The Space Race Today

[Fractal_UK]

We won't be using space to get power. An orbital solar farm is twice more efficient than a solar farm on the ground? Who cares? Just build a solar farm on the ground that is twice as big. It will still be massively cheaper, and we are not running out of sunny real estate any time soon.

When? No, we probably won't be doing it within the next few years but as our technology advances, why wouldn't we do it? In principle, if a civilisation can exploit resources from all over the solar system, particularly from low mass bodies such as asteroids and moons, there is nothing stopping it from deploying absolutely unimagineable quantities of solar capacity throughout the solar system. There is no reason to believe that such capacity need be manufactured on Earth, sure that's all we can do for now but it doesn't make sense to predict negatively in this case. There is no reason to believe that this cannot be done or that it would be inefficient to do so, therefore assuming human civilisation continues to advance, I guarantee it will be done eventually.

The sheer energy involved in building a massive power plant and accelerating it from 0 to 25000km/h will always be higher than the power output of that power plant. Also, factor in the loss of beaming that power back down to the ground, the cost of the ground station that is going to convert that beam into electricity, and the complexity and risk involved. It's a no go.

Note that even in this case, you're looking at a large one-off cost with minimal ongoing operational costs, which tends to be optimal type of investment to make anyway. Provided you can get launch costs low enough to make the energy more valuable over several years than the initial launch costs, you have a profitable system. Again, there are plausible near-future mechanisms by which launch costs could be substantially reduced from what they are at present.

Like I say, it's not soon but if you're going to predict something won't happen, you'd better be damn sure it's impossible or practically impossible or it almost certainly will be done eventually.

[Nibb31]

Well, speculating about anything beyond a couple of decades is pretty meaningless, and I'm pretty sure we won't get orbital solar plants in the next 40 years. There are much cheaper power sources on Earth, and I don't see any groundbreaking lowering of the cost of accelerating things to orbit.

In the 60s, people were predicting moon bases, nuclear powered flying cars and what did we get? The Internet, that nobody expected. Yet it has changed our lives in a much deeper way than anything else that emerged out of the industrial revolution. The greatest changes are the ones that nobody expects.

[DerekL1963]

The major niche that I could see for it right now would be to target asteroids with deposits of particular metals that have an extremely low natural abudance within the Earth's crust. There are some materials for which the entire worldwide production of these materials is measured in grams or kilograms. Many of these elements are very heavy and thus extremely rare on large planetary bodies

There is no mineral on Earth so expensive, even thousand plus carat gem quality diamonds, that you wouldn't go broke fetching it home from space. None. Nada. Zip. (The current record for a diamond is a hair over $16 million USD.) In order to not go broke, you have to get price per lb into LEO down in the same range as terrestrial transport.

It could also allow insertion of resources into LEO in quantities that might be prohibitively expensive simply by launching them up there, potentially unlocking other avenues of advancement in space exploration.

After you've spent a few tens (or hunrdreds) of trillions establishing sufficient LEO infrastructure to make hauling asteroids around economically sensible... you've probably got sufficiently efficient ground to orbit transport that it isn't economically sensible. And that's the real problem with space exploitation, chicken-and-egg problems everywhere you look.

[Joshington]

Me: Hey, people are replying to my thread!

*looks at replies*

Me: Welp...That escalated quickly.