The case for an economy in space

[55delta]

I've been lurking here for a while and one, seemingly unspoken, question keeps popping up in relation to space travel. It has been bothering me, so now I'll bother the rest of you with it. I expect that this will be a rather uncomfortable question around here.

What, in space, is there of value that anyone could make a business or economy out of?

What is there, either not on Earth or so rare on Earth as to overcome initial launch costs, that found in space that that humans would want more of? Or is there something that can only be made it space that would be useful to one or all of us? Can you make a business case for space?

The big business of satellite communications is a good example of what I mean with that question. There is a market for it, and it can only be done in outer space (specifically LEO or GSO orbit).

However, scientific missions are not good examples of what I mean. Knowledge of outer space (and it's various parts) is essential, certainly. My question couldn't be answered without knowledge of what is in space. But scientific surveying and analysis can only be done once or twice per question and subject/object, limiting continuous viability. Not to mention that scientific knowledge, although valuable, is not really sellable. Put another way, if you would just give grants for scientific studies of something until your curiosity was satisfied, it's not really a business and you should not expect any return on your investment.

I'd like to start by limiting discussion to existing or theorized to exist possibilities. Yes, there are plenty of examples in fiction. No, we don't need to discuss them here. By the same token, there is no need to discuss 'the potential infinite of space.' We know there are things in outer space, could you narrow it down to one thing, please?

Additionally, to save discussion time, if you propose businesses that already exist on Earth (ex. mining for platinum, real-estate), please include in your post how your proposal is expected to be competitive with those businesses while handling the costs of space-travel or what is different in the product that justifies the price tag. As well, any proposal that depends on a demand that doesn't yet exist must also explain how such a demand should come to exist. For example, please do not discuss mining ice water on Mars to sell to Mars colonists unless you can say why there should even be a colony to sell ice water to.

Please keep discussion of spaceflight relevant to your proposals. There are other threads to discuss the cost of rockets. I want to know the cost in context to the money to be made. There is also no value in any statement about the cost of spaceflight is too expensive to make any business viable. Instead, try to think of something that can only be found in outer space that's worth any cost of any rocket. Finally, any post that can be summarized as 'there's nothing of value out there, stay home' will be considered trolling.

Of course, this doesn't just have to be about business. If you can think of any other reason to visit outer space that can overcome the massive price tag, feel free to explain. But please stick to social factors, 'exploration', 'because it's there', and 'because it would be awesome' are not good examples. Additionally, I must regrettably pre-empt discussion of Earth-wide extinction events. That has, and is discussed in other threads.

So, why go to space? Is there anything you'd want out there? Please discuss...any body outside of Earth, manned or unmanned. What would make people want to go to outer space?

[DBowman]

Orbital Solar Power Stations - avoids 50% losses through atmospheric absorption & 'cosine' / tracking in exchange for have to microwave / laser the power down. Maybe you can avoid a lot of 'night' also. Gerard O'Neill (and others) proposed constructing with lunar sources materials to minimize setup costs.

[Kerbart]

• Rare earth mining (most of those metals seem to be coming from meteorites, so why not go to the source)
  
• Biological research (without fear of dooming earth when a vicious microbe escapes) for pharmaceutical companies
  
• Off-shore banking. Why hope countries like Luxembourg or Switzerland change their banking rules and disclose your account information to foreign governments? Bank in a zone that is under no jurisdiction! This may be a far fetch but I'm looking for industries that have a lot of money for starters.
  
• Data Storage. Park your data in orbit! Safe against earthquakes, tsunami's, tornadoes, avalanches and terrorist attacks! (If Monster can sell audio cables for $100 then we should be able to sell this to the market!)
  

[regex]

Manufacturing is about the only thing I can think of, the problem being getting started in the first place and having a "killer app".

[Nothalogh]

What, in space, is there of value that anyone could make a business or economy out of?

Extrajurisdictional space.

Anything that runs afoul of the lavender scented feelings of any terran government

[Excellent]

People have already spent millions on space tourism and I cant imagine the bussiness getting any smaller. companies are already offering more than whats already been done. The value in this is obvious, the beauty of space. I'm still baffled by how cool KSP can look even 500 hours into the game, there is something about seeing space that you'll never be able to fully replicate on earth.

If I wanted to make a business "in space" tourism would be on the top of my list.

[WinkAllKerb'']

you mean this ?

[PB666]

Orbital Solar Power Stations - avoids 50% losses through atmospheric absorption & 'cosine' / tracking in exchange for have to microwave / laser the power down. Maybe you can avoid a lot of 'night' also. Gerard O'Neill (and others) proposed constructing with lunar sources materials to minimize setup costs.

Just what we need, more global warming. This sounds like a good idea until you realize that the stray microwaves would instantly fry anyone who got underit. It would incidently make a great space weapon. Just find some politicians campaign rally out in an open air site, and boil their brains. Could you imagine a despotic leader taking a microwave energy and whoops, gee Im sorry I melted greenland, so what are the bank account codes cause I thinks it straying in the direction of Antarctica.

One thing space has alot of, vacuum. You could have space liposuction:cool:

The problem with electric power generation that makes it useless for space power concepts is that it needs to be efficiently generated close to where it is used. If you are deflecting light down on solar panels in Nome Alaska on december 30th this is not to much of a problem, since heat is not a problem. In Needles California in mid August, its less so welcome. So then you end up having to have a transfer station safely 100s of miles from the users in increasingly fewer isolated places (Australian outback, Sahara desert, Gobi desert, Antarctica, Greenland, Northeasern Siberia). Antarctica would be a really good place, because any water you melt will instantly refreeze, only the exterior of the continent in melting, the interior is safely frozen; and it has alot of water. Electricity + 2H20 --can---> 2H2 + O2. And you can ship the hydrogen where its needed. Problem is that hydrogenesis is extremely inefficient, even with pure Antarctic water, any gas you produce would need to be shipped under or over a glacier and then to the three southern continents by pipeline.

[Bill Phil]

Ah, you're looking for MacGuffinite.

There are some rare metals, like platinum and a few others, in asteroids and other small bodies.

Although, there isn't enough demand for people to go out into space hunting it down. Just wait a century or two.

[Robotengineer]

Ah, you're looking for MacGuffinite.

There are some rare metals, like platinum and a few others, in asteroids and other small bodies.

Although, there isn't enough demand for people to go out into space hunting it down. Just wait a century or two.

I'm sorry Bill, but I'm afraid I can't do that. (Unless there is some medical breakthrough that extends human lifetimes 2-3x.)

[Pixel of Life]

Lunar industrial colony combined with spacecraft based on NASA's Asteroid Redirect mission (if it succeeds). Grab small asteroids or pieces of larger ones and put them in an orbit around the Moon, or set them on a collision course so they land in some remote area and can then be mined. Mineral-rich 'roids can make you a lot of money if you can figure out a cost efficient way to redirect and mine them. We're talking about millions, even billions of dollars for a single asteroid.

Edited July 25, 2015 by CaptainKorhonen

[Bill Phil]

I'm sorry Bill, but I'm afraid I can't do that. (Unless there is some medical breakthrough that extends human lifetimes 2-3x.)

Yeah... It does seem a bit bad. But it took a century for the car to become popular. Decades for air travel to become common. So it will probably take many decades or centuries for space travel to become common. It's sad, yes, but it's at least already almost 60 years since space travel became common. That's pretty cool, and it might shorten the time we need to wait.

[DBowman]

Just what we need, more global warming. This sounds like a good idea until you realize that the stray microwaves would instantly fry anyone who got under it. It would incidentally make a great space weapon...

Orbital solar + microwaving it down won't contribute to global warming and would allow taking carbon power stations offline, it's a actually a huge win against climate change - remote 'zero impact' renewables. The idea is that the microwaves are not tuned to heat water and are received by an antenna array that outputs electrical power. The microwave transmissions they have in mind would be 'safe enough' to walk around in. The Bond-ian death ray potential is there though, but I imagine it could be 'designed out'.

The problem with electric power generation that makes it useless for space power concepts is that it needs to be efficiently generated close to where it is used. If you are deflecting light down on solar panels in Nome Alaska on december 30th this is not to much of a problem, since heat is not a problem. In Needles California in mid August, its less so welcome. So then you end up having to have a transfer station safely 100s of miles from the users in increasingly fewer isolated places (Australian outback, Sahara desert, Gobi desert, Antarctica, Greenland, Northeasern Siberia). Antarctica would be a really good place, because any water you melt will instantly refreeze, only the exterior of the continent in melting, the interior is safely frozen; and it has alot of water. Electricity + 2H20 --can---> 2H2 + O2. And you can ship the hydrogen where its needed. Problem is that hydrogenesis is extremely inefficient, even with pure Antarctic water, any gas you produce would need to be shipped under or over a glacier and then to the three southern continents by pipeline.

I don't really follow your reasoning. You could replace an existing coal power plant with a microwave receiver array, no need to ship the power via Siberia, or to beam sunlight onto installations - except maybe for some winter solstice 'take that mother nature' demo/festival. A hydrogen economy is a whole separate issue, but it could only be easier with 'too cheap to meter' ( ) space power raining down on us.

Also I forgot to add in my OP. Once you have 'something big' going on in earth / lunar space - for example lunar mining/manufacturing & orbital assembly of thousands of square kilometers of mirrors / PV cells etc. then it can be worth taking advantage of deltaV economics. It's deltaV cheaper to get to LEO from Mars or Luna than from Earth. There might be enough convenient water on Luna for shipping to LEO, but maybe not. If you 'exclude setup costs & supply chain length/time' then you can ship water & carbon feed-stocks for plastics - mylar mirrors etc to LEO from Mars cheaper than you can from Earth. Shipping Methane that was converted to plastic in earth orbit would leave hydrogen as a by-product for use as fuel for nuclear thermal rockets. The asteroids might be even better but I've not done any math on them.

I recently read about 'light hydrogen gas guns', you could shoot 1000 kg projectiles from Mars to Earth, it actually has heaps of excess deltaV and so could operate way outside of the ideal Hohmann transfer windows. I'm not sure how you'd stop it at the other end...

I guess the main thrust is that we know we want and will pay for electrical power, you can make it in orbit, the cheapest way to do that is bringing resources from Luna/Mars/Asteroids. So space solar fills a real immediate need and can motivate a lot of far flung activity.

[peadar1987]

Existing power stations max out at a thermal efficiency of about 50% (Combined cycle gas turbines). Most operate at 30% to 40%. What this means is that 60% to 70% of the heat they generate from their fuel is not converted into electrical energy, it is dumped into a cooling tower or water source as waste heat (yes, a 1GWe coal plant is dumping about 2GWth into the environment).

The heating caused by beamed microwave power would be a fraction of this, and wouldn't have a significant effect on global warming. The sun already dumps orders of magnitude more heat into our atmosphere than we could ever hope to, the problem is when we release gases that stop it from escaping.

[Awaras]

Another thing about mining heavy/rare earth metals offworld - mining them here on Earth generates enormous amounts of pollution and seepage of toxic substances into the soil and groundwater (Mostly in China and third world countries, so who gives a d*mn, right?). Moving all that processing out of our biosphere into orbit or the dead surface of the moon and sending only the finished, refined materials to Earth would go a long way toward letting us stop sh*tting where we eat. How much is that worth economically? No idea...

Edited July 25, 2015 by Awaras

[Kaos]

The easiest thing to do is to mine ressources to use them in space. There is a usage for ressources in space and they are all brought from earth right now. If they are produced in space you safe a lot on transport. While this market is quite small right now, it would grow if there were cheaper ressources.

Just imagine how small the market for computers would be right now, if every computer would cost 1000000 times it costs now

With this cost reduction for ressources in space, mining other ressources would be cheaper as well.

[YNM]

It'll be economical once we question the habitability of Earth itself.

[Kinglet]

It'll be economical once we question the habitability of Earth itself.

It might be pessimistic, but I think the majority of humans will only care about space travel when their cillivisation as a whole is on the verge of death because of greed and stupidity.

Also, stopping global warming is very easy, but only when we overcome our massive greed and stop wasting money on things like bigger-than-needed militaries.

[SomeGuy12]

Huh. 18 posts in this thread and no one has mentioned the most obviously useful one of all.

The Moon itself actually contains more solid matter than the Earth (the molten part of the Moon is thought to be really deep). It's roughly the same elemental cross section as the earth - less volatiles, more heavier elements since the solar wind and heating has over the aeons blown away a lot of the light stuff.

No one lives on the Moon, or would have any reason to complain about pollution.

Living things are self replicating. We can build 3d printers and other bits of tech that can make many of the parts used in themselves. We have massive factories that the sum total of the effects of all the machinery is that the factories replicate themselves.

Ergo, we can build a factory that can self replicate itself completely. It will require more advanced technology - possibly something on the order of "molecular assemblers" in order to make the factory compact enough to be practical to load into rockets, but it is possible. Note that the self replication doesn't have to be fully autonomous - machinists and other factory workers might still be needed to help the robots perform more difficult tasks. These people would teleoperate the equipment from Earth.

So, the business plan :

1. Develop self replicating factory technology

2. Use the factories and the land rights you can get on Earth to stripmine large chunks of the Earth to make more factories

3. Use the factories to build a lot of rockets, enough to launch a complete copy of the factory to the Moon

4. Land the factory on the Moon in a series of landings. It would have to be at the poles so that parts of it are always exposed to sunlight, and parts always exposed to darkness.

5. Have the factory copy itself...

Sure, this would be colossally expensive - but in the long run, you'd have covered the entire Moon with factories. You'd be able to make back your investment thousands of fold. You would either send the manufactured products back to Earth with a mass driver, or put them into Lunar orbit and use them to build gigantic centrifuge wheel habitats. People would live in these habitats, supplied with a constant supply of equipment and materials launched from the Moon, and would pay rent, paying back the initial investment.

[55delta]

There's some ideas here...good. Time to see if some of these are viable. I'll start with the easiest one first: space tourism.

This business is 'easiest' mostly because the trail has been blazed. In 2001, Dennis Tito, former JPL scientist and businessman paid about $20 million, made it through the necessary training, went up to the ISS as third passenger on a Soyuz TM for a seven day visit. There have been six others since then. This isn't even counting that in 1990, Tokyo Broadcasting System paid to have a reporter, Toyohiro Akiyama, flown to Mir for seven days. However, he didn't count as a tourist because his daily broadcasts apparently made him a business traveler. I've seen prices paid between $20 million and $40 million, which makes it all the more regrettable that I can't figure out the price on both a Soyuz-U and Soyuz TM. The reason they stopped adding tourists in 2010, when they expanded the regular crews and so filled that third seat. There was some talk of adding tourists again in 2015...although I'm not so sure if that will happen at the moment. So there is certainly an industry here.

As you know, many people are looking at providing sub-orbital flights. It's not hard to see why. Sub-orbital hopped have the least fuel requirements, which means possible SSTOs with plenty of passenger room, while still providing that full experience of both a big view of Earth and several hours zero-g. Divide the costs plus margin amongst say...10 passengers to knock a zero or more off the usual ticket price, and you should have a successful business with good market demand. It's only that no one is at that stage yet. Word has it that Virgin Galactic's VSS Voyager is expected to be flown in 2015. I have no idea if it'll happen on then or 2016 though.

Outside of sub-orbital hops, things aren't quite as rosy. Both fuel and provision costs rise with distance. Still, there are efforts, such as plans for an inflatable space hotel or circumlunar trips. I expect much bigger ticket prices there, but I would expect that about 9 days of travel to and from the Moon wouldn't seem unreasonable to anyone who has a $100 million to spare.

However, I expect tourism to other planets to be a rather hard sell with current technology. I believe it is 9 months to travel to Mars, and 4 months to travel to Venus (halve those if you can arrange a constant source of thrust), same to come back. That's less a vacation and more a sabbatical and you'd want less a space capsule and more a cruise liner if you were to travel that long. So I'm not expecting to hear about tours to Mars or Venus anytime in the near future.

Still, space tourism has great potential involving travel to outer space. But I think we've just scratched the surface of reasons to go to space.

[GoSlash27]

55Delta,

You've hit on the crux of the matter. People won't live and work in space unless they're paid handsomely to do it. That money doesn't come from nowhere. There has to be an economic cash cow up there; something that's valuable here and worth the risk and expense.

Sadly, I don't know what that might be...

Best,

-Slashy

[Findthepin1]

Just a small correction.

I believe it is 9 months to travel to Mars

http://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=Mars&mission_class=oneway&mission_type=rendezvous&LD1=2014&LD2=2040&maxDT=21&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=20&min=DV&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results

4 months to travel to Venus

http://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=Venus&mission_class=oneway&mission_type=rendezvous&LD1=2014&LD2=2040&maxDT=21&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=20&min=DV&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results

Those are interplanetary Hohmann transfer plots possible between 2014 and 2040. The shortest one-way trajectories are 96 days (3.15 months) long for Venus, and 160 days (5.26 months) long for Mars.

Edited July 26, 2015 by Findthepin1

[Nibb31]

Yeah... It does seem a bit bad. But it took a century for the car to become popular. Decades for air travel to become common. So it will probably take many decades or centuries for space travel to become common. It's sad, yes, but it's at least already almost 60 years since space travel became common. That's pretty cool, and it might shorten the time we need to wait.

The difference is that there was demand, even before those inventions, for fast transportation. People needed cars and planes (and horses and ships) because there were places that they wanted or needed to go to. There were people at those destinations that they needed to meet up with, places that they wanted to visit, customers to sell stuff to, business to be made...

Space is not comparable, because it isn't an actual destination for anything worthwhile. You aren't going to space to go conduct business meetings or to visit relatives, neither is there a market to sell stuff to people. So it is never going to be a mainstream destination for mass transport.

[DerekL1963]

Space is not comparable, because it isn't an actual destination for anything worthwhile. You aren't going to space to go conduct business meetings or to visit relatives, neither is there a market to sell stuff to people. So it is never going to be a mainstream destination for mass transport.

That's the problem with both the space-as-aviation model (there's nobody there and no place to go), and the space-as-the-New-World model (there's nothing there worth bringing back). There's just no demand for going there, and launch costs keep it that way. Launch cost really have to fall until they're relatively small multiple of the energy cost until either model can even begin to be relevant, and even SpaceX's most fervent dreams result in costs that are still several orders of magnitude higher than energy costs.

[shynung]

Launch cost really have to fall until they're relatively small multiple of the energy cost until either model can even begin to be relevant, and even SpaceX's most fervent dreams result in costs that are still several orders of magnitude higher than energy costs.

Hard to say. On one hand, there could be materials that's too costly or otherwise impossible to get on Earth, but on the other hand, not much people are trying to look for them. Not just from cost, but also available technologies, not to mention a reliable business plan.

Old thread debating launch cost effects on space-stuff demand. Granted, a bit exaggerated, but it raises some important issues.