Musk's Space AI Data Centre Plans Are Moronic

Musk has diarrhoea of the mouth and constipation of the brain.

Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash

The stupid spectrum has a fascinating flaw. You’d think the more stupid something is, the easier it would be to spot as stupid, but that is only true to a point. Past that point, when something is monstrously dense, we lose all context, and it can be hard to nail down not just how brainless the idea is, but what about it is even daft in the first place. So, sometimes, the more stupid a plan, claim, idea or alike is, the harder it is to recognise how neurologically challenged it is. I can think of no better example of this than Musk’s recent claims that SpaceX plans to deploy 100 GW of solar capacity in space annually to power orbiting AI data centres. On its face, it sounds like a mildly ambitious task that SpaceX, as the largest space launch company in the world, could hit. Yet, it is possibly the most laughably blockheaded and assinine thing to have ever left Musk’s lips. And that is saying something.

For starters, some context. The US national grid, the second-largest energy grid on the planet, has a total energy capacity of 460 GW. Musk wants to build an energy system that orbits the Earth that is larger than this immense energy grid that took decades to build down on terra firma, in just five years. That should give you an idea of the scale at which Musk is talking about here. It is beyond James Bond villain levels of preposterous.

But, the realities of building, launching and deploying these satellites are, to put it mildly, impossible.

Take the solar panels themselves. You can’t use the same ones you strap to your house in space, the vacuum pressure, the giant fluctuating heat gradients and constant intense radiation would rapidly destroy them. For space, you need far more robust, and therefore, far more expensive, solar cells.

Gallium arsenide is the current go-to technology for space solar cells. They are efficient, relatively light, and insanely durable. There are some experimental advanced lightweight solar technologies being developed, but they are far from ready for deployment, and there is no manufacturing capacity for them. So, if Musk wants space solar, he will have to turn to gallium arsenide.

A space-rated gallium arsenide solar array currently costs around $300 per watt of capacity (according to polytequnique insights) and has an energy density of 350 watts per kilogram (according to KeAi). This means that 100 GW of these solar cells will have a mass of 285,714,285 kg, and would cost $30 trillion to purchase. Even Musk’s deep pockets couldn’t afford that.

These are, admittedly, very rough estimates. After all, if the solar cells don’t need to last that long, then they can weigh less and cost a bit less, and ordering this many would change the economy of production. However, these changes will only marginally optimise things, not deliver radical reductions in cost and mass. So, these figures do give us a good sense of just how expensive this endeavour would be.

Also, as a side note, these solar arrays have an energy density of 300 W/m², meaning this 100 GW array would cover an area twice the size of London, or 1,200 square miles. If SpaceX deployed these solar arrays as a giant mega-structure, it would be so vast that the structure would likely be wildly unstable and could collapse. The current total area of solar arrays on orbiting Starlink satellites is roughly 0.3 square miles, so if instead SpaceX wants to deploy these solar arrays as a constellation of satellites, they would likely need to deploy hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of satellites each year. And, don’t forget that SpaceX has filled Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with so many Starlink satellites that they are now having to lower their orbits, putting them in greater danger of fatal geomagnetic storms, because LEO is so damn full of Starlink satellites.

But, to be fair, it doesn’t make sense to put these solar arrays in LEO, as that orbit enters the Earth’s shadow, limiting how much energy they can create. Instead, it makes far more sense to deploy them to Geostationary Orbit (GTO), as there, they will get 24/7 sunlight. Getting them there will be more expensive than taking them to LEO, but it is a worthwhile expense.

So, how much will it cost?

Well, Musk obviously wants to use his Starship to deploy all this solar capacity, after all, its entire reason for existing is to be by far the cheapest route to space.

But, as the past few years have shown, Musk’s predictions as to Starship’s payload, cost and effectiveness absolutely can’t be trusted. The original was meant to have a 100-tonne payload to LEO, but it was never even launched with a payload, as it was so crap. The unplanned second generation has only been rated for a 35 tonne payload to LEO, despite only having a “sucessful” flight with less than half that onboard, and failing spectacularly with just 20 tonnes onboard.

As such, I doubt even the next generation of Starship can take even a small payload to GTO, let alone take it reliably. But, let’s be enormously generous and say that somehow, SpaceX meets the 21-tonne payload to GTO they promised in their 2020 Starship user’s guide.

With that payload, it would take 13,605 Starship launches to take this 100 GW solar array into GTO. Or, in other words, taking 100 GW of solar capacity into space each year, as Musk claims he will, requires more than 37 Starship launches per day. Let’s also not forget that this figure doesn’t include the structures to hold these solar arrays, the data centres they are meant to power, or the necessary radiation shielding, cooling systems and communications systems they need.

But here is the thing, Musk’s claim that Starship launches will cost $2 million to $10 million a pop is also total horse shit. I explain this more in my previous article (click here), but a far more realistic, yet wildly optimistic estimate is $70 million per launch.

That puts the price of launching all this solar capacity at $952.38 billion! And remember, this isn’t a one-off. Musk wants to do this annually.

Another side note, this many launches would emit up to a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is more than the global aviation industry emits annually, and would raise humanity’s global carbon emissions by 2.6%.

All of this means that the total cost of SpaceX deploying 100 GW of solar power to space is, optimistically, $30.95 trillion! For some context, that is around the same value as the entire US economy, and just less than the US national debt, which is $38 trillion. Musk and his backers are rich, but nowhere near rich enough for that!

Musk’s idea of deploying 100 GW of solar to orbit each year is so utterly insane, mornic, dimwitted, hairbrained, dopey, absurd, nutty, gormless and just straight up laughably stupid, that it should disqualify his opinion or ideas going forward. It shows he hasn’t the first idea what the hell he is talking about. This is such a ludicrously dense, exaggerated idea that even if he proposed it at a pie-in-the-sky meeting, where any suggestions go, he should be laughed at and kicked out for it, because it shows he has nothing of value to give.

But, while I will never claim to be smart, I’m not an idiot. I know these claims are the ramblings of a billionaire conman. He isn’t saying this because he wants to do it; he is saying it because it will line his pockets. And, wouldn’t you know, SpaceX is set to go public this year with a trillion-dollar IPO, despite Starlink still being unprofitable and Starship constantly exploding.

No, this idiotic claim exists for the same reason those Nigerian price emails were full of misspellings and ludicrous sums of cash up for grabs. Sure, more people would believe those emails if they were spelt right, and the sum of cash up for grabs was reasonable. But those scamers don’t want reasonable people; they won’t want the vulnerable, the easily manipulated, those so desperate, they will ignore every red flag. The idiocy of those scam emails wasn’t a bug; it was a feature to filter out the reasonable and lock in on the easiest to manipulate and pillage. Musk, in my opinion, is doing the exact same thing here. Wild, mornic, totally unrealistic bullshit to extract wealth from the desperate by driving them to invest directly in SpaceX. I mean, it isn’t like he hasn’t done that before.

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Sources: Next Big Future, NSS, Polytechnique Insight, Science Direct, Will Lockett, Tao Climate, Berlin.de, Ars Technica, Space Flight Now, Space.com