Elon Musk's grand vision for igniting competition in space computing is to leverage SpaceX's launch capabilities, combined with Tesla's photovoltaic and energy storage technologies to meet power needs, by deploying his Grok data center in space orbit and utilizing the Starlink communication network to address data networking and transmission. Additionally, space orbit offers cheap spatial resources, and there is no need for land and water cooling costs. These are all absolute game-changing technologies in Musk's hands. If this grand strategy is truly realized, it will be a dimensionality reduction strike, directly overshadowing competitors in AI computing power like Microsoft, Google, ChatGPT, and Meta. In the future, Musk will find it hard to find any rivals.
In a public forum a few days ago, Musk stated that this year he aims to achieve full recovery and reuse of Starship, thereby reducing the cost of space transportation to $100 per kilogram, which is a highly impactful figure. Currently, the main rocket that launches nearly 200 times a year is Falcon, with a cost of $3,000-$4,000 per kilogram, already the cheapest price globally.
China and Russia also have rockets with a cost-performance ratio of $4,000-$6,000, which is close in cost, but they fall far behind Falcon in launch frequency. SpaceX launches every two days with a dense schedule and also offers ride-sharing features, which China and Russia cannot match, so international commercial contracts have all been taken by SpaceX.
If Starship successfully achieves full reuse next year, the cost will only be 2.5% of Falcon's, a revolutionary advancement comparable to buying a Rolls-Royce Phantom at the price of a BYD Qin. Only when transportation prices drop to a certain extent can we truly realize launching photovoltaics and computing power bases into space profitably.
Why can costs drop so significantly? There are mainly two factors: first, Starship's single launch capacity is 8-9 times that of Falcon; second, previously Falcon could only recover the lower half each time, while the upper half, costing $10 million, was a consumable, whereas Starship is designed for complete recovery and reuse, naturally leading to a significant reduction in costs.
Recently, the market has been hot on commercial space, space photovoltaics, and space computing, all driven by Musk. He is now the king of global capital promotion; once he speaks, dozens of stocks soar, even in photovoltaics, which have been stagnant for three to four years. This feels familiar, doesn't it, just like in the crypto circle!
