Halo from orbit -- bandwidth needs (was A buck a squafoot)

> > Why spend half a billion dollars launching Wildblue satellites
> > when Wildblue can simply rent time on superior hardware (with
> > superior transmitting power) built (from scratch) and installed
> > in situ at an orbiting city?
> Pray tell, where will all of the electronic components come from?

Value-per-mass ratio codes positively for Earth-sourcing.
Microchips feature high value-to-mass ratios. Other electronics,
such as motherboards/transistors/resistors/capacitors, do not
feature value-to-mass ratios that are as high, but are still
higher than what generally goes into the masses of comsats and
terrestrial communication-basestations. I think that motherboards
would probably be sourced from Earth.

Imagine this...
http://images.google.com/images?q=very+large+array

...times one-million or so, and in orbit, all attached to the same
structure.

> Why would [a chipfab] be built in orbit in order to produce
> a few specialized chips for the "superior hardware"
> you imagine would be built?

I do not think that any chipfabs would be built in orbit.

> The satellite manufacturing business is, what, $1 billion per
> year. So, I don't understand how, in order to save
> launch costs, it's worth establishing a sophisticated economic
> infrastructure in orbit and still come out with cost savings.

There was little market for CPU's and microcomputers before 6502
chips and Apple II's cheaply flooded the market.

Current comsats produce relatively little value-per-dollar. A
city, or nation, in space -- featuring trillions of times the
orbit-Earth bandwidth (ship-to-shore?) of a typical satellite --
would be forging new market territory. How large? I don't know
-- but digital-communication seems to be a universally popular
commodity.

Also, since communications are not the only envisioned market,
there might be new demand anyway to serve the other envisioned
markets -- tax-haven (zero income/capital-gains/business taxes,
including zero social-security/medicare/medicaid and RICO-status
for labor unionizing), spacefan-haven (and middle-class
spacefans who chose to commute to work from orbit would also
profit from the zero-income-tax feature), astronomy,
remote-sensing/viewing of Earth, tourism/amusement/health-spa,
etc. Any given population of 10 million people in a spacehab is
probably going to want to communicate with Earth -- and do so
with bandwidth.
http://images.google.com/images?q=hp+halo+bandwidth