Steve Levitt
speaker
962 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 31 Jul
Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
would require covering an area of about 1,000 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island.
You've said that solar panels are eight times as efficient in space, but that still implies that you'd need something like 100 square miles of solar panels in orbit to produce 5% of U.S.
electricity.
The problem is getting it there, of course.
You need a lot of rockets to get these things into space.
So in the short run, from what I've heard, the biggest barrier to doing this is not even really the physics.
It sounds like you're pretty confident of the physics.
It's just that for orbiting data centers to be economically viable, you need the cost of rocket launches to fall.
How much does the cost of launching these rockets have to fall where this now becomes economically sensible?
Spoken like a true Canadian.
Project Suncatcher plans to launch its first satellites in 2027.
To build the prototypes, they're partnering with Planet, the company founded by former NASA scientist Will Marshall, who we heard from earlier.
More from Marshall after the break.
I'm Steve Levitt.
You're listening to Freakonomics Radio.
You may remember Will Marshall from the beginning of the episode.
He's the former NASA scientist who started a company by prototyping satellites in his garage.
That company, Planet, is the one now prototyping Project Suncatchers satellites.
But that isn't their main business, not at all.
I asked Marshall what Planet does.
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