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Who would be the customers of such industries manufacturing stuff for Mars? Is there any significant demand (in the economic sense - not expressed opinion, but
by PeterisP 6y ago
Who would be the customers of such industries manufacturing stuff for Mars? Is there any significant demand (in the economic sense - not expressed opinion, but willingness to pay large amounts of money) for that?
As far as I see, none of the governments have expressed intent for large scale funding of such payloads to Mars, and there seems to be nothing so valuable on Mars that would justify investments into habitat construction just to extract some resources for commercial purposes. It's not even commercially worthwhile to mine stuff in Antarctic and the ocean floor (except for oil), and those are much cheaper to access and mine than Mars. Also, the property rights and exclusivity aren't a given; the Outer Space Treaty asserts that nations can't claim exclusive rights to any specific resources (e.g. a particular Martian ore deposit), so there's no (yet) legal certainty that an investor who builds some infrastructure would get their returns. If we look at the fictional Expanse universe, we currently don't have the equivalent of the "UN charters" granting specific corporations exclusive rights to some asteroids or resources that they had.
The current motivation for going to Mars is not a commercial opporunity, it's mostly exploration, because it's there - and as such, we're limited by the amount people (individuals as well as nations) are willing to spend on that i.e. consume for their ideals/desires, not invest with reasonable expectation of profit. And that "frivolous spending budget" isn't enough to launch whole new industries.
- elihu 6y agoI don't know who the initial customers would be, but it seems implausible that if it suddenly became possible to ship stuff to Mars no one would do it. If nothing else, get some automated methane production going so the ships can come back. Questionable legal status notwithstanding, it's hard to imagine anyone creating a facility on Mars and someone else coming along later and saying "you don't own that land". Then the question comes down to how much area around a facility can you plausibly claim for your exclusive use. Short of any formal legal agreements, it's basically whatever you can get away with without someone else calling your bluff and building in your exclusive area. I suppose we're more likely to see a Mars real estate land grab if multiple parties (governments, probably) are perceived to be in a race to get the best locations / mineral deposits / whatever. I could see a U.S. / China space race, for instance. That sort of scenario imagines the money spigot going from a trickle to full blast all of a sudden. Which seems kind of wasteful compared to slow and steady funding starting much earlier, but if no one's opening their wallets yet then there's not much that the people who would otherwise be building this stuff to do about it.
- fapjacks 6y agoIt seems like you're unironically saying "isn't enough to launch whole new industries" in the same moment that SpaceX is averaging about a launch every week or two (one tomorrow, another 07APR) with a backlog of customers? You could add a layer of abstraction and it would be approximately the same thing people were saying about private launch companies in the 90s.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoSpaceX’s backlog of customers has nothing to do with Mars. What makes you think a customer who, for example, wants to put a few cubesats into earth orbit has any interest in Mars?
- fapjacks 6y agoThis backlog of customers are the ones that unimaginative naysayers were talking about in the 90s when they said there would be no commercial interest in a private launch industry. Just because you can't see a commercial opportunity in getting things to Mars doesn't mean those opportunities don't or won't exist.