Google says Starship needs about 1,800 launches to make space data centres work
TechCrunch reports a Google white paper puts the figure near 180 launches a year for a decade, assuming 200 tonnes per flight and launch costs around $200 a kilogram by 2035.
Google believes SpaceX's Starship would have to launch about 1,800 times over the next decade before orbital data centres become cost-effective, TechCrunch reported on Thursday. That works out to roughly 180 launches a year, assuming 200 metric tons per mission, according to a Google white paper the outlet says will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.
The paper's cost case rests on a learning curve. Google projects launch costs could reach $200 per kilogram by 2035 if SpaceX keeps cutting prices by 20 percent a year, as it has since Falcon 1, TechCrunch said. Matching the cost fall seen with Falcon 9 would take about 370,000 tons of payload launched to orbit.
The analysis supports Project Suncatcher, Google's plan for orbital networks of 81 satellites flying in formation. Travis Beals, the Google executive running it, said the bandwidth and latency between TPUs matter a great deal when running a multi-rack workload. Google has not said when it expects to build the full network.
Radiation is the other open question. TechCrunch said Google's testing found error rates of about one in a million for inference operations, but that the chips remain a problem for large training runs lasting months. We have not read the white paper itself, and the figures here are as TechCrunch relayed them.