Space X and privatised space exploration.

[Fixer]

Back in the 1950s, a movie called destination moon made their prediction that it would be private industry and not the government that would first set foot on the lunar surface.

They were wrong of course but now it looks like Elon Musk may be pushing ahead to be the first to set foot on Mars.
Space X is now worth an estimate £21.5 billion and has plans for an interplanetary transport system.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/spacex- ... round.html

With the space race a thing of history and with no real political will for further manned space exploration, could we be looking at a corporate future amongst the stars?

[Morgaine]

Assuming this "transport" doesn't blow up on the launch pad and Musk blames a conspiracy involving snipers paid by Virgin Galactic again.

Honestly why anyone still believes this conman is beyond me.

[TGLS]

If there is a corporate future in the stars, the first question that needs to be answered is "Where's the money?" We are almost certain that there are no minerals we can mine cheaper in the stars (once you account for the very high shipping costs/times), and industrial processes specific to the environment of space have not been explored yet. Shipping water and materials to low earth orbit could be practical, but there's hardly a market there to begin with.

Mars One was a daft idea, but at least it had a plan to make money off of a Mars landing. All SpaceX has Elon Musk's vanity...

[Fixer]

I hadn't heard of the sabotage story before. Had to look it up, article I read made good point that it might have been business posturing, deflection and BS.

Despite the nonsense SpaceX has managed some decent technological feats. Elon Musk has a bunch of pie-in-the-sky ideas or concepts that will never work thanks to those pesky laws of physics but still manages to pull off things like the new battery installation in Australia.

In terms of profitability in space, the money maker at the moment is satellite launches and bringing down the cost per kilo is the way towards profitability. A British company called Reaction Engines was developing the SABRE engine, capable of air breathing and vacuum operation which would massively reduce the cost of launches to space. There's also the far future possibility of a nanotube space elevator.

After that, space tourism, asteroid mining and helium 3 would be the next logical steps. Asteroid mining has a huge potential return from rare element mining in metal rich asteroids. However there's that teeny bit of concern that redirecting a high mass rock in space at high velocity towards Earth might bring some justified concerns. Helium 3 would need someone to develop an actual working fusion reactor.

[Wild_Kraken]

Privatizing space exploration is a bad idea for numerous reasons, but a primary one is how fragile the whole set up is. I see numerous parallels between Elon Musk with Space X and Walt Disney with EPCOT. The former will almost certainly suffer the same fate as the latter. Once Musk dies, without his forceful personality to steer things, the shareholders will take control and halt anything that isn't making them a profit in the short term. Space X will at best be nothing more than a service for launching satellites into orbit, or perhaps for delivering goods to whatever puny space station replaces the ISS.

[Antiboyscout]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h97fXhDN5qE

8:57 Space X is not a public company

not sure how to use the youtube video tool

[TGLS]

@AsteroidMining
Let's play numbers. A 40 tonne ship with an exhaust velocity of 5 km/s (slightly better than modern chemical rockets) flies to a big ball of platinum 5 km/s (approximately geostationary orbit) away, picks up 40 tonnes of platinum and flies back 2.5 km/s and parachutes home. How much money does this make?

By the rocket equation, this rocket needs around 209803 kilos of propellant/fuel at earth. At a cost of about $5000 per kilo, this costs around a billion dollars. The platinum is worth around $1.2 billion, so you net $200 million before non-functional related expenses. Note you are increasing platinum production by around 20%, so the value may be lower. Of course, I know of no such ball of platinum.

Lesson 1: The rocket equation is the biggest problem here. Higher efficiency rockets are a good idea (doubling exhaust velocity literally quadruples your money), as is refueling on site to minimize fuel costs (another money quadrupler).

Lesson 2: Maximize value to mass of the product your shipping. This means shipping smelted ore or finished goods instead of raw materials. Coupled with the low gravity conditions of space, finished products that can only be produced in space will probably be the main products shipped about (for example, higher quality crystals or rounder ball bearings can be produced in microgravity environments)

[Admiral X]

There probably isn't much profit in going to Mars, but I guess someone rich enough and willing to essentially waste the money on a "just because" project can't be ruled out. But unless we develop something that is cheaper than rocket propulsion, private space travel is probably going to be restricted to hauling satellites, cargo, and people into orbit. It would be interesting to see a private company develop something like the space shuttle so that satellites could be retrieved and repaired as well.

[Fixer]

Of course, I know of no such ball of platinum.

Fear not! Forbes published a list of the solar system's most valuable asteroids not long ago.
The top value asteroid was $5.4 trillion.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailtra ... c2a9723cfc

Enough to crash the global metals market and destroy several economies.

Outside of that though, in vacuum and without a gravity well solar sails and ion drives become viable options. Low thrust over long term, without having to carry a large reaction mass. Requires a lot of patience and an extremely long time before a pay-off but near Earth asteroids could be pushed into a comfortable orbit. Also other resources on Asteroids such as water could be used for fuel for more conventional engines.

Also this has the potential to push resources for further construction into orbit, rather than having to do the heavy lifting up from Earth. If you're looking to bootstrap into starting some real space industry, that's how to do it. Though it would take a leap in refining technology and production.

A massive up front investment and zero payoff for potentially decades would put off a lot of capital investors.

[Madner Kami]

There probably isn't much profit in going to Mars, but I guess someone rich enough and willing to essentially waste the money on a "just because" project can't be ruled out. But unless we develop something that is cheaper than rocket propulsion, private space travel is probably going to be restricted to hauling satellites, cargo, and people into orbit. It would be interesting to see a private company develop something like the space shuttle so that satellites could be retrieved and repaired as well.

You can also reduce singular costs for a spaceflight by getting more people into the same ship, but that's besides the point. What really broke the back of space exploration late in the Cold War and early in the Post Cold War phase is indeed the lack of inherent economical value of any undertaking with the currently available technology. There could be an entire asteroid made out of diamonds and it would not be economically viable to catch and mine it, not to even think of what the amount of diamonds brought back would do to the diamond economy on Earth. One just needs to think about what happened to the Spanish Empire, once they started importing obscene amounts of gold to Europe...

Anyways, assuming it would be possible to grow food on Mars as well as independently supply colonists from the planet alone, then there's business there. Plus Mars makes more sense as a base for further space exploration than Earth does, due to lower gravity. The problem still is transportation costs, obviously and the Moon, which is both closer and has less gravity, would be an even better base to begin with, but, and that's the real bringer, if something really bad happens to Earth, the Moon might not be the best place to be. Mars certainly is.