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Rebel Blob
Mar 1, 2008
Probation
Can't post for 13 hours!

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

The projected maximum payload for Falcon Heavy is 53 metric tons to LEO, but only 19 metric tons to a geostationary transfer orbit! We'll be generous again and assume that this ratio applies to the final payload to geostationary orbit itself. This effectively raises our launch cost by a factor of at least 2.8, meaning it would cost about 3.1 billion dollars - again, this is only to lift the mass of the solar arrays into orbit. This doesn't cover actually building a modular solar array satellite bigger than the International Space Station, nor does it cover building the receiving antenna or power infrastructure on the ground. Better hope you can design it to be remotely assembled without a human presence, because manned missions will rapidly inflate your costs too.
If you can keep the costs under $20 billion, it would still be less than what the US military spent annually on air conditioning during the Iraq & Afghanistan wars.

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