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I'm not in either industry, but doesn't mining (like oil) depend on getting the low-hanging fruit first? In other words, how can you profit from mining if your

I'm not in either industry, but doesn't mining (like oil) depend on getting the low-hanging fruit first? In other words, how can you profit from mining if your costs are exponentially higher than folks doing the same work here on earth? Even if the entire mining operation were already setup (at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilo of weight sent up there), you would still have the costs of getting the mined materials back down here and those are likely to be astronomical, so to speak.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
I’m not in either industry either, most of what I’m saying is based on what I’ve gathered as a space enthusiast. The cost issue is multifaceted. Most of it is sunk into launching itself, which is where things like space tourism come into the picture as a way to provide an initial business case and eventually, economy of scale. Addressing that alone will improve the economics of off-world industry quite a lot just on its own. For the other part, initially companies will just have to eat the cost to get things up and running. This really isn’t that unusual — we just haven’t had much in the way of truly new frontiers in many years and have grown accustom to business ventures being relatively low cost and low risk. That said, this could also be partially subsidized by researchers and tourists, since there is certain to be interest from universities and other organizations to send people to study these other bodies, and there are most certainly a surprising number of individuals both wealthy and crazy enough to want to go stay on Mars for a couple of years.
cwkoss 5y ago
1kg of a commodity in earth orbit should be worth more than 1kg of the same commodity on earth because it's stuck in earth's gravity well. The orbital commodity has significantly more potential energy. Now, there's not yet much of a market for commodities outside of earth, but as soon as there is, producing a commodity on the moon and shipping it to earth orbit will likely be cheaper than shipping it from earth - at least once scales are large enough.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

I’m not in either industry either, most of what I’m saying is based on what I’ve gathered as a space enthusiast. The cost issue is multifaceted. Most of it is sunk into launching itself, which is where things like space tourism come into the picture as a way to provide an initial business case and eventually, economy of scale. Addressing that alone will improve the economics of off-world industry quite a lot just on its own. For the other part, initially companies will just have to eat the cost to get things up and running. This really isn’t that unusual — we just haven’t had much in the way of truly new frontiers in many years and have grown accustom to business ventures being relatively low cost and low risk. That said, this could also be partially subsidized by researchers and tourists, since there is certain to be interest from universities and other organizations to send people to study these other bodies, and there are most certainly a surprising number of individuals both wealthy and crazy enough to want to go stay on Mars for a couple of years.

cwkoss 5y ago

1kg of a commodity in earth orbit should be worth more than 1kg of the same commodity on earth because it's stuck in earth's gravity well. The orbital commodity has significantly more potential energy. Now, there's not yet much of a market for commodities outside of earth, but as soon as there is, producing a commodity on the moon and shipping it to earth orbit will likely be cheaper than shipping it from earth - at least once scales are large enough.