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SpaceX is claiming in the neighborhood of $1500/kg to put something into LEO. If you want to put a structure on the order of billions of kilograms into orbit it

SpaceX is claiming in the neighborhood of $1500/kg to put something into LEO. If you want to put a structure on the order of billions of kilograms into orbit it would make more sense to get that mass from something already out there and park it in high orbit instead - and space-based mining technology doesn't exist yet.

hinkley 7y ago
I wonder if we could circularize the orbit of a near earth asteroid like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx which is outside of earth orbit always (less likely to run into the earth, and 10% farther up the sun's gravity well.
wongarsu 7y ago
At the same time a fully loaded Falcon 9 uses about $10/kg of fuel to put something into LEO. The cost mainly comes from building the rockets, and to a lesser degree operating them (mission control, landing ships, etc). All of those costs would come down dramatically once you reach the scales nessesary for building such a structure. Economies of scale could easily bring the price down an order of magnitude or more. For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).
m4rtink 7y ago
Note that such prize is most likely for low Earth orbit - and I don't think you want a 30 km long orbital there when if you could get it there. There is still signifficant air drag in LEO that would get it down rather quickly, ruining someones day on the surface.
saundby 7y ago
Closer to $1100 per kg for Falcon Heavy.
- mhandley 7y ago
  And something like $300 per kg for Starship (on the assumption of roughly $30M for a fully reusable launch - Musk says it should be cheaper than F9 per launch - and 100 tonnes to LEO) if they're successful in minimizing refurbishment between launches, and there's enough business to spread the development costs over enough launches.

hinkley 7y ago

I wonder if we could circularize the orbit of a near earth asteroid like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx which is outside of earth orbit always (less likely to run into the earth, and 10% farther up the sun's gravity well.

wongarsu 7y ago

At the same time a fully loaded Falcon 9 uses about $10/kg of fuel to put something into LEO. The cost mainly comes from building the rockets, and to a lesser degree operating them (mission control, landing ships, etc). All of those costs would come down dramatically once you reach the scales nessesary for building such a structure. Economies of scale could easily bring the price down an order of magnitude or more. For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).

m4rtink 7y ago

Note that such prize is most likely for low Earth orbit - and I don't think you want a 30 km long orbital there when if you could get it there. There is still signifficant air drag in LEO that would get it down rather quickly, ruining someones day on the surface.

saundby 7y ago

Closer to $1100 per kg for Falcon Heavy.

mhandley 7y ago
And something like $300 per kg for Starship (on the assumption of roughly $30M for a fully reusable launch - Musk says it should be cheaper than F9 per launch - and 100 tonnes to LEO) if they're successful in minimizing refurbishment between launches, and there's enough business to spread the development costs over enough launches.