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Space Businesses Earth

Jeff Bezos' Plan to Save Earth? 'Move All Heavy Industry into Space' (timesofsandiego.com) 210

Posted by EditorDavid from the residential-zoning dept.
The world's richest man made some interesting remarks Saturday when he became one of eight inductees into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame for founding the spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000.

The Times of San Diego reports: He described the origins of his space infatuation. Bezos said he told his high school paper he wanted to start a space company to save the environment and "eventually turn Earth into a national park." Saturday, he said: "I believe that, one day, Earth will be zoned residential and light industry. We'll move all heavy industry into space. That's the only way, really, to save this planet."

The 55-year-old Washington Post owner (and would-be NFL team buyer) invoked the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "You can't start an interesting space company in your dorm room," he said. "It's just too hard. It's too expensive. We want to change that." Reducing "the price of admission" to space is this generation's mission and his own, he said, "and the next generation will see a dynamic explosion of entrepreneurial talent the same way you have on the Internet."

His goal is "real operational usability" -- having rockets fly to space and return to earth (landing vertically as his Blue Shepards have done 10 times straight successfully) with regularity. Instead of disassembling and inspecting rockets after each flight, he said, the aim is making space trips "close to aircraft flight operations... You land, refuel and fly again." He said our grandkids' grandkids shouldn't have to face a planet that's "finite." "You want a dynamic civilization that continues to use more and more energy and more and more resources and build amazing things," he said.

"And to do that, you have to move out into the solar system."
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Jeff Bezos' Plan to Save Earth? 'Move All Heavy Industry into Space' More

Jeff Bezos' Plan to Save Earth? 'Move All Heavy Industry into Space'

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  • You would need (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:02AM (#59450626)

    A BeanStalk (AKA space elevator.)

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      You don't need a space elevator. You don't literally "move" the heavy industry into space. You stop building it here, and start building it there. There are real problems to be solved, but don't pretend we can't solve them. Those of us who want to are simply being stymied by already rich fucks who want to get richer, and don't care if the world burns. And as long as we have to pay for their externalities, we are subsidizing their destructive behavior.

      Waiting around for a space elevator will cost more than i

  • Sure, Bozos, I'm 100% behind your plan for heavy industry. All we need now is cheap (as in pennies on the mega-dollar), ubiquitos space launch and space transport capability. No problem, right? It's just another R&D cycle, right? RIGHT???

    Can we get some sanity up in this, please?

    Fine. Solve the mystery of how gravity actually works on the quantum level, and invent gravity control, so we can have gravity polarizer drives for spacecraft (no more reaction drives, reaction mass is not always easy to

    • Re:Yeah sure except for ONE SMALL DETAIL: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kenwd0elq ( 985465 ) <kenwd0elq@engineer.com> on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:48AM (#59450704)

      How does this work? WE DON'T SEND MATERIALS FROM EARTH UP THERE. WE GATHER ASTEROIDS AND COMETS THAT ARE ALREADY UP THERE.

      Robert Heinlein used to write, "It's raining soup! Grab a bucket!". Once orbital and asteroid mining is established, then we won't need fuel to send raw materials UP.

      • We would still need to bring down the materials and/or finished products, which is a problem that is nearly as hard as sending stuff up. Witness, for example, the immense engineering challenges that SpaceX and Boeing face, just to bring down a tiny little capsule.

        • We would still need to bring down the materials and/or finished products, which is a problem that is nearly as hard as sending stuff up.

          Hard, how? Sure, it could be a difficult engineering problem but it's far easier in terms of energy.

          • Energy is not really a concern, either way. The problems are all in engineering. The energy cost for sending up a rocket is only a small percentage of total cost.

      • Yeah, we just mine asteroids! Derp. Space Nutters.

      • No he didn't. You've created a false quote and used it in a discussion of a topic not pertaining to his argument.
        Actual quote:

        Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.”

        Note the difference in tense between his and yours. He was describing a past situation, not making a future projection.

        No, we *may* not need to send mat

    • Bezos just jumped the shark.

    • Reentry is actually pretty cheap, all you need is a heat shield and a parachute. And if you're moving heavy industry to space you're probably using space-based resources to do it, so you don't need to ship much except people up from Earth. At least until you're doing it regularly if you're dumping a sizable percentage of the total durable goods demand of Earth through the atmosphere, the heating and ionization from reentry might present some real problems.

      Gravity drives would be great, but we have no reas

      • Reentry is actually pretty cheap, all you need is a heat shield and a parachute.

        For small objects, yes, but building a suitable parachute system gets exponentially more complicated as payload mass increases.

        • So use multiple small payloads. You don't have to send it as one big wad. Start by sending down refined metals. Work your way up to sending finished products. Don't make it needlessly complicated. Eventually we may have a space elevator so we can send down anything we want, but we can accomplish a great deal without one. Perfect is the enemy of good.

          • So you're planning to launch a landing system from Earth to meet up with a chunk of metal in orbit, match orbital speeds, build them together, and then send the whole thing down again ? For a few tons of refined metals ?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Sure, Bozos, I'm 100% behind your plan for heavy industry. All we need now is cheap (as in pennies on the mega-dollar), ubiquitos space launch and space transport capability. No problem, right? It's just another R&D cycle, right? RIGHT???

      Also another little problem here: Space launches create a lot of pollution. That would need to go down dramatically to make this idea beneficial at all.

  • Earth will be fine. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:32AM (#59450664)

    The real danger isn't to Earth but the many ecosystems on Earth. You cannot save those retroactively, so waiting until you develop super cheap spaceflight isn't going to be an option. The better idea is to proliferate uranium breeder SMRs across the US and it's allies and invest heavily in the development of LFTR to expand globally (since it cannot be used to make nuclear weapons). This would provide a plentiful amount of energy to our planet, wipe out the fossil fuel industry and enable us to use the excess power to actually undo the damage we're doing.

    Rockets are neat but they won't save this planet.

    • First, we only need a couple of dozen rockets and the right automation tech. We can already do this. That's not the problem. The problem is, since humans need gravity, this won't be done by humans. So, realistically, what the hell else will humans do?

      • First, we only need a couple of dozen rockets and the right automation tech

        ... and a hell of a lot of handwaving.

        I've been on a school trip to a steel factory, and I'm pretty sure it won't fit in a dozen rockets, even if we conveniently forget about all the stuff that the steel factory needs to operate on a daily basis.

      • We already have this? Where? I didn't know we already has asteroid mining facilities and space factories!!!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by FudRucker ( 866063 )
      clean energy in the USA wont save the world, when nations like China and India and southeast asia & phillippines and africa and asia are not even concerned about the environment and they dump a HUGE shitload of industrialized pollution on it everyday

      • Then stop buying products made in China/India/Southeast Asia/Philippines until they do change.

        Just because they won't doesn't mean we shouldn't and it doesn't mean we are helpless to their whims.

        Shut up or put up.

      • All those nations you're blaming have a tiny fraction of the per capita carbon output of the USA.

    • Solar and wind are both cheaper than nuclear, and we live in a capitalism. It makes less than no sense to promote nuclear.

      What's needed to wipe out the fossil fuel industry is carbon tax, without trading. Cap and tax, not cap and trade. That's literally all it would take, which is why big oil lobbies so hard against it. If the true costs were accounted for, they would go away rapidly.

      "Rockets are neat but they won't save this planet."

      Use them to launch solar power satellites. That 100% solves the old canard

      • What's needed to wipe out the fossil fuel industry is carbon tax, without trading. Cap and tax, not cap and trade. That's literally all it would take, which is why big oil lobbies so hard against it. If the true costs were accounted for, they would go away rapidly.

        I agree but this would be unable to generate the amount of energy needed to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere to undo the damage we've done. Also, it doesn't work for densely populated nations. I'm all for using renewable energy but SMRs have the potential to be much cheaper. When LFTR is fully developed, it will be a much cheaper way to deploy energy around the globe.

    • The real danger isn't to Earth but the many ecosystems on Earth.

      Thank you, Astute One, but you can relax; not too many are worried about the "health" of the geology, certainly not for its own sake.

  • what about the fuel needed to get that cargo up there?

    • Re:what about the fuel needed to get that cargo up (Score:4, Informative)

      by kenwd0elq ( 985465 ) <kenwd0elq@engineer.com> on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:44AM (#59450694)

      Not much cargo needs to go up. We'll collect asteroids and comets in space, and smelt them down (using solar power, because in space, there's NO LIMIT to solar power), manufacture stuff up there, and send it down in lifting body landing craft.

      • How much will it cost to hire a lifting body craft to land all the space-manufactured sheetrock for your average house? If it's more than a few hundred bucks, it's not going to be competitive with current earthbound distribution systems.

        With this few hundred bucks budget, you're going to have to either launch a reusable landing craft, or manufacture a new disposable one in space.

        • You don't use vehicles to bring stuff down. Heat shields and parachutes. Maybe some very limited propulsion for steering and a super gentle landing.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • And then, how are you gonna get a even single shipping container from Mach 25 orbital velocity to a soft landing in a designated area ?

              (*) Standard container can be loaded to 20 tons if you want to put it on a regular truck, more if you put it on a cargo ship. Compare with Dragon Capsule which has a measly 3.5 ton capacity.

      • "We'll collect asteroids and comets in space"
         
        This post is currently marked +4, Informative.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      As somebody nearby said, you mine the moon or asteroids for raw materials. However, a bigger question is how do you get the "heavy industry" goods back down? If something goes wrong, it's raining dump-trucks.

  • Laserbeams (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:40AM (#59450686)

    At least we now know Dr Evil's obsession with laserbeams.

  • I agree! (Score:3)

    by kenwd0elq ( 985465 ) <kenwd0elq@engineer.com> on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:42AM (#59450688)

    I've thought for 40 years that the right way to do it would be to move most heavy industry into space, or to the Moon.

    There was an early '70s movie called "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern. In that movie, industry was on Earth, and the last remnants of the forests were in bio-domes on space freighters. I thought, then, that this was exactly backwards.

    I'm PROUD that Amazon jacked up the price of my Amazon Prime membership if this and Blue Origin are what he's spending the money on. Go, Jeff!

    • After 19 years of regular billion dollar cash gifts from Bezos, Blue Origin has... a suborbital rocket that isn't ready to fly anyone yet. And a promising but untested BE-4 engine. I'm not impressed.

  • That's a lot of pollution just to fight with gravity.
  • Literally only mega corps can control production.

  • I think the energy and environmental cost of launching all the needed materials and machines and people into orbit is going to outweigh the energy and environmental cost of doing it on Earth.

  • All Jeff Bezos has really done here is confirm my suspicion that his long-term plan for 99.9% of humanity is to leave it behind, and then kill it once all the billionaires are safely in space. There's no way you're going to *reduce* pollution by sending all the shit you need to do this into orbit. The rich are going to strip mine this planet, and if it's not uninhabitable when they're done, they'll just exterminate us to prevent any hope of retaliation.

    • I should point out that this *does* leave room for another possibility: all the able-bodied poors will be shipped to Mars to work in hell-factories that now don't directly pollute the billionaires' new Eden. If they follow this model, the only place that has to be dirty on Earth is the launchpad. They can wait to exterminate the slaves until automation is good enough to replace them. And it'll be so easy to do! Just turn off the air. No riot police needed.

      Regardless of how they plan to do it, never forget t

  • I'd even say he's onto something... but it's akin to saying a Mr Fusion would solve many of our issues. Not wrong but also, at the current state of technology, completely useless.

    We need faster propulsion if we want to start mining asteroids... which seems to be a necessity unless we manage to build a space elevator and then we'll have to pose the question of what the hell do we do with the waste we produce up there.... have even more garbage orbiting? Shoot it towards outer space? And how long can we ship

  • Is that not an option?

    • I would think so.

      The cost of making a factory on earth that works as a closed system, with only raw materials going in, and clean finished products coming out, must be orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to do the same thing on the Moon.

      • You don't need to do the same thing on the moon though. Environmental impact studies wont be as hard. The solar panels wont kill any birds, and the waste you dump out the back isn't going to turn any frogs gay.

        Still not feasible to do yet though. For the future, why not? Interesting challenge to get it all to work and I'm sure we would learn a great deal from trying.

        • the waste you dump out the back isn't going to turn any frogs gay.

          Not the frogs, no, but dump enough waste on the Moon, and it will interfere with your manufacturing process.

          Also, there may be water on the Moon, but it's going to be much more expensive than water on Earth, so it wouldn't make sense to throw your dirty waste water away. You would try everything you can to clean it up and recycle it. But we can do that on Earth as well.

      • Going to the moon actually forces you to figure out how to build the closed system factory with no tempting cheats, though. It creates a market for truly closed systems which doesn't exist on Earth. I think a more realistic idea is that building things in space will teach us the techniques we'll then start applying on Earth.

        • Going to the moon actually forces you to figure out how to build the closed system factory with no tempting cheats, though.

          It would be easier to keep a gun pointed at the engineer, and shoot him when he's tempted by a cheat.

  • This idea is non sense.

    First, the cost of transporting something from space is greater than the impact of building here on Earth, so the net impact will be greater.

    Second... the only solution? That's absurd. There is multiple solutions, but the most obvious is not contaminate, renewable energy and ultraefficient recycling. Using this method, life has been active for trillions of years without exahust anything.

    I don't oppose to space industrialization. I think that humanity have more "room space" there than

    • the second law of thermodynamics would like to have a talk with you.
      • The Sun would like to have a talk with you.
  • thanks Bezos, you just doomed the earth you lying thieving SOB
  • ... but in the real world it takes a lot of energy to go to orbit. And that problem will not be solved quickly. It's just physics. Sure you could theorise about a space elevator - which would lower energy (an thus heat generated ) and cost to orbit; but obstacles like bad weather and lightnings are probably very hard to overcome. And if you want to move your heavy industry anywhere, it would rather be underground than on the surface, let alone in orbit. 'heavy' means it takes heavy materials in and out, it'
  • Sure thing Jeff. Hey Jeff - do you even space? You seem to have trouble getting past the sub-orbital phase... how you going to get heavy industry up there?

  • If we actually did move all heavy industry off Earth, then and only then could we run it all on solar energy.

    Fortunately, there are other carbon-free energy sources available on EArth that we can run heavy industry on.

  • His radical new idea is very old. Scifi has promoted that idea for over half a century. He's promoting scifi because realizing the move isn't feasible yet. You have to get all the materials up there to build 'em *and* have a safe, reliable and *cheap* method to getting materials up and product down.

    It's the *cheap* *up* part that's the kicker.

    • Only if you forget about the asteroid belt. You did that. Don't do that.

      You only need to send up enough mass to bootstrap.

      Much of the point of moving industry off the planet is not having to send up the materials.

      Scifi has promoted it, yes, and you apparently forgot what it actually promoted.

  • and where does all the fuel/energy for all these space launches come from? I get say having the heavy polluting industry out of our atmosphere but energy production isn't exactly that green currently. I guess this would at least put a very high price on pollution and incentivize coming up with less polluting options you you don't have to launch crap into space in order to work on it.

  • Bezos is worth $109B. There are 7.7B people on the earth. If we eject Bezos into space and distribute his net worth across the planet, every single man, women and child would receive $14. As a bonus, Amazon would disappear too...

  • Does anyone remember the story about how Apple has troubles building factories in the US because they simply don't have enough local suppliers to build their dependencies?

    The same thing happens for heavy industry in space. Sure, you could build a system to forge steel from asteroid material. But even if you automate all the bits of actually forging steel (and there are a lot), you are unlikely to be able to automate the bits of maintaining the equipment needed. An modern manufacturing plant sits on a hug

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