Sorry, this is such an absolutely absurd argument.
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
That would be (if at all) for the first mission only. The 'bootstrap'. And in-situ utilizing the shit out of anything available to build as much as possible of the equipment up there. And why would I care about the money? That's just a few wars, peanuts so to speak. By stopping that shit alone you'd burn way less carbon! See? Wheee!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
While interesting, this dream team of engineers is trying to tackle a problem that has many more commercially, economically and environmentally viable solutions.
For one, solar power may be easier to harness in outer space. But there's a problem: it's in outer space. There is no reason why we should be resorting to such measures when we have the potential to harness solar energy here on the earth's surface.
There are energy demands that must be met, and it is true that our needs will grow exponentially. However, more earthlings than ever (percentage-wise) have a sufficient source of energy, and I believe this number will continue to climb.
This is not to say that this company's efforts are a waste of time. Far from it. We need overambitious entrepreneurs to at least attempt these solutions so that we can better gauge the difficulty of the problem at hand. While this technology may not be realistically implementable, it very may well lead to a newer, more efficient way of harnessing solar energy. If this technology works, more power to them. And to us.
On it's face, that's not a terrible argument. But consider the "bet" you are making: spend like $1T on a habitable structure large enough for a good community, and then ~1B per year to operate it, in the hopes of "serendipity".
How many materials scientists (and their families) would want to live in orbit, or on the moon, in harsh, cramped conditions, with limited tools and resources?
> Precious industrial metals and beamed solar power would be one thing.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the distances involved to the asteroid belt.
Beaming power over one to two astronomical units is something in between impractical and a death-ray superlaser. (And that's assuming Earth is exporting the energy, because the other way around makes even less sense--the asteroid belt only gets 10 to 20% as much light.)
> bananas
Lastly, sterile environments on Earth will be wayyy easier and cheaper an equivalent facilities in orbit, to construct, maintain, and house a workforce, etc.
The problem of screening/cleaning everything that passes through the airlock is the same regardless of gravity.
That requires a truly astounding amount of material. Unless the cost to place it in orbit gets within an order of magnitude of our current terrestrial freight, it's not happening.
Best bet is to construct these things in orbit, with materials sourced in orbit. But now you have a chicken and egg problem - need to send an incredible amount of material (and people) in order to (potentially!) save in the future.
The problem here is the assumption we need scientific progress to do this. We don't.
We have the technology today to launch satellites into solar-orbits which would be capable of beaming power back to Earth. It would be clean, efficient and non-disasterous to the biosphere.
With any amount of space-borne industry, the costs would also plummet and get cheaper with every additional satellite. Once you can harness the energy of an entire star, there's almost no reason not to achieve it.
We're talking about space here. Minimal living conditions absolutely can't be made for pennies, and introduce enormous risks of destruction even without any human inside. And the energy requirements...
I’m increasingly of the opinion that nuclear for space should be mined and built in space. Just launch the infrastructure needed to bootstrap the process.
Locate richest mineral resource in near-Earth neighborhood. Apply rockets. Build new rockets.
I know, it is 'just a fantasy', but .. y'know .. it was once 'just a fantasy' that we'd all have Internet terminals glued to our heads, and look how fast we got that one, once the will-power was there ..
It's not profitable yet, or someone would already be doing it. It's something that can be done on small, incremental scales. You don't need to mine a whole planet, that's a strawman. You don't need to build the entire thing, just some solar panels floating in space an attached to something useful (e.g. our communications satellites) fit the bill. It gets more effective the more industry you have in space - we have none so far.
There's no reason to think we won't reach that level of technology - assuming we have a demand for space industry for some reason, like running low of key materials on Earth, or a population that keeps growing.
You're basically just doing that same thing as the OP, claiming "nuh uh" without backing that up either. To which I say "uh uh".
If you can lift exatons of steel into space, you can probably already afford to solve the problem of direct synthesis of all, and every fertilizer, and probably nearly every other chemistry process just by throwing more energy at it.
We already have a gigantic fusion reactor at the centre of the Solar system. All you need to do to power manufacturing in space is find ways of harnessing that energy.
Disagree, you get to space using fossils and then what? Can't ship everything from Earth, the surplus is not that big, you need local industry first. I suspect even hundreds of starships won't be enough, our technology is incredibly interdependent. Only then you can build self-sustaining ecology.
Industry needs loads of energy and only practical power sources in space are solar (up to some distance but there water is scarce) and nuclear.
So if there was a missing chance, I'd say it was developing ubiquitous nuclear power. Would help on Earth, would help in space.
1) Building out sufficient solar power collectors to solve the Earth's energy problems forever.
2) Manufacturing medicines, alloys, and materials that can only be produced in micro-gravity.
3) Protecting humanity against social breakdown and/or extinction in case of massive asteroid strike / global pandemic / etc.
4) Because every dollar that has been spent on space development in the US has put $7 back into the economy by way of spinoffs, technical advances, etc.
It's not about energy, it's about processes that literally don't work on Earth.
See Made in Space fiber[0] for an early example - they're producing best-in-class optical fibers which can't be made on Earth because convection introduces crystalline impurities. Their value per kg is attractive enough to make this a profitable business with today's launch costs.
As launch costs drop and people explore this space we're going to discover a _lot_ of such problems.
Solutions / mixtures essentially don't separate in micro-g so you can grow much better crystals, smelt very high entropy alloys, do all sorts of awesome tissue engineering, etc.
The vibration isolation thing is also a huge force multiplier for all this. Ultra-precision manufacturing is a game of complete and total process control. Right now we spend absurd sums on isolation systems to block vibrations from the truck driving by half a mile away. In orbit you just make sure anything with moving parts is on a separate free body from your isolated component and they fly in formation. The LISA mission is doing this to position ultra-perfect reference objects and detect gravitational waves with baselines measured in thousands of kilometers.
Sure heavy industry in space wouldn't pollute the Earth, but the physics for this just don't work out. How would you get all the produced goods back to Earth? Lots and lots of rockets that would then have to fly back up to space. The energy involved with that would be massive and cost prohibitive on the scale that it would need to be in order to replace any meaningful amount of heavy industry on Earth.
A space elevator could potentially be much better, but none of these private companies are pursuing space elevators.
Investing money into developing renewable energy power for heavy industry makes infinitely more sense, but isn't as cool as launching rockets. IIRC the Gates Foundation is investing in a solar powered method for smelting steel.
Musk claims that it costs too much to move the mass required to build the space stations into space, but energy is actually quite cheap if you harvest it efficiently (solar), and anyway the cost of moving the mass is a amortized, so it's small relative to operational costs over time. It just seems to me that there are only two planets that we are likely to ever colonize, and one is already a wreck. Putting in an enormous amount of work to wreck the other just seems to put off the inevitable ... one way or the other.
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
reply