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Comment by Clewza313

The game changer here is SpaceX's Starship. If you can lift 100T to orbit in one shot, that suffices to deploy around 6 MW worth of the current solar panels we use for the ISS, which clock in at around 120KW/2T. Solar panel efficiency has improved greatly since they were designed and built, so even accounting for the overhead of assembly, refueling, the transmission component etc, 10MW+ per launch seems quite feasible, particularly if Musk gets costs down to the mooted $20/kg or so.

Charlie Stross does the napkin math here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-...

parent Clewza313 5 years ago

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