alt Hacker NewsElon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available.
The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
Replies
What are the benefits of a solar panel in space vs a solar panel here on Earth? I get that there's less "night" up there, and there's less interference from the atmosphere so the solar is more efficient, but is it that much more efficient that it actually makes more sense than solar panels on earth?
Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.