9 ms·
When he talks about millions of people working in space, what jobs is he talking about? Primarily resource mining?
by myroon5 10y ago
When he talks about millions of people working in space, what jobs is he talking about? Primarily resource mining?
- adventured 10y agoManufacturing for one thing. He has spoken on numerous occasions about wanting to offplanet manufacturing to space for multiple reasons. The question of course, is whether by the time we could be doing large volume manufacturing in space, if it isn't far more likely to be done by robots.
- synaesthesisx 10y agoI'm having difficulty picturing anything we could manufacture on Mars that would be cheaper vs terrestrial manufacturing.
- jstandard 10y agoManufacturing and processing materials to sustain martian colonies, exploration, or satellites. The cost will be high initially, but if we're ever to have any permanent foothold, local manufacturing will be needed.
- oblib 10y agoThat is science and tech for knowledge's sake, not a plan to make a profit. Certainly there are some things that will benefit from being manufactured in a low or zero gravity environment but so far nothing that will turn a profit off of setup costs that I'm aware off. It's not that I don't admire the ambition. I do. But I really don't think that unfettered commercialization of even low missiles into space is a good idea. From what I've read we do not know the potential effects this could have on the Ozone and upper atmosphere. We seem to be ignoring the precautionary principal with these projects.
- Judgmentality 10y ago> That is science and tech for knowledge's sake, not a plan to make a profit. To be fair, there wasn't much business incentive (although certainly a lot of political incentive) to go to the moon in the first place. But it ultimately led to numerous new technologies and markets, most notably GPS. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good investment, but the biggest wins are always the biggest surprises (Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Apple were all initially hated by investors).
- jstandard 10y agoBy "local" manufacturing I was referring to manufacturing plants on Mars itself to support other initiatives on Mars, in response to a comment comparing manufacturing on Mars to on earth. Raw materials transport seems the major constraining factor. Assuming some types of raw materials will be available on Mars, there's a high chance local Mars manufacturing of some basic goods will be more cost effective than manufacturing on Earth and transporting it.
- Hermel 10y agoThe manufacturing itself won't be cheaper. But you can save transport costs. It costs about 22000 USD to send 1 kg into space. SpaceX might improve this to 1000 USD per kg, but that's still quite expensive.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 10y agoMaybe not on Mars, but in low gravity environments. Metallurgy in low-gravity is interesting.
- adventured 10y agoOne the arguments Bezos floats for space-based manufacturing is to offplanet the negative environmental consequences of industry. His premise is, the earth is for habitation, space is for industry. Certainly seems likely to be very expensive, but he also thinks he can put down a foundation of space infrastructure upon which the next generations can build upon (with the implication being to bring costs down dramatically to enable a boom in all things space). He uses the Internet as a comparison, in that he was able to do what he did, because previous generations put down a technology foundation that made Amazon possible (he didn't have to build all of that).
- hinkley 10y agoThere's abundant calcium, silicon, aluminum, titanium and oxygen on the moon. You bring in hydrogen and export tritium and a lot of the rest could be used to expand settlements and build up space infrastructure.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoNot necessarily on Mars. Earth orbit would be a good start, so would be Luna if you absolutely need to have a solid rock bed under you. It definitely won't be cheaper initially, especially if you want that manufacturing to serve the needs of people down on Earth; but it will make more space development cheaper (you don't have to move mass upwell, and as we know, Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System). So space industry will most likely initially work on developing itself and reducing its own costs.
- oblib 10y agoThat is a more realistic view of manufacturing in space. Robots? Sure. I don't see "millions of people" doing that though. And so far I've not heard of what or where they'll be mining. I've heard of getting water from comets but that's not really a profit maker either (unless maybe you make liqueur with it) so unless you've spotted one nearby made of precious metal I'm still not seeing the motivation for this.
- ansible 10y agoSolar power satellites would be a nice-to-have for the ultimate "clean energy" supply for Earth civilizations. I haven't looked recently to see exactly how practical they are though.
- dirtyaura 10y agoOne would assume that harvesting energy is practical (sans the launch cost), but practical way to transfer the energy back to the earth is the unsolved problem.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoMicrowaves. The problem with that though is, from what I hear, such technology would double as an orbital weapons platform. I wonder what the math says about big mirrors focusing more sunlight over empty areas where we could put lots of solar panels.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hueving 10y agoMuch easier to put solar panels on the ground.
- andygates 10y agoThey're physically huge, so they're a lot more feasible when much of the bulk mass can be sourced "upwell" from (for example) mined resources.
- Jakob 10y ago"While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there's one thing he hates: space solar power. "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate?" he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. "Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"" http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a8101/elon-musk-on-spacex-tesla-and-why-space-solar-power-must-die-13386162/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a8101/elon-musk-o...
- 3xnis 10y agoThe primarily resource would be datamining. Datacenters need energy and cooling. Both are available in abundance in space. Unlike any other industry, their processing material, data, doesn't have to be transported with rockets. However, this doesn't create jobs in space, just jobs in space industries, since those datacenters are most likely fully automatized.
- dennyabraham 10y agoIs this a joke or is purely radiative cooling in space feasible for a datacenter?
- jameshart 10y agoMaybe you plant your data center on the dark side of an iron-rich asteroid and sink waste heat into it.
- dullgiulio 10y agoThat works for the ISS, maybe a DC would just be bigger in scale. There is also the link problem: if the space DC is geostationary, it will be quite far making for a longer round-trip time (RTT) and latency. If it's closer, it needs a lot of radio stations on earth to keep the space DC connected. And each radio station is roughtly the investment of a real DC on Earth.
- srdev 10y agoCooling is not easily available in space actually. Its a pretty difficult problem. There's no air to convect away heat so you rely only on radiative cooling which can't move a lot of heat easily.
- detritus 10y agoI've always thought it a good idea to consider restricting future dangerTech development to, say, lunar or orbital labs and factories. Advanced nano tech or virus development, for example. Anything that skirts grey goo or 100% lethality rates. Any problems and 'nuke the site from orbit'.