Getting Rich Off The Solar System... By What?

[Entropian]

On 8/12/2020 at 10:58 PM, SOXBLOX said:

There really isn't an economic reason for going to space.

Woah, you really think so?  What about asteroid mining, He3 scooping, and 0g crystal growth?  (seriously, 0g crystal growth would be extremely profitable)

[Scotius]

High quality vacuum would be very beneficial for many scientific and industrial processes. What we have in moderately high Earth orbit, far exceeds in purity any vacuum we can produce on the surface. And there is nigh infinite amount of this very pure vacuum Imagine a particle collider thousands of kilometers long, built mostly from electromagnet rings precisely spaced between Earth and the Moon. Everything powered by solar energy.

[Nightside]

10 minutes ago, Scotius said:

High quality vacuum would be very beneficial for many scientific and industrial processes. What we have in moderately high Earth orbit, far exceeds in purity any vacuum we can produce on the surface. And there is nigh infinite amount of this very pure vacuum Imagine a particle collider thousands of kilometers long, built mostly from electromagnet rings precisely spaced between Earth and the Moon. Everything powered by solar energy.

But most of that industry also relies on the high quality gravity freely available on the surface of a planet...

Edited August 14, 2020 by Nightside

[Scotius]

1 minute ago, Nightside said:

But most of that industry also relies on the high quality gravity freely available on the surface of a planet...

That's an incentive do develop and build rotating habitats

[kerbiloid]

These strange people are not happy that we already have all what we need right here, on this planet, and get disappointed every time when another hope that we lack something and need to go into vacuum is broken.

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, Entropian said:

Woah, you really think so?  What about asteroid mining, He3 scooping, and 0g crystal growth?  (seriously, 0g crystal growth would be extremely profitable)

Asteroid mining is only useful for space industries and He-3 is not worth mining at all. At least not on the Moon. And even if we had a perfect and highly pure source of He-3, we don’t have the technology to use it.

0g crystal growth could be profitable but you need large infrastructure and an ability to return said crystals to Earth in large numbers.

[magnemoe]

On 8/13/2020 at 4:58 AM, SOXBLOX said:

There really isn't an economic reason for going to space. If there was profit to be made in space, governments would be regulating space a lot more.  

Now, on the serious side of things, modern economies don't run on raw materials. These are usually dirt cheap. The important step is turning raw materials into finished products. (Think about how much the materials in a cell phone cost compared to the phone itself.) This requires work, which people are paid for, and work needs energy. So you should use space energy to drive economic processes. Using a limited number of ships to haul raw materials is unlikely to be efficient, so use them for ferrying workers and prefab habitats. Use good ol' chemfuel rockets for hauling stuff. Then, set up orbital solar arrays, huge fission reactors on the moon, stuff like that to take advantage of the lack of environmental protection agencies. Beam energy to Terra, manufacture stuff in space, and supply your worker colonists with water and stuff. Over 25-50 years, you could profit doing this.

Of course, of you're feeling Machiavellian, instigate a nuclear war on Earth. Then, many people will pay you to leave Earth and bring supplies to them from orbital farms. This is a...drastic...solution, though.

Governments don't regulate space much as its hard because it require getting all to agree on it or going to war against the one who don't. 
Same with international water is not regulated and here you have real issue likes over-fishing who nobody can handle seriously. 

Satellite business has long been very profitable and is booming. 
The problem with space manufacturing is actually that testing processes in space is so expensive, not talking about actually producing them. 
This part will be much cheaper, one item who might well be worth producing in space is optical fibers as you can get higher quality in zero-g. 
I say this is the number one marked, better than tourism down the line. 

Next is fuel from Moon or asteroids. Followed by raw materials for your orbital factories and space stations. Not only materials used but also for shielding, armor and structures. 
Note that both of this require deep space mining but your target is not Earth but orbit and it small scale. 

Rest is closer to 2050 outside of stuff making space exploration cheaper. 

[Entropian]

9 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

He-3 is not worth mining at all. At least not on the Moon.

Totally not on the moon.  Go to the gas giants if you want He3.  Lunar mining is really inefficient.

 

12 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

0g crystal growth could be profitable but you need large infrastructure and an ability to return said crystals to Earth in large numbers.

Even if you only produced a few dozen crystals a year, you would still be rolling in cash.  Single crystal yttrium barium copper oxide is a good example.  You can get insane current density with single crystals, which would be groundbreaking for superconducting magnetic confinement fusion devices.  Scientists have produced something like a 1cm single crystal for YBCO, but when stacked the crystal joints cause a huge current density loss.

[kerbiloid]

23 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

you need large infrastructure and an ability to return said crystals to Earth in large numbers.

A space elevator.
They attach the pack of crystals to the rope and release.
It falls and pulls the opposite side of the rope with attached passenger cabin.
The cargo falls down, the cabin runs up.
When the cargo is on ground and the cabin is on top, the dockers tie it with rope to the anchor.
The passengers from the Earth get out, the passenger from the station get in.
The dockers take the cargo from the cabin and release the rope.
The cabin gets down.

It's quite simple.

12 minutes ago, Entropian said:

Totally not on the moon.  Go to the gas giants if you want He3.

And spend it to return.

[wumpus]

4 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Asteroid mining is only useful for space industries and He-3 is not worth mining at all. At least not on the Moon. And even if we had a perfect and highly pure source of He-3, we don’t have the technology to use it.

Asteroid mining may be useful for extremely large amounts of materials that are rare on Earth (iridium, platinum).  It also depends on just how concentrated you have to get the ore and all sorts of political considerations on being allowed to deorbit (and even for orbital insertion) the ore/pigs

[SOXBLOX]

Probably the fastest way to make a buck off space industry is to build an orbital solar array, though. It requires the least infrastructure, I think. So, faster.

[kerbiloid]

Or to sell books, videos, and lectures about the space industry, orbital arrays, and colonization of Mars.
Somebody is doing this right now.

Edited August 15, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

Probably the fastest way to make a buck off space industry is to build an orbital solar array, though. It requires the least infrastructure, I think. So, faster.

 

Likely the most optimal way given constant 1g and higher for 25 years.

 

Also the fact that industry is already ready to make solar panels en mass, unlike for rare materials we have little of.

So if we suddenly were dropped a bunch of precious rare metals to crash the market, our industry would have to play catch up to fully utilize them.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Spacescifi

[SOXBLOX]

You got it!

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Or to sell books, videos, and lectures about the space industry, orbital arrays, and colonization of Mars.
Somebody is doing this right now.

Or this. 

[Spacescifi]

12 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

You got it!

Or this. 

 

Congrats... it looks like you won the challenge.

Unless someoneelse here can convince me they can make more profits than you in 25 years using another method.

Doubt it though.

What are you going to do with your 1g or higher constant acceleration ship once you get to keep it?

Do the mars colony thing? Or something else?

By the way, without manmade modifications, the ship can carry a max payload of 2000 tons.

Max acceleration possible with max payload is 3g. Adding more payload will reduce maximum hrust naturally, while reducing payload will increase it.

Can fly indefinitely.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Spacescifi

[DDE]

14 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

And even if we had a perfect and highly pure source of He-3

And we do, in the form of decaying tritium in nuclear arsenals.

15 hours ago, Nightside said:

But most of that industry also relies on the high quality gravity freely available on the surface of a planet...

Well, to be honest, it's because that industry is designed that way.

Which still means a costly reengineering of everything to work in z-g.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

it looks like you won the challenge.

Zubrin did.

[SOXBLOX]

11 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Congrats... it looks like you won the challenge.

Unless someoneelse here can convince me they can make more profits than you in 25 years using another method.

Doubt it though.

What are you going to do with your 1g or higher constant acceleration ship once you get to keep it?

Do the mars colony thing? Or something else?

By the way, without manmade modifications, the ship can carry a max payload of 2000 tons.

Max acceleration possible with max payload is 3g. Adding more payload will reduce maximum hrust naturally, while reducing payload will increase it.

Can fly indefinitely.

Oh. Well, thank you. I believe one thing I would do with the drive is send a telescope to the solar gravitational focus, to investigate an exoplanet or two. Maybe I'd also use the revenues from the solar arrays to colonize, say, the lunar poles? IDK.

[Spacescifi]

6 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

Oh. Well, thank you. I believe one thing I would do with the drive is send a telescope to the solar gravitational focus, to investigate an exoplanet or two. Maybe I'd also use the revenues from the solar arrays to colonize, say, the lunar poles? IDK.

 

I will tell you what I would do with a 1g or higher constant acceleration spaceship.

1. Put probes on every world in the solar system that we know about. Recieve video feed and download it and return it back to Earth upon completion.

2. Put a sub on Europa to explore it's rumored ocean beneath the ice. My gut tells me that it is probably just a bunch of watery lakes and not all over.

3.  Nuke Mars... put explosion on video feed for later Earth entertainment consumption. Less for science and more just because I have the power to do silly things and will.

4. Explode a nuke in deep space for same reason.

5. Find out how many nukes it takes to blow up a large asteroid rather than just blow it off course. Answer: A lot.

Real reason I'm doing this: Besides the awesome nuclear video clips, I will be reducing mankind's nuclear stockpile in the name of entertainment.

Edited August 16, 2020 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Nuke Mars... put explosion on video feed for later Earth entertainment consumption

It would be a very short and dull video because Mars almost doesn't have an atmosphere to show anything but short flash and thrown ejecta.

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Explode a nuke in deep space for same reason.

It would be even more spectacular, as there would be even no thrown ejecta.

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Find out how many nukes it takes to blow up a large asteroid rather than just blow it off course. Answer: A lot.

The large asteroid varies from 10+ m to 500 km.

[kerbiloid]

Tyres. We can send the spent tyres to the Moon instead of burning or storing them.

On the Moon they're carbon and hydrogen. To produce the fuel when it's required, but stable and storable all other time.

They can be reused on lunar rovers to protect the wheels from regolith.
And if fill them with regolith, they may become building blocks without any 3d.

Also they can be used as fender(s) to protect the lunar modules (and orbital stations) from collisions (see Progress M-34).

Spoiler

 

[Arugela]

That would be hilarious as all the super rich move to the moon and live in houses that look like slums.

They would quickly become space hillbillies and the cycle would be complete.

Edited August 29, 2020 by Arugela

[KerikBalm]

On 8/13/2020 at 2:34 AM, Spacescifi said:

1g constant acceleration spacecraft without a need to refuel.

You really are obsessed with this aren't you? how many threads have you started in which contain the premise that one has access to such a thing?

On 8/16/2020 at 3:05 AM, Spacescifi said:

2. Put a sub on Europa to explore it's rumored ocean beneath the ice. My gut tells me that it is probably just a bunch of watery lakes and not all over.

"Gut instinct" is worthless, and the presence of an ocean around Europa's core is well supported.

Enceledus on the other hand, that may be pockets of water without a moon-wide ocean