Investment in Space Tech

[Jonfliesgoats]

14 hours ago, tater said:

There are countless delivery systems capable of cost-effectively landing people in Antartica. There are vastly cheaper that getting people even to LEO, much less Mars. While I know someone who just took a vacation to Antarctica, it's a pretty tiny subset of people going there, it's not some sort of new, Antarctican economy. If there's not a reason to go there, as this discussion always devolves to, what's the economic motivation for space? Earth orbit offers maybe a few more launches than we have now for a private venture to grab up, but many are going to always be "national" launcher missions.

Investment requires a return on that investment, otherwise it's just lighting money on fire.

Someone mentioned Antarctica!  This is a great analogy for why we may want to withdraw from the OST.  Article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty bars any nation from laying sovereign claim to any part of the continent.  Consequently, nobody is scouting coastal Antarctica for rare earth minerals, etc.  This is a good thing for me, but also an example of how the OST may hinder future commercial exploitation of space.  We need a reason to go to these places and any investment needs a return.  You can't promise a return unless you can enforce some law around those investments.  Sovereign claims seem to be required, unfortunately.

Agreed about the value of research.  ISRU devices in KSP are a shortcut to factor much more complex problems of resource utilization in the field.  While ISRU isn't in the cards IRL, it seems any manned presence on mars will need to extract some local water.

Same on the moon with the limited amounts of water there.  Any sort of enduring presence there will need to make use of local resources in some way.

 

[tater]

Resources on Antarctica could be cheaply shipped anywhere for sale. It is not cost-effective to return anything from Mars at all. Even an insanely ambitious concept like ITS can only return a fraction of what it delivers. 

[kunok]

9 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

Someone mentioned Antarctica!  This is a great analogy for why we may want to withdraw from the OST.  Article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty bars any nation from laying sovereign claim to any part of the continent.  Consequently, nobody is scouting coastal Antarctica for rare earth minerals, etc.  This is a good thing for me, but also an example of how the OST may hinder future commercial exploitation of space.  We need a reason to go to these places and any investment needs a return.  You can't promise a return unless you can enforce some law around those investments.  Sovereign claims seem to be required, unfortunately.

I really think that the day that is really profitable the extraction of resources in Antarctica the treaty will be changed to allow that.

[Kryten]

It's already profitable to extract resources from similarly remote and inhospitable areas of the arctic, why would antarctica be any different?

[kunok]

33 minutes ago, Kryten said:

It's already profitable to extract resources from similarly remote and inhospitable areas of the arctic, why would antarctica be any different?

I know what you mean, but add to the prices of the resource extraction itself the price of all geopolitics, bureaucracy and other indirect cost related to changing that international treaty. How big they are? I don't know

[Jonfliesgoats]

With regard to space, it seems we are in a catch-22.  You need a reason to invest and the costs are too high.  To get costs down, you need to build and learn from systems deployed to sites.  To do that we need investment.

Perhaps we need idealistic zealots? 

[Nibb31]

4 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

With regard to space, it seems we are in a catch-22.  You need a reason to invest and the costs are too high.  To get costs down, you need to build and learn from systems deployed to sites.  To do that we need investment. 

You don't say! 

It's not like this isn't the key problem that has been the main focus of space enthusiasts for decades. 

Edited December 17, 2016 by Nibb31

[DBowman]

15 hours ago, tater said:

It is not cost-effective to return anything from Mars at all.

I think it would be cost effective to ship water from Mars moons to LEO - but I guess you mean all the way to Earth surface to compete there. Also buying H2O in LEO assumes we've already broken the catch-22 and have some kind of big economy off earth.

I think the closest thing to a viable product from space is electricity from orbital solar. There are lots of reasons OS is thought to be impractical or un economic but there is a huge and growing for the foreseeable future market for low CO2 emission power. If the problems could be overcome then there would be a huge amount of activity in earth space and that could be a potential market for some off earth resources.

[tater]

8 hours ago, DBowman said:

I think it would be cost effective to ship water from Mars moons to LEO - but I guess you mean all the way to Earth surface to compete there. Also buying H2O in LEO assumes we've already broken the catch-22 and have some kind of big economy off earth.

I think the closest thing to a viable product from space is electricity from orbital solar. There are lots of reasons OS is thought to be impractical or un economic but there is a huge and growing for the foreseeable future market for low CO2 emission power. If the problems could be overcome then there would be a huge amount of activity in earth space and that could be a potential market for some off earth resources.

Yeah, propellant mining form martian moons is indeed viable, particularly compared to lunar surface mining. 

[Nibb31]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, propellant mining form martian moons is indeed viable, particularly compared to lunar surface mining. 

It might be viable one day, if there is any demand for the stuff. Right now, there isn't.

[tater]

2 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

It might be viable one day, if there is any demand for the stuff. Right now, there isn't.

Yeah, sorry, that goes without saying. I really meant compared to lunar regolith mining---which basically only offsets landing costs in terms of propellant.

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, tater said:

Yeah, propellant mining form martian moons is indeed viable, particularly compared to lunar surface mining. 

Weird it has not been more focus on the Mars moons, here you have two decent sized asteroids as secondary targets who would be easy to study if you are in an decent orbit. 
Russia had one probe who failed. 
If you could mine them for water it should have impact on Mars operations and as you say it would be interesting to return. 

[Guest]

I think I've posted this before, but, it's the same what happened when Colombus "discovered" the Americas: it was horribly hard to get there and European leaders didn't invest in it firstly because they found it easier to just get their resources from nearer sources. But then they found out they could harvest the Americas' resources with a lot of profit, so they decided to actually go and spend money with getting people there to work/populate the place to claim it as the colony owner's territory (at least this happened with Brazil).

It's the same with space exploration now. We have no reason to go out right now since it is much easier to just get our resources, claim territory and fight each other down here at Earth. If the Outer Space Treaty was withheld, though, I think there would be an increase in governments' interest in space colonization.

More territory, more resources, more weapons and more tech. Would you refuse that if you were a leader?

[tater]

Getting to the Americas was trivial compared to space travel. Vikings and Polynesians did it in open boats.

Edited December 18, 2016 by tater

[Guest]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Getting to the Americas was trivial compared to space travel. Vikings and Polynesians did it in open boats.

And so it will completing our current goals be to the future generations. Compare the number of people that got to the Americas alive during the 1500's and the number of people that travel to the Americas today. Might seem trivial to us now, but back then it surely was horribly difficult.