The case for an economy in space

[DBowman]

• ...
  
• 7: total propellant market is 1.6 - 3.64 M USD / annum
  
• 8: LEO-GEO is only a small portion of that
  

Per Jolly_Roger's vid LEO-GEO uses about 0.1 * Surface to LEO propellant so

• 9: LEO-GEO propellant market is 160,000 - 364,000 USD / annum
  

We need something bigger than that to motivate expansion into space - or my math is way off (if anyone sees the problem please point it out).

I'm sure once there is a big economy up there using a lot of propellant then ISRU propellant will be important to reduce costs, but it looks like it's not going kick-start an economy.

[Findthepin1]

On 28 July, 2015 at 2:07 PM, AngelLestat said:

To pollute less, cars just use grams of platinum combined with rhobidium and paradium (which are more cheap) in different cycles to save platinum.

Paradium, you say?

(Sorry, not intended to offend you or anyone, just a joke, this seems within the rules, )

Back on topic...

I don't think an economy in space is really going to start up until we can get stuff from space, make stuff in space, and live in space. Basically, once space is independent of Earth, a space economy will start taking off. Otherwise, we're just relying on the planet for our needs. That isn't going to work in the long run. Once we actually have an independent space economy, I worry it will remain a space economy for a long time. It'll be more profitable to have and sell resources in space to people who need them in space (i.e. water ice for rocket fuel, breathing air, water to drink, water to farm in, hydrogen for fusion reactors, yada yada yada) than it will be to bring stuff down to Earth (carry a hundred tons of quite dense metallic material inside a reentry module) and from Earth to space (rocket launches for going up with really big expensive rockets).

Edited February 24, 2016 by Findthepin1

[Temstar]

I still think propellent depot has an excellent commercial case. Yes, having a cheap source of fuel in orbit does not in itself provide a reason to go to space, but why does it need to?

The SLS costs $35 billion to develop and $500 million a pop to launch, assuming NASA hit the forecast budgetary numbers which seems rather doubtful. NASA is supposed to launch a SLS every year. That is money on the table that could be in your pocket if you could provide LOX and LH2 on tap in LEO. Yes this would require technologies like zero g fluid transfer, zero boil off hydrogen storage and in orbit electrolysis of water if your feedstock is water, but propellant depot technology is currently under intense R&D effort and there's no reason to believe that these engineering issues wouldn't be resolved in the future.

So, assuming the technology exist to store and transfer LOX, LH2 and H2O in orbit and cracking H2O into LOX and LH2 is possible in space. That means you then have the business case to setup a private propellant depot in orbit to get that NASA money. Once your Orbital Gas n Go is opened you could easily sell oh say, LOX and LH2 at $4000 per kg, just below the price per kg of Falcon 9. The cost for SLS to lift LOX and LH2 to orbit would be many orders of magnitude higher than your price since it has to be a man-rated rocket. As a result NASA would be pressured to use smaller rockets (say something like a Delta-IV of some sort) to put their government manned payload into orbit with an empty upper stage, dock with your depot and buy your fuel, else they will be accused of wasting tax payer money on unnecessarily large rockets.

So that means you're going to make a lot of money, as long as you can refill your depot with water cheaper than $4000 per kg. But that's not your problem, you just put up ads saying "Pure Water wanted at Orbital Gas n Go, $2000 per kg" and let the other companies work that out. Maybe they would build extremely cheap but not so reliable rockets to lift water from Earth (if 20% of the rocket blows up, who cares? It's just water), or maybe they will deploy ISRU operators at Lunar poles or NEO to drill for water ice. Whatever the solution is you don't care, you only pay them once they have delivered the water.

In fact you could probably charge higher than $4000 per kg or whatever the price is for the lowest cost rocket at that time. After all a NASA government payload might need a lot of fuel and the cheapest rocket on the market might need many trips to fill it up. But government payloads generally don't want to wait around as they have people on board and they don't want to miss transfer windows just because one of the cheap rockets failed to make orbit. So you stand to make that extra money by being the middle man and smooth out the Supply vs Demand.

The thing is, NASA doesn't actually need to be forced into this by economic pressure - they have stated very publicly that's the future they hope for. They've come up out and said they want to be customers for propellent depots, not operators.

Lastly, there are laws in place to prevent NASA from working with say, the Chinese Space Agency. But they aren't no such law preventing Gas n Go from servicing both. You also get all the small fries from private companies now looking to put medium sized payload up for the cheap using refuel - say, Planetary Resource ISRU robot ship headed to NEO for that sweet sweet $2000 per kg ice - economic bootstrapping in action!

Edited February 24, 2016 by Temstar

[55delta]

It's all good...well, except for thread necromancy. But that I leave to others.

Creating an economy in space around space travel, would be inevitable if anyone makes the infrastructure. As you figured, Earth would be involved in passing the money between parties. But that was mentioned back with the idea of mining ice asteroids to sell water to the ISS.

Unfortunately, there's apparently no rush. You see, no one here knows of any thing or substance or material in space that they would want from space that they couldn't acquire on Earth. Earth, it appears, is so unique that it has everything except pretty pictures and settling that Martian meteor debate.

Why is that important? Because that would be *the* springboard to get bigger investment in space travel. Otherwise, you have to wait on space being a matter of national pride...which I won't discuss here because politics attracts national debate, argument, and moderation. Best not to start.

Still, I would be interested if six months has added any insights whether anything of interesting has been learned.

[DBowman]

56 minutes ago, Temstar said:

NASA is supposed to launch a SLS every year

I think SLS is launching 130,000 kg of propellent in the Exploration Upper Stage, which makes a total market of 520,000,000 USD @ 4,000 USD / kg (lets ignore that this is more than the 500 MUSD estimated SLS launch cost). If you wanted a ten year payback period you could afford to spend 'only' about 5 billion to develop, deploy, and run some kind of asteroidal / luna water mining operation, orbital H2O storage plus LH2&LOX manufacturing depot, & orbital propellent transfer tech and equipment. It seems 'pretty optimistic' to think anyone could put the orbital depot operation together for that kind of money, which means they'd need a much bigger market.

Edited February 24, 2016 by DBowman

[Temstar]

That's only one agency though. You may also get some of that LEO-GEO market since they also have incentive to use smaller rockets. Plus any other national agency that you might be able to reel in.

Plus cheaper prices for missions should also increase demand somewhat, depend on price elasticity of demand.

It's not rock solid business case, but with some harder numbers after more accounting there may be enough of a case here to interest billionaires ala Planetary Resources.

Also, there's no need to committe many billions from the word go to start depot construction. A phased approach would allow risk reduction as well as build NASA's confidence in your business. You could for example start with a small demo mission with a one shot refuel mission launching Earth processed LH2 and LOX, thus proving fuel transfer ahead of zero boil off storage or propellent production. 

Edited February 24, 2016 by Temstar

[DBowman]

1 hour ago, Temstar said:

You may also get some of that LEO-GEO market

I think the LEO-GEO propellant market is only like 500,000 USD per annum ( an earlier post of mine )

I'm all for phased development and implementation. I feel like everyone knows 'it will work' it's just a case of 'will it pay?' - it just doesn't seem like projected demand is enough to convince. We need 'some big new driver' for spending the $$$.

[fredinno]

Space refueling is a bad idea- UNLESS you have a set of reusable space tugs- then the reusability would reduce costs.

[Findthepin1]

I think what we want to do is assemble stuff in orbit. I don't mean like the ISS. I mean like setting up a robotic base on some icy-stony rock somewhere, and actually building probes and making fuel from the materials on the asteroid. Avoiding launch costs, avoiding all the delta-v needed to get something from the ground to interplanetary space.