What will happen if Skylon succeeds?

[magnemoe]

Development is ongoing, so it's not a truly paper project anymore. The cost projections are pure best case scenario, though.

Some chance other take over or start their own development if it looks good, US air force is researching scramjets, they do it for missiles who is far easier than spaceplanes.

They want an supersonic cruise missile as they don't want to use use long range ballistic missiles as other can take it for an nuclear attack, yes its a bit fishy, perhaps they like fast planes

[Moar Boosters]

Yep. I thought so.

And Skylon is not just a paper - they already made a small-scale test of engines, and work now on a large-scale engines with ESA.

As ESA said:

They've also recently named eight locations in the UK which are being assessed for the suitability for a space-port. None of the releases I read mentioned Skylon specifically, but they have said a 3000m minimum runway is a requirement, and the UK isn't exactly an ideal location for multi-stage rockets as they'd be dropping parts all over Europe and Russia.

[GoSlash27]

I don't think very much changes. Even if it delivers the payload/ cost they're hoping for (which never happens in practice) it's still way out of the price range to make space economically viable. If you're going to send a person up there it's a year's salary. That's just to LEO. Unless you're a government space agency, you've got to justify the cost of such an expenditure. What's up there that's worth that kind of money?

Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing... but space isn't going to boom until they find something up there that's worth the trip.

JMO,

-Slashy

[Ralathon]

I don't think very much changes. Even if it delivers the payload/ cost they're hoping for (which never happens in practice) it's still way out of the price range to make space economically viable. If you're going to send a person up there it's a year's salary. That's just to LEO. Unless you're a government space agency, you've got to justify the cost of such an expenditure. What's up there that's worth that kind of money?

Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing... but space isn't going to boom until they find something up there that's worth the trip.

JMO,

-Slashy

A single metal rich asteroid can contain more rare metals than we have mined during the entire existence of humanity. There's a lot of good stuff up there, it's just that the initial hurdle to get to that stuff is so ridiculously expensive and risky.

Also, space is an entire industry in the current economy. Only a small fraction of things up there are for purely scientific reasons. Telecommunications, weather monitoring, earth imaging and GPS sats are all commercial or military ventures.

If Reaction Engines manages to get a working vehicle they'll have a big market.

[GoSlash27]

A single metal rich asteroid can contain more rare metals than we have mined during the entire existence of humanity. There's a lot of good stuff up there, it's just that the initial hurdle to get to that stuff is so ridiculously expensive and risky.

FWIW, this is also my best bet for an economic impetus for humans working and living in space. But in the meantime there's nothing you can mine from an asteroid that isn't available cheaper on Earth.

Also, space is an entire industry in the current economy. Only a small fraction of things up there are for purely scientific reasons. Telecommunications, weather monitoring, earth imaging and GPS sats are all commercial or military ventures.

If Reaction Engines manages to get a working vehicle they'll have a big market.

Not disputing any of this, but that's not a "change". These folks should do a brisk business if it works out, but there's not much that I see changing as a result. The market shares change, the usual customers save some money on their satellite launches, but that's about it.

Best,

-Slashy

[Seret]

A single metal rich asteroid can contain more rare metals than we have mined during the entire existence of humanity.

Which would be a bit of a problem.

The thing is you can't base the economic case for mining those metals on the current value of rare earths. If you did suddenly have a viable way of getting them back to Earth you'd be able to flood the market. Essentially it would give you full control of how much you wanted to crash the price. It would probably be worth your while severely restricting production in order to keep the price artificially high.

This of course would only work if you had a monopoly. As soon as you've got competition happening then you're in a race to the bottom, and there goes your margin. You'll probably either end up with some behind-the-scenes price fixing or both go bust.

[SeaDog]

Which would be a bit of a problem.

The thing is you can't base the economic case for mining those metals on the current value of rare earths. If you did suddenly have a viable way of getting them back to Earth you'd be able to flood the market. Essentially it would give you full control of how much you wanted to crash the price. It would probably be worth your while severely restricting production in order to keep the price artificially high.

This of course would only work if you had a monopoly. As soon as you've got competition happening then you're in a race to the bottom, and there goes your margin. You'll probably either end up with some behind-the-scenes price fixing or both go bust.

I've seen this argument before, and I think its a bit strange. It doesn't seem to take into account how any industry develops. Just because you have a viable way of getting the materials back to earth does not mean you're able to flood the market.

First, the platinum market is something like 200 tons per year. So at around 100 tons per year, I guess we could say we have flooded the market. But what would that require? It would require a mining operation that can produce 100 tons per year, or a few hundred kilograms per day. That in turn would likely require a similar amount of oxygen and hydrogen, most likely also mined, for transportation between asteroids and earth. Then you'd need the infrastructure for the transportation and the fuel mining and the platinum mining rig itself. It seems pretty obvious to me that this requires putting many hundreds if not thousands of tons into LEO. In other words, we're nowhere near having the infrastructure for that kind of scale to be plausible right away, no investor would go for a plan like that.

Secondly, no one really knows how you'd build this system, so we'd need to try several different ways of doing this, and the first ones will probably not be profitable. The first attempts will be mostly about demonstrating the possibility and testing various systems. If profitability is unlikely, you'll want to keep the scale as small as possible. I'd say one ton per year is a very large scale for the first attempt. I think it would take atleast two decades between the one ton scale to the 100 ton scale. And all the while, people would still be unsure wether this was profitable in the long run or not, just like it is with regular mines. It would not be like the gold rushes in the americas, where people suddenly discover a resource that was cheaply available. Instead, it would be like modern mining operations, where everyone is mostly aware to some extent that the resources are there, but nothing happens until enough investors decide that it's worth the risk to try and develop it. This means it will be a very careful development (that might at any time stop to be resumed a few years later with new investors) with relatively little real competition because, frankly, few people believe in it. And again, the scale will be kept at a minimum, because not even the investors who do believe in it want to make the risk bigger than it has to be.

So yeah, it's been said that this whole asteroid mining thing is fantasy and science fiction, and there's probably some truth in that. But the "flooding the market"-criticism is even more sci-fi in my opinion. I don't see how anyone who understands the mining industry or the space industry could believe THAT to be a significant problem here.

[Seret]

Actually I don't think we disagree SeaDog. My point was that the abundance of resources in asteroids can't be used as a potential trigger for a vastly expanded utilisation of space, as Ralathon was trying to assert. As you point out, the economics of mining asteroids is unlikely to be guaranteed. If you can't shift enough of it back to Earth you can't make much money, and if you can you crash the price. It's not a good argument for a significant expansion of activity in space either way IMO.

[SargeRho]

IMO, materials mined in space are best used in space. If you can bring a few tons of Platinum back, that would be nice as well though.