7 ms·

It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming ro

It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60. So, there's clearly a lot of value to somebody for fiber optic cable with even lower signal loss. That really drives home to me that, even though information technology is just my boring day job and it's still space travel that gets me as excited as it did when I was a kid, it's still true that the space age is over and we're definitely living in the information age.

kiba 6y ago
If you didn't have to source your material from Earth, it would be a lot cheaper.
adrianN 6y ago
Orbital manufacturing makes very little sense if you source material on Earth. You need to get your raw material from the Moon or a captured asteroid.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Which is why this fiber optic thing is a big deal. They're demonstrating that you can build useful stuff in space that are a) already have a demand, and b) are infeasible or impossible to manufacture downwell. More attention = more funding, more attempts... until, I'm hoping, we'll reach critical mass and someone will start mining near-Earth asteroids, or perhaps capture one and move it a bit closer to us, at which point the prices of space material will drop. = more funding, more attempts, until someone figures out how to make stuff useful for space missions in space, and this will be the true beginning of a self-sustaining in-orbit economy.
sargun 6y ago
So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these. For example, the MAREA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. If it's to be believed, ZBLAN could get rid of these repeaters all together. The cable's design is _much_ more complicated because of the requirement to have electricity and repeaters.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Presumably lower loss also means more bandwidth when background thermal noise becomes the limiting factor.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Lasers. This stuff may be necessary for a new class of weapons. That is the reason for all the speculation.
simonh 6y ago
> I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. That sounds like you’re including the weight of the whole final cable, including yarn strengthening members, plastic shroud and sometimes a braided metal shield layer. Only the glass fibre itself actually needs to be manufactured in space and is usually on the order of a kg or so per km.
osamagirl69 6y ago
For the time being, they are targeting specialty applications where it is not uncommon to charge in excess of $1000 per meter even for normal earthly fibers. For scaling up, if one uses the smallest commercial fiber standard (80um diameter cladding--they would put the buffer and whatnot on after it comes back to earth) the mass of the fiber is only 53grams/km so using your $3000/kg the cargo cost is only $0.16/meter which seems pretty palatable to me.
- chas 6y ago
  What’s the application of super high-quality earth cable?
  - SXX 6y ago
    That's kind a obvious: high-frequency trading. Thousands of banks and companies will happily to pay premium to get some edge over competitors. As soon as single entity on market have it everyone else would want it as well so there will be plenty of demand.
borosT 6y ago
is asteroid mining viable compare to shipping raw material up the earth gravity well?
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Definitelly - just has a high startup cost and possibly takes some time to get the material back.
dannyw 6y ago
High frequency traders will want the best connectivity humanely possible. It’s a zero sum game. If they can beat a competitor firm’s signals by the smallest fraction of a second, even a nanosecond, they reaps in the profits. So $100m for some better fibre? Go nuts!
- andrepd 6y ago
  Eh, that's a really sad thing to optimise for, don't you think? Revealing of a broken incentive system. I'd prefer if HFT practices were banned.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Can you be more specific about what is so broken about the need for efficient and fast trade?
    - pms 6y ago
      Volatility is the main concern [1]. Making trading decisions based on microseconds is speculation. How can anyone or anything reach an understanding of something as complex as markets in this short time? Other concerns include unnecessary waste and unfairness [2]. The point is that this is a zero-sum game that makes us invest in infrastructure that will soon get obsolete once someone else builds a faster infrastructure. Fast trade isn't "efficient". Long-term stability is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
      - TomMarius 6y ago
        It is a speculation, yes. That does not mean it is not useful, or is harmful to the society.
        nicoburns 6y ago
        How is it useful?
yellowapple 6y ago
How much of that material needs to come from Earth, though? If we can get that from the Moon, for example, then you wouldn't need nearly as much fuel to get the raw materials into orbit for manufacturing. Then all you need to do is get the finished product to wherever it needs to go (e.g. in an atmospheric entry vehicle, or to some other orbital factory, or to some far out colony, or what have you).
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Long term - definitely! But to get space manufacturing started in the short term, lowering the launch costs is the best bet.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Agreed 100%. The more we can lower costs getting from Earth to LEO, the cheaper and faster it'll be to bootstrap that manufacturing infrastructure.
tripzilch 6y ago
> That really drives home to me that, even though information technology is just my boring day job and it's still space travel that gets me as excited as it did when I was a kid, it's still true that the space age is over and we're definitely living in the information age. Just the fact that the historical events the past couple of days didn't involve space, but something filmed on a mobile phone shared through information technology ...
pharke 6y ago
> the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg This is also assuming the price per kg to orbit stays stable but Musk has stated he intends to drive the price down much further. He's even given figures for what he thinks they might be able to achieve with Starship[0] and SpaceX's rapid progress seems to indicate that they will, eventually, get there. The best comparison from history is probably the construction of railroads which had long development timelines and capital costs but eventually began paying back massive amounts even while driving the cost of freight down and providing a backbone for commercial and industrial development. [0] https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-musk-outlines-cost-for-launches https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m...
- jacobolus 6y ago
  People used railroads to profitably carry freight (originally with carts pulled by horses) right from the get-go. They became a lot cheaper to make once steel could be economically mass produced. Steam engines were originally used for pumping water, but there was an obvious huge demand for locomotives to move freight by land once they could be made cheaper or better than draft animals. I’m sure there exist some commercial uses for space flight, but it really doesn’t seem all that similar to railroads in terms of obvious market demand or effect on the economy.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    Yeah; I would compare railroads/rockets to microcomputers/VR. The latter is definitely impressive, and unique, and evocative for futurists, and has some niche use-cases, but doesn't have a clear "killer app". While the former had people - real businesses - chomping at the bit even before it became economical.
  - pharke 6y ago
    The points you bring up don't seem to support your argument. It took a decade from when people first attempted to haul freight with a steam locomotive until the first commercially successful railway was built. If you start counting from when the steam engine was first invented then it would be more than a century. You're correct that a lot of that success depended on improvements in manufacturing capability but I don't think it's so obvious that there was a huge market for steam locomotives right from the start, early steam engines were notoriously fickle, required constant attention and a trained engineer, needed specialized tooling and materials to repair when they inevitably broke, and they were incredibly inefficient and fuel hungry at first. That's why they started out so linked to coal mines, the mine produced enough cheap fuel for the engine and already had a lot of the metalworking tools and capable engineers needed to maintain it. I'm not sure why you don't think space is commercially viable right now, companies and governments are paying a lot of money to have things delivered to orbit. SpaceX is making money with every launch otherwise they would have gone bust years ago. If you mean there's no market for human spaceflight, well there wasn't a market for passenger railroad travel for a long time either. You need to build the railways before people can make practical use of them. Back when most railways only extended for 1 or 2 km it was pretty hard to imagine getting paying passengers. You have to build something that connects to places people want to go before they'll pay to ride it. With spaceflight we're currently in the shorthaul stage, all the profit is in delivering cargo to LEO. The cost is coming down and people are finding more uses for cheap satellites. The rockets already have their use case, they move people and cargo the same as a railroad, it's what we do with that capability that we need to get creative with and as we continue to build out capability and lower cost there will be more and more uses for space. The main reason I compare it to railroads is that it is a type of infrastructure that makes new things possible and there's always a profit to be made in a frontier as long as you're daring enough to take it.
piokoch 6y ago
Wait until some HFT investors will step up to buy such fiber cable to be microseconds faster than competition. Those $3000/kg could turn out to be a small change.
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
You know... Launching the raw materials to orbit from Earth might cost $3000/kg. While Earth is great for being able to sustain life, the gravity well rather sucks. Launching the same materials from most other interesting places in the solar system would cost a lot less, (at least, were there people there to provide some sort of settlement) For instance, presuming most of what you need is silicon oxide anyway; launching the raw material from the moon and transporting it to earth orbit easily costs MUCH less fuel than launching it from earth. * Earth->LEO: 9400 m/s * Moon->LEO: 1730+680+3260=5760 m/s on rockets alone * Moon->LEO 1730+680=2400 m/s with aerobraking (smarter) * Mars->LEO 6300 m/s with aerobraking * Asteroid belt->LEO between 1060-3360 m/s Moral of the story: Don't launch your stuff from Earth if you can at all help it. Now, once you have a somewhat established moon settlement that can take on projects it gets even more interesting. Unlike on earth, Lunar gravity is so low that things like a space elevator or a linear accelerator are practical with even todays technology and materials science. Combined with aerobraking on the other end, you could ultimately ship materials or goods to earth for cheaper and faster than china post ship from china. ;-) The only downside: first you do need that settlement on the moon, and that's one heck of an initial investment. On the other hand: once established and marginally autonomous, you can intuit that -despite harsh conditions- such a settlement could be quite a competitive location to establish mining and industry. Reference (assuming this one is well made): https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_deltav_subway_map_of_the_solar_system/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...

kiba 6y ago

If you didn't have to source your material from Earth, it would be a lot cheaper.

adrianN 6y ago

Orbital manufacturing makes very little sense if you source material on Earth. You need to get your raw material from the Moon or a captured asteroid.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Which is why this fiber optic thing is a big deal. They're demonstrating that you can build useful stuff in space that are a) already have a demand, and b) are infeasible or impossible to manufacture downwell. More attention = more funding, more attempts... until, I'm hoping, we'll reach critical mass and someone will start mining near-Earth asteroids, or perhaps capture one and move it a bit closer to us, at which point the prices of space material will drop. = more funding, more attempts, until someone figures out how to make stuff useful for space missions in space, and this will be the true beginning of a self-sustaining in-orbit economy.

sargun 6y ago

So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these. For example, the MAREA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. If it's to be believed, ZBLAN could get rid of these repeaters all together. The cable's design is _much_ more complicated because of the requirement to have electricity and repeaters.

londons_explore 6y ago
Presumably lower loss also means more bandwidth when background thermal noise becomes the limiting factor.
sandworm101 6y ago
Lasers. This stuff may be necessary for a new class of weapons. That is the reason for all the speculation.

simonh 6y ago

> I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. That sounds like you’re including the weight of the whole final cable, including yarn strengthening members, plastic shroud and sometimes a braided metal shield layer. Only the glass fibre itself actually needs to be manufactured in space and is usually on the order of a kg or so per km.

osamagirl69 6y ago

For the time being, they are targeting specialty applications where it is not uncommon to charge in excess of $1000 per meter even for normal earthly fibers. For scaling up, if one uses the smallest commercial fiber standard (80um diameter cladding--they would put the buffer and whatnot on after it comes back to earth) the mass of the fiber is only 53grams/km so using your $3000/kg the cargo cost is only $0.16/meter which seems pretty palatable to me.

chas 6y ago
What’s the application of super high-quality earth cable?
- SXX 6y ago
  That's kind a obvious: high-frequency trading. Thousands of banks and companies will happily to pay premium to get some edge over competitors. As soon as single entity on market have it everyone else would want it as well so there will be plenty of demand.

borosT 6y ago

is asteroid mining viable compare to shipping raw material up the earth gravity well?

m4rtink 6y ago
Definitelly - just has a high startup cost and possibly takes some time to get the material back.

dannyw 6y ago

High frequency traders will want the best connectivity humanely possible. It’s a zero sum game. If they can beat a competitor firm’s signals by the smallest fraction of a second, even a nanosecond, they reaps in the profits. So $100m for some better fibre? Go nuts!

andrepd 6y ago
Eh, that's a really sad thing to optimise for, don't you think? Revealing of a broken incentive system. I'd prefer if HFT practices were banned.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Can you be more specific about what is so broken about the need for efficient and fast trade?
  - pms 6y ago
    Volatility is the main concern [1]. Making trading decisions based on microseconds is speculation. How can anyone or anything reach an understanding of something as complex as markets in this short time? Other concerns include unnecessary waste and unfairness [2]. The point is that this is a zero-sum game that makes us invest in infrastructure that will soon get obsolete once someone else builds a faster infrastructure. Fast trade isn't "efficient". Long-term stability is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      It is a speculation, yes. That does not mean it is not useful, or is harmful to the society.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        How is it useful?

yellowapple 6y ago

How much of that material needs to come from Earth, though? If we can get that from the Moon, for example, then you wouldn't need nearly as much fuel to get the raw materials into orbit for manufacturing. Then all you need to do is get the finished product to wherever it needs to go (e.g. in an atmospheric entry vehicle, or to some other orbital factory, or to some far out colony, or what have you).

m4rtink 6y ago
Long term - definitely! But to get space manufacturing started in the short term, lowering the launch costs is the best bet.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Agreed 100%. The more we can lower costs getting from Earth to LEO, the cheaper and faster it'll be to bootstrap that manufacturing infrastructure.

tripzilch 6y ago

> That really drives home to me that, even though information technology is just my boring day job and it's still space travel that gets me as excited as it did when I was a kid, it's still true that the space age is over and we're definitely living in the information age. Just the fact that the historical events the past couple of days didn't involve space, but something filmed on a mobile phone shared through information technology ...

pharke 6y ago

> the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg This is also assuming the price per kg to orbit stays stable but Musk has stated he intends to drive the price down much further. He's even given figures for what he thinks they might be able to achieve with Starship[0] and SpaceX's rapid progress seems to indicate that they will, eventually, get there. The best comparison from history is probably the construction of railroads which had long development timelines and capital costs but eventually began paying back massive amounts even while driving the cost of freight down and providing a backbone for commercial and industrial development. [0] https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-musk-outlines-cost-for-launches https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m...

jacobolus 6y ago
People used railroads to profitably carry freight (originally with carts pulled by horses) right from the get-go. They became a lot cheaper to make once steel could be economically mass produced. Steam engines were originally used for pumping water, but there was an obvious huge demand for locomotives to move freight by land once they could be made cheaper or better than draft animals. I’m sure there exist some commercial uses for space flight, but it really doesn’t seem all that similar to railroads in terms of obvious market demand or effect on the economy.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  Yeah; I would compare railroads/rockets to microcomputers/VR. The latter is definitely impressive, and unique, and evocative for futurists, and has some niche use-cases, but doesn't have a clear "killer app". While the former had people - real businesses - chomping at the bit even before it became economical.
- pharke 6y ago
  The points you bring up don't seem to support your argument. It took a decade from when people first attempted to haul freight with a steam locomotive until the first commercially successful railway was built. If you start counting from when the steam engine was first invented then it would be more than a century. You're correct that a lot of that success depended on improvements in manufacturing capability but I don't think it's so obvious that there was a huge market for steam locomotives right from the start, early steam engines were notoriously fickle, required constant attention and a trained engineer, needed specialized tooling and materials to repair when they inevitably broke, and they were incredibly inefficient and fuel hungry at first. That's why they started out so linked to coal mines, the mine produced enough cheap fuel for the engine and already had a lot of the metalworking tools and capable engineers needed to maintain it. I'm not sure why you don't think space is commercially viable right now, companies and governments are paying a lot of money to have things delivered to orbit. SpaceX is making money with every launch otherwise they would have gone bust years ago. If you mean there's no market for human spaceflight, well there wasn't a market for passenger railroad travel for a long time either. You need to build the railways before people can make practical use of them. Back when most railways only extended for 1 or 2 km it was pretty hard to imagine getting paying passengers. You have to build something that connects to places people want to go before they'll pay to ride it. With spaceflight we're currently in the shorthaul stage, all the profit is in delivering cargo to LEO. The cost is coming down and people are finding more uses for cheap satellites. The rockets already have their use case, they move people and cargo the same as a railroad, it's what we do with that capability that we need to get creative with and as we continue to build out capability and lower cost there will be more and more uses for space. The main reason I compare it to railroads is that it is a type of infrastructure that makes new things possible and there's always a profit to be made in a frontier as long as you're daring enough to take it.

piokoch 6y ago

Wait until some HFT investors will step up to buy such fiber cable to be microseconds faster than competition. Those $3000/kg could turn out to be a small change.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

You know... Launching the raw materials to orbit from Earth might cost $3000/kg. While Earth is great for being able to sustain life, the gravity well rather sucks. Launching the same materials from most other interesting places in the solar system would cost a lot less, (at least, were there people there to provide some sort of settlement) For instance, presuming most of what you need is silicon oxide anyway; launching the raw material from the moon and transporting it to earth orbit easily costs MUCH less fuel than launching it from earth. * Earth->LEO: 9400 m/s * Moon->LEO: 1730+680+3260=5760 m/s on rockets alone * Moon->LEO 1730+680=2400 m/s with aerobraking (smarter) * Mars->LEO 6300 m/s with aerobraking * Asteroid belt->LEO between 1060-3360 m/s Moral of the story: Don't launch your stuff from Earth if you can at all help it. Now, once you have a somewhat established moon settlement that can take on projects it gets even more interesting. Unlike on earth, Lunar gravity is so low that things like a space elevator or a linear accelerator are practical with even todays technology and materials science. Combined with aerobraking on the other end, you could ultimately ship materials or goods to earth for cheaper and faster than china post ship from china. ;-) The only downside: first you do need that settlement on the moon, and that's one heck of an initial investment. On the other hand: once established and marginally autonomous, you can intuit that -despite harsh conditions- such a settlement could be quite a competitive location to establish mining and industry. Reference (assuming this one is well made): https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_deltav_subway_map_of_the_solar_system/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...