:
"Putting a data center in space is very hard and makes no sense."
"Putting a data center in space is actually pretty easy."
But by "hard" we mean "difficult to the point of being extremely economically uncompetitive with putting computers in a building," and by "easy" they mean "technologically feasible and the basic concept of computers in space has been done many times already."
The point of Star link was orders of magnitude reduction in cost of launching thousands of satellites. Musk is talking indirectly about another order magnitude of further reduction of that via star ship; sorry if that wasn't clear.
> the physics and economics don't make sense
This is a popular assertion that despite all the experts chiming in is not that black and white. Clearly investors and Elon Musk beg to differ. Similar arguments were used against Star Link when that was still science fiction. And now it isn't. It actually seems like a good idea that at this point is being copied by others. And SpaceX is getting a lot of the launching business, for now.
I think it's mainly the economics that are the challenge here; not the physics. Implicit in the assertion is that launching the amount of mass needed would be prohibitively expensive. There are lots of engineering challenges as well.
> it's just easier and cheaper to build out the same thing on Earth
Maybe; but it seems challenging to scale there. Permitting and scaling energy generation are a problem right now. But I agree, it's more logical to fix that. But one does not exclude the other. We might end up with a lot of in orbit computation regardless. It's not an either or proposition.