Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.

The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.

So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.

Yes, it's based in the real world. This was the Falcon 9 launch price that I could come up with in the amount of time I was willing to spend on a shitpost. I agree that launch prices will continue to come down, but launchers will always be mass-constrained and launching lead spheres into orbit will never be a practical solution.

I agree.

IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)

How long until they can build that massive box, stage it in orbit, and pick it up/put it down as needed?

I can't decide if I'm joking or not.