How Far and Fast Can the Commercial Space World Grow? 159
coondoggie writes "The development of the commercial space industry has in the past been slow and deliberate, but that seems like it's about to change with a whirlwind of developments that could shape or break its immediate future. Today the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics is holding a hearing to go over the Federal Aviation Administration's 2012 budget request, which includes close to $27 million — nearly a 75% increase over 2010 — in the budget for the group tasked with overseeing commercial space development. They're also evaluating the need for a longer regulatory ban. Also this week the Government Accountability Office issued a review of the issues the commercial space industry and the FAA face (PDF) going forward "
Sky is the .... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait....
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What will commercial space companies do? (Score:5, Interesting)
So the speed of development seems to be limited by companies' ability to find things in or about space that can be commercially exploited. It's still not clear what else there is out there that would be a profitable venture.
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Commercial communication satellites have been very marginal in terms of profit for years. There is a glut of manufacturing capability compared to the demand.
(AC because I work in the industry)
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Yes. This was a hard-sell item to Queen Isabella, too.
Nor was Spain able to monopolize all the profits. Can you imagine how to even calculate what the "value" of those profits is? We're talking about the "New World".
Now - this is not going to happen in our "Isabella" lifetimes. Whether we ever break Faster Than Light travel or not.
But multiply that above "value" times tens, or hundreds of thousands of worlds.
The word "Profit" seems trite.
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The word "Profit" seems trite.
It means you get more out of an activity than you put in. The moral connotation is just a distraction.
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you have a pretty liberal, brain washed, view of profit. It means you have added value to something. whether you've taken raw materials and refined them into something of more value and sold it, or you brokered a deal that allowed someone else to get something they wanted.
investment + labor = value add = profit
With your line of thought then everybody in the world is ripping off companies every day because they get more in their paycheck than they put into the company ie ~$0.
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With your line of thought then everybody in the world is ripping off companies every day because they get more in their paycheck than they put into the company ie ~$0.
That's where the concept of trade comes in: voluntary, mutually advantageous transactions.
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Of course it's matter of defining "you", and timeframe. If it's "you humanity" get more out of an activity than you put in "during current millennium", then it's quite different from "you stockholders" get more out of an activity than you put in "during this quarter".
I remain leery of any claim to net benefit over the timescale of millennia. That's probably because I've never run across an activity with large cost to us now and sufficiently massive benefit in the far future to break even, much less measure any sort of profit.
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Yes. This was a hard-sell item to Queen Isabella, too. Nor was Spain able to monopolize all the profits. Can you imagine how to even calculate what the "value" of those profits is? We're talking about the "New World".
No, just no. Didn't they teach you this in school? America is where they ended up, but that wasn't where they thought they were going. They were looking for an alternative to the Silk Road, the land route to India and China. The goods to be traded were luxuries such as silk, satin, hemp and other fine fabrics, musk, other perfumes, spices, medicines, jewels, glassware and rhubarb. They thought they knew approximately how long the sea route would be based on Earth's circumference, it was only a matter of fin
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Yes, they did. Which is why everyone thought Columbus was a crackpot - everyone knew that the distance from Europe west to China was close 15000 miles.
Note that Columbus was a distinct minority in thinking that China was close enough to reach with the ships of the day.
Note also that Flemish fishermen had been drying fish in Newfoundland before Columbus ever sailed. And that Columbus probably knew this, sin
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In addition to navigation, and telecommunications, reconnaissance is also a huge field (of which weather satellites are only a very small part). Google Earth is but another example of this kind of survey system that absolutely depends upon satellites to function, not to mention how businesses like farmers or mineral exploration companies use satellite information to map the surface of the Earth to find mineral composition and "mass concentrations" in the Earth that might yield profitable mining operations.
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Yes, not much out there at all, just the rest of the universe. Columbus, Cook and Marco Polo all had a hard time at getting funding too. You know what, we all have very little idea about what we can do up there, basically because we aren't really up there yet but, given time people just like you will use hind sight to claim credit for all the things eventually done up there.
Why would you live in a colony in space, well assuming your life in measured in hundreds of years and not tens, you avoid all the in
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Asteroids worth trillions in minerals and a ready source of free energy to process them?
But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Communication and physics research satellites seem to be the only thing people are launching. Until more tech that is space-only is developed, we really have no reason to go up there.
Supply and demand. We have no demand, so therefore there is no supply.
What we should be focusing on is how to create the demand.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tourism is a huge demand. You get it down to $10k and I will take a ticket right now. Lots of other folks would be buying at $100k.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tourism is a huge demand. You get it down to $10k and I will take a ticket right now. Lots of other folks would be buying at $100k.
One of the space tourism guys was saying recently that there's a surprising amount of demand for spaceflight in the million-dollar range, where people who could afford to fly on Soyuz can't afford the time required for the training (AFAIR Soyuz passengers have to train as crew, whereas a true tourist flight would only take a small amount of training).
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I think it is actually that big... they are just creaming the market... why charge 10k when you have enough people willing to pay 200k to get you started and test out the system... when you have grown enough, decrease price gradually... it is a more sound business plan... if you ask me though, if they can get the price to $100, it is even is better :)
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So far, the only "space tourists" that have gone up past the Kármán line have all been customers of Space Adventures.... and they've all gone orbital. Every single last one of them, including docking at the International Space Station.
While I think there will be more sub-orbital tourists than the orbital variety, and that is where the talk is coming from, where the action is happening instead of the talk it is all orbital spaceflight.
That sort of blows your whole point away, and it will be severa
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"Space tourism" is not a sustainable market. Once you've shot your wad and everybody with the money and interest to pay 10k for a couple hours in space has gone (and I think you'll find that the number of people both interested & wealthy enough to do this are much smaller than you seem to think)... what then?
There's still nowhere to go up there, it's a joyride. Yay, you went WAY UP IN THE AIR, got a couple lovely panoramic views as the craft inverted, and then came back down. Now what? How many peop
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"Space tourism" is not a sustainable market. Once you've shot your wad and everybody with the money and interest to pay 10k for a couple hours in space has gone (and I think you'll find that the number of people both interested & wealthy enough to do this are much smaller than you seem to think)... what then?
Well, how do you explain the enduring popularity of tourism markets in general? After all, if you've spent a couple of hours on Mount Everest or Paris, does that mean you've "shot your wad?" I imagine that space tourism operators would vary their routines, come up with new trips, build interesting destinations, and do all the other tricks that normal tourism operators employ to create repeat business.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
The enduring popularity of tourism markets in general is the fact that there are things to do and see once you get there. There is none of that in space, and we are long, long years away from any sort of "cruise ship in space" experience. If you have no destination to go to, and nothing to do while you're there, "space tourism" is simply not sustainable. Even if-and-when there are "private space stations" the economics of building living facilities in space will keep it a novelty experience for the ultra-rich. Just like you and I don't get to stay in the penthouse of the Trump Tower for 3 months at a time when we visit New York, we'll find that "2 hours of flight with 15 minutes of zero g and the opportunity to take some photos of the earth from orbit" are the tourism experiences that will be within reach of the "common man" - and by "common man," I mean upper middle class.
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The enduring popularity of tourism markets in general is the fact that there are things to do and see once you get there.
Gee, I guess space tourism will have to do that then.
Even if-and-when there are "private space stations" the economics of building living facilities in space will keep it a novelty experience for the ultra-rich.
Until it's cheap enough for the not-so-ultra-rich. Present conditions will not continue.
we'll find that "2 hours of flight with 15 minutes of zero g and the opportunity to take some photos of the earth from orbit" are the tourism experiences that will be within reach of the "common man" - and by "common man," I mean upper middle class.
For the next few years, sure.
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The founder of SpaceX, who has every reason to talk up his chosen industry, expects that they'll be able to ship cargo to space for $1100 per kilogram - eventually.
Do the math, and figure out why shipping a 75kg human being, with all of the food, water, oxygen, and hell, 30 kg of luggage too, is never going to be anything more than a dream for anybody who is not in the "fuck-you money" bracket of the idle rich.
Here, I'll help: a 75kg person (that's ~165 pounds) will need to spend $82,500 just to ship the
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Here, I'll help: a 75kg person (that's ~165 pounds) will need to spend $82,500 just to ship themselves up.
So? Now we're talking high end tourism not mission Apollo costs. There are a lot of people in the so-called "fuck-you money" bracket.
to spend a week up in space in a tin can with... absolutely fuck-all to do - quite literally.
Just like all those other tourist destinations. Oh right, they have weather to talk about.
I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe the same people who can figure out how to put an operating hotel in space will also use a small bit of that brain power to figure out how to entertain tourists in the most unique environment mankind has yet created.
This notion that someday we're going to hope in a personal space craft in our backyard and fly to the moon is a fantasy.
Things change. You still igno
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No, there really aren't. Because those people would have to both *have the money to afford this trip,* and *have any interest in going.* When you are talking about a plane ticket that costs more than the household income of 75% of the households in the United States, you have a VERY small potential market. Realistically, your target market is people making well over a million dollars a year, and they're a fraction of 1% of the population
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See some of my other posts throughout this thread. The founder of SpaceX expects that the price-per-kilogram to orbit will "eventually" reach $1100, from roughly $4000 today.
Yes, that's a dramatic reduction. Yes, that means that it's cheaper to get there. It still means that a 75kg human being is paying $82,500 for a ride into space, and that's just the launch - the costs for all of the other stuff need to be factored in as well - building & maintaining & staffing a safe, livable habitat in space
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People do pay to use the rides at funfairs though. This would be similar, I would imagine.
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And if it cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to ride the ferris wheel, people wouldn't do that, either.
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The fact that there's, uh, you know, a DESTINATION? You can GET OFF the airplane? Breathe the air? Have WEATHER? Meet PEOPLE? (I realize this is probably not a selling point for the average Asperger's Space Whackjob though) Eat food that wasn't freeze-dried? Look, do I REALLY need to explain this to you? Have you EVER been anywhere that didn't involve a game console? Jesus Christ!
Space is itself a destination. Plus you can put space stations up there or go other places such as the Moon. As to the experience, it's not going to be like anything on Earth. Sure space doesn't have weather as you might think of it, but it does have amazing phenomena such as weightlessness and great views of Earth or other places.
You're delusional. You can make the same arguments for bottom of the ocean tourism...
Which incidentally is a growing business.
What is the deal with space? When I had a CRT, I didn't have the irrational urge to visit the vacuum inside.... You guys are nuts. Completely irrational and utterly misinformed on the nature of space. It's just not that great. So there's a few millionaires with egos. How does that translate into the fantasy-levels of space technology you think we have?
The rest of the universe is in space. Do you really want to spend your whole life in a shrinking cradle and have no wonder about what lies
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What happens if you stay in orbit for a week? A month? A year? Are you sure that you can't do that again?
How many people do you think would like to be part of the first hundred folks who have gone past the Moon in a circum-lunar flight (re-creating Apollo 8)? How about being named the "first person in the 21st Century to orbit the Moon"? There certainly are some folks have egos that large, and even bank accounts to afford it.
It is far more than simply a joy-ride up into the sky, hanging around for a co
Re:But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pray tell, what will you do in orbit for a week? A month? A year? What wonderful sights and experiences will you have while you're there, and where will you have these wonderful experiences - on your launch vehicle? For a month? I'm really hard-pressed to think of anybody who would consider a year floating in circles above the earth in a single seat in the space shuttle to be much of a "vacation".
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
Exactly, there are some folks with egos & bank accounts. Those folks will never be numerous enough to make "space tourism" a sustainable venture for regular folks. "Space tourism" is, and will continue to be - barring signficant advances in the economics of survival in space - a novelty marketed to the very wealthy. The ONLY "space tourism" that will be within reach of the "regular" people (i.e. upper middle class, nobody below that will ever be able to afford it) will be the couple-hour joyride with some photos and a few minutes of zero gravity.
Yes, it will be just for the view. What else is there to do up there, for a "tourist"? Float around in zero-g for a month? That would appeal to about 30 Slashdotters, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't make a sustainable market. Space tourism is simply a big "Observation Deck," and unless you make significant changes in the economics of survival in space, that's all it will be. And as I said, if the Observation Deck at the Empire State Building was literally the ONLY THING you could do in New York City as a tourist, then NYC would have a lot fewer tourists.
I get the feeling reading these comments that people think we're going to be launching to some massive space station in earth orbit which is some sort of Battlestar Galactica-style pleasure ship, complete with blue-skinned Alpha Centaurian courtesans. There IS NO facility in space for tourism to be anything more than "up, look around, down." Anything else will have to be built, i.e. launched from earth and assembled in space, and constantly resupplied and operated for YEARS with perfect safety while handling a steady stream of cargo & human traffic moving to it from the earth's surface.
The ISS, designed for a crew of 6, has an estimated cost of between 35 and 160 billion dollars. How many tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars will it take to build something that could handle an operational crew of 20, and 20-30 guests at a time? And you think this is somehow a feasible economic reality within the reach of a large market of people?
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The ISS, designed for a crew of 6, has an estimated cost of between 35 and 160 billion dollars.
The ISS was not remotely designed for minimum cost, it was a technology demonstrator platform. Ask Bigelow how much these structures need to cost. Ask SpaceX how much it will cost to get them there. Don't talk to me about bullshit political constructs made real like the ISS.
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So let's assume that it's TEN TIMES more expensive than it needed to be. That means to create a livable environment for six humans, it'd cost between 3.5 and 16 billion dollars. Let's assume cost scales perfectly with occupancy, and housing for a single new person costs 580 million to add: Suddenly your 40-person luxury space hotel costs 23 billion at the low end, or 107 billion at the high end. And that's *if the tech can be built for one tenth of the cost it reportedly took to build the ISS,* which is
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And... with all this, you think that any sort of "space tourism" besides a brief launch-photos-return experience will ever be anything but the domain of the idle rich with more money than sense?
I'm trying to see the problem here, and it's just not coming to me. In what way does this impede the validity of the business model in today's world of golden parachutes, subsidies, and tax cuts for the rich?
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Well, I'm sure political snark will make the business model MUCH more sustainable.
Thanks for trolling!
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You're a stupid ass. I was making the entirely valid point that there are a bunch of people who will pay for such an experience, so there is money to be made there. If you want to argue about whether there's enough we can do that but there's plenty of people for whom that is chump change.
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Ya, I think the same thing about the beach. I mean, it might be good for a day trip, but how much time can you r
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Bigelow Aerospace [bigelowaerospace.com]
And before you start ranting about, "Promises, promises...." you should know that Bigelow has multiple
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There are probably millions/hundreds of thousands willing to pay that price. Safety is not an issue for many. I am willing to take the same risk as a soyuz trip presents at that price.
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One of the ideas I've seen floating around is actually traveling far distances by going into space and then dropping down where you're wanting to go. I think that's the most likely application for this, at least in the near term. The other one being an orbiting hotel.
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That isn't totally unreasonable, but how many times are you willing to pay 10K to visit space?
Apparently most of the pre-booked flights for sub-orbital flights are researchers. That's a market where they'd go up regularly.
Don't get hung up on the word "tourist", it just means "not crew".
$10k is (Score:3)
Lamely replying to myself....
Commercial vomit comet flights are $5000 per person (plus tax.) For a couple of minutes of interrupted zero-g (15 parabolas of 30 seconds each, spread over an hour.)
$10k for a ten minute sub-orbital flight would sell like hotcakes. $10k for 90 minutes in orbit would have a waiting list of years.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question is why you don't have enough imagination to figure out reasons why we might want to go up there. We wouldn't have those satellites in orbit at all if people approached things with your attitude. The opportunities always seem obvious in hindsight, but it takes a pioneering spirit to seek new ones out and make them real.
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This, though in my opinion the biggest tech advances to come out of Space exploration are right here on earth.
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No, the real question is why buzzword filled drivel like yours gets modded insightful. The OP made a valid point - which you failed to address at all.
Jingoism is no substitute to actual thought.
Hogwash. LEO is a physical place just like Manhattan or Des M
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I think the problem is in trying to see LEO as a destination. It's not, it's just a stepping stone to juicier pickings further out.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
I mean -- its not like our space faring civilization will ever just build itself us.
I mean -- It's not like theres ever been another dominant life form that's now utterly extinct due to one or two slightly above average asteroids striking the Earth -- You can be complacent because you're ancestors were not dinosaurs... I suppose you believe Mammals are impervious to extinction events since we're so prevalent and adaptable (tell that to the anaerobic life that was killed off in the great origination catastrophe --- hint: our oxygen levels drop a bit more, we won't be having this discussion, it'll be the anaerobes' turn again).
In short: Life on Earth finally got decent brains! Let's not flippin' waste them due to insignificant BS and artificially important economic issues -- Anything less than advocating space exploration is burying your head in the sand (and ignoring the fossil record found there).
Those that don't know their history are doomed; There is no second chance to repeat it for some species.
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Right on. Keep preaching, I'll sit here in the choir!
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Of course, maybe they are all oxygen-breathing humanoids with fucked up foreheads who speak English. It's possible.
You're assuming that the longterm survival of the species is a strong motivator for the average person.
It doesn't need to be. The average pers
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As in the previous case, I bet a majority would say they support these things, but would prefer not to pay for them. Would you say that "doesn't seem supportive"? Furthermore, would you support getting rid of these public services?
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1% sounds like a little and you seem to be counting on that. 1% of the United States budget is fairly impressive to me, however.
And how are people not "putting their money where their mouth is in voting"? Seriously. How? The results of those polls are fairly well known and discussed.
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Increasing the funding of NASA with the specific purpose of "[moving] out into th
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You're assuming that the longterm survival of the species is a strong motivator for the average person. [...] What matters is our immediate happiness. [...] I increasingly suspect that an intelligent race would more likely not go into space. Interesting possibilities I've heard speculated are that it would ultimately commit mass suicide, feeling existence is pointless, or withdraw into a virtual reality world on its own planet [...]
Geoffrey Miller's take on Fermi's Paradox:
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels... ever so good.
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens [seedmagazine.com]
Geoffrey Miller [wikipedia.org]
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I'm not complacent - but I'm also not ignorant. Going into space today to escape a dinosaur killer is like walking into an auto body shop to buy a pizza. It's not only pointless, it's stupidly silly - because it's going to be centuries at best before anything off planet has
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There is no evidence that the dinosaurs did not have space flight... Think about it!
They aren't around now, well aside from birds who survived things the hard way.
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I think there's a critical mass of technology that is required before we can effectively create the demand, and that is what these companies are working on (launching satellites to pay the bills in the meantime). Working backwards here: I don't think that we're going to be able to do much in space manufacturing (etc) until we close the life support loop; sending supplies up constantly is just too expensive. Bigelow is working on that problem, but are currently constrained by launch costs. SpaceX, Virgin,
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Raw materials and energy.
One of the caps on human expansion is the limit of raw materials and energy.
Energy: just under 100 million miles from our planet is a massive fusion reactor, putting out 3x10^20 megawatts of power PER SECOND. Never needs refuelling, can't melt down.
Raw materials: at 1997 prices (it's the metric wiki used), a sub-1-mile-diameter metallic asteroid is believed to contain more than $20 trillion in gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
A few ideas? (Score:2)
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Why would we mine asteroids, or gas giants, when we have the technology to mine all those same elements right back here on earth?
You realize that the elements available here are pretty much the same as you'd find anywhere, right? Like, Hydrogen here on earth is the same as Hydrogen on Jupiter? Considering that 70% of the earth's surface is covered, in some places miles deep, with a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, I'd say extracting hydrogen and oxygen right here on earth would be a lot more economical th
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Agreed. I'd also point out that, as you increase the supply, the price goes down so it has to be even cheaper than you think.
Imagine running across a solid gold asteroid. You'd be rich! But when you brought it back to Earth and started to sell lots of it in order to pay off the costs of actually getting it, you'd end up making less money because you'd drive the price of gold down. That would be true for anything that's available on Earth.
The real reason for mining astroids, etc. is to provide an infrast
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When the California Gold Rush happened in 1849, there were hoards of people who traveled to San Francisco (or overland) for the chance to "make it rich". Some fairly wealthy people spent the modern equivalent of a million dollars or more to make the trip too. Furthermore, in spite of being able to claim they were rich (and many did become quite wealthy), the price of gold did drop considerably compared to almost all currencies world-wide because that hoard of gold ended up flooding the world commodity mar
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Here's the problem with your comparison to the Gold Rush: San Francisco isn't millions of miles away in a vacuum that is completely inhospitable to human life, which requires hundreds of millions of dollars just to reach, much less extract minerals from, and ship them back to earth.
By contrast, during the gold rush, a few tens of dollars would get you set up to prospect. Some chisels & hammers, sifting pans, shovels, and pickaxes were sufficient. And yet, about half of the miners [wikipedia.org] ended up losing mone
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I think you forget just how remote San Francisco was in the 1850's. It was quite literally on the frontier of European civilization and required expeditions that did indeed cost in today's dollars the equivalent of millions of dollars to travel to that destination from places like Germany or England. For some of the sailing ships, it was close to hundreds of millions of dollars in today's "inflation adjusted" money.
Not only that, but it took the better part of a year or more to get there, as they had to s
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They will not, at least not on any scale that would be commercially viable, and your vapid wishful thinking will not change one iota of the economic reasons for that. There is *no place to go* and there is *nothing to do,* in the "tourism" sense. And from the "exploiting raw materials" perspective, there is no resource on Jupiter that would be cheaper to produce there and ship back to earth that wouldn't be cheaper to simply find
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Yes, yes, and yes. Put down the Star Trek DVDs and engage your fucking brain.
He-3 on the moon is the same as He-3 on earth. There will never be a time where it will be cheaper to extract it from the moon, or Saturn, or Jupiter and ship it back here to earth than it is to manufacture it through tritium decay here on earth. Period. Full stop.
There is NO economically viable future in "mining asteroids" or "mining the moon" or "extracting gases from jupiter." Why? Because we'd have to strip-mine half of C
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Problem is that if you bring that quantity back to earth, you'll depress the prices to the point where it isn't worth going out to get them. Even with a 10 fold reduction in launch costs, such as what SpaceX gives us, there aren't any elements or materials in existence and of sufficient value to mine in space and return to earth. The only possible exception is Helium-3, but that assumes we can develop He3 fusion any time soon.
Even if you were to find an asteroid made from pure platinum, by the time you br
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When you mention launch costs, you are presuming that the price point includes sending fuel up on those rockets and shipping that fuel from the surface of the Earth to some asteroid and then trying to get a conventional rocket designed for flying off of the surface of the Earth to be able to return with that fuel barely making it back to the Earth.
That is a whole lot of assumptions that I think simply are false and misleading when being discussed about the economics of extracting minerals in space. Yes, a
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Why? Are these asteroids magical Asteroids of Infinite Ore? Do they have a super-fast bugged respawn rate that allows us to spawn-camp them, getting enough ore to finally corner the auction house?
You are trying to gloss over a huge number of practical economic issues, which makes it clear you haven't actually thought this premise through to its conclusion.
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Yeah, and you're also missing all the pesky overlying atmosphere which is sort of required by the people mining this magical rock. Oops.
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I have a feeling that the people you're responding to have a raging case of PHB syndrome: "Look, coal mining is done by a bunch of blue-collar high school dropouts, how hard can mining really be? The hard part is clearly just developing a rocket to get there. We can make robots at least as smart as high school dropouts, GAWD."
Meaningless growth (Score:3)
As someone pointed out recently, our brightest minds in computer science are laboring at ways to get more people to click on links. Similarly, the commercial space industry will develop quickly, but it will be focused on putting enormous ads in the sky, or something equally useless.
rockets are holding us back (Score:2)
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Space elevators are theoretically possible with modern material science, and that science is still advancing. There are other problems to be worked out, of course, but they are *being* worked out already.
I'm not saying I'm sure we'll see a space elevator in my lifetime, but I wouldn't bet against it. There's a huge technological advantage to having one; every other option requires either lifting all the power to get out of the gravity well with you (and nothing short of nuclear energy will do that with suff
Regardless of how it eventually happens, (Score:2)
Space will be settled by the impatient.
Re: (Score:3)
Ah, young padawan AC.
You should know Matt from his O'Reilly book: Running Linux (now in it's 5th edition).
If you want to know more, go to http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/ [harvard.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Really, Skylon?
I'd never trust a bastard stepchild of Skynet and the Cylons.
Re: (Score:2)
Really, that could be it. I discovered that project about month ago, and its seems promising.
Skylon's problem is that it's too expensive to develop and not cheap enough in operation. There's no known or predicted market large enough at its predicted cost per kilo to justify the $10,000,000,000+ development cost.
It flies too fast at staging and has no wings, thus it bound to hit earth fast. I understand that parachutes will slow it down but not
much to keep the delicate tanks from cracking or even bending.
Generally speaking, tanks are cheap, the engines are the expensive part. Being able to reuse the whole thing would be nice, but if you can only reuse the engines that's still a substantial win.
And NASA looked seriously at reusing Saturn rocket stages in the past. It hasn't really been tested
Re: (Score:2)
If the Skylon ever begins flying it will never be man-rated for one simple reason: engine unstart (hammer shock) is a safety of flight issue. This is one of the problems that killed NASP.
If one of the engines ever unstarts, it will suddenly become a drag producer instead of a thrust producer. With massive drag way out on the wing on one side of the aircraft and massive thrust way out on the wing on the other side, the Skylon will snap sideways to the airflow and be torn apart by aerodynamic forces.
The way
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking about it all wrong. Massive space tourism, you're right. But unmanned mining robots, possibly partly remotely operated, could be preparing packages which get sent back to Earth so that we don't have to do crap like mining here. Power generation could also be moved offplanet to avoid crap like coal and nuclear plants spewing nuclear waste into our atmosphere.