Philip Johnston

So, for example, with the current launch vehicle Falcon 9, if you build a new one every day for a year, at the end of the year, you still only have one Falcon 9 upper stage because it's dispendable.

Whereas with Starship, if you build a new one every day for a year, at the end of the year, you have 365 Starships because they're reusable.

And it's not just SpaceX.

There's new rockets coming from Blue Origin, Stokes Space, Relativity Space, and Rocket Lab.

even if you have a pretty healthy dose of skepticism on their forecasts, the coming capacity is just mind-blowing and will be the real game changer.

So this coming capacity reminded me or got me thinking about the concepts from sci-fi that I remember reading about as a kid or as a teenager under the torchlight at night.

In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov first wrote about the idea of space-based solar, which is where you have a huge solar panel in space and then you somehow beam that power down.

The problem with space-based solar, though, has always been that you lose most of the energy and transmission from space to Earth.

But with low-cost launch, we now have the ability to move things like data centers to space, close to the energy source, to consume the energy there and just beam down the results so we don't lose the energy and transmission.

I ran the numbers with my co-founders, Ezra Fielden and Adi Oltin, and we came to the conclusion that if the launch cost gets to around $500 a kilo, which is well within Starship launch prices, data centers in space will be economically viable.

So that's how the idea came about.

But where does this $500 a kilo number come from?

And how is it that energy for data centers in space will be cheaper than on Earth?

Well, let's run a comparison with a data center on Earth with a solar project on Earth to power data center because solar on Earth is the cheapest form of energy we have right now.

So you have three big costs with a solar project on Earth.

Number one is the cost of permitted land.

This is actually the biggest cost or can be the biggest cost, particularly in North America where it's linked to the energy price.

Number two, you have the cost of battery storage because you need to charge the batteries during the day so that you have power at night.

And number three, you have the cost of the solar cells themselves.

So how does that compare with a solar project in space?