3 ms·

Fair point, though I'll point out that we can also argue there's no point in capturing asteroids until there is machinery available to work with them. I was al

by WJW 5y ago

Fair point, though I'll point out that we can also argue there's no point in capturing asteroids until there is machinery available to work with them. I was also just thinking about "boring things" like coffee machines, laundry machines and space beds for the space station hotels that the Bigelow people are designing. Surely you'd want to design those well up front so you can iterate the design a few times before the first guests arrive?

icegreentea2 5y ago
The selling pickaxes to gold miners formula only works when people are pretty sure there is gold. Funding development of orbital smelters would be an incredibly risky proposition given that pay-off would be contingent on someone else figuring out asteroid mining or something. And as for "boring things". Same type of deal. It's risky throwing money at a problem that only has a payoff if someone else succeeds their own high risk activity. Like Bigelow currently has no staff, and has totally missed all of its planned milestones. Especially for the boring stuff, you're also going to be cramped up against someone selling solutions that just apes whatever the ISS does. Does only have instant coffee, and not having real laundry, and having to sleep strapped into a sleeping bag kind of suck? Ya. But YOU'RE IN SPACE (and that's roughly just the same thing as camping). The novelty alone should be enough to tide you through your entire first generation of customers.
lmm 5y ago
If you can capture an asteroid full of palladium or whatever then that's worthwhile even if all you do is take chunks of raw asteroid down to Earth for processing. But then once that's in place then it becomes worth doing some basic refining in orbit so that you're not shipping a bunch of dirt down at thousands of dollars per kilogram, and eventually it becomes worth moving more and more of the manufacturing chain up into orbit for the same reason. That's the most plausible way I can see to bootstrap things.
- dTal 5y ago
  Surely shipping stuff down is basically free.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Putting stuff on a ballistic reentry is free, but will burn up a certain amount of your material and is very hard to do safely. Maybe China could bring one down in their big desert and not worry too much about whether it hits anyone who lives there, but many nations would balk at that, and it complicates the retrieval. Otherwise the atmosphere helps you somewhat, but you've still got to fit a heatshield and some way to decelerate. The mass limit for parachutes is pretty low, so we're probably talking about a lifting body and some proper engines - maybe air-breathing engines, which are going to be significantly cheaper (especially fuel-wise) than rocket engines but by no means free. Maybe thousands per kilogram is an overstatement, but the cost is significant and there's only so much you can do about it (short of building a space elevator).

by WJW 5y ago

icegreentea2 5y ago

The selling pickaxes to gold miners formula only works when people are pretty sure there is gold. Funding development of orbital smelters would be an incredibly risky proposition given that pay-off would be contingent on someone else figuring out asteroid mining or something. And as for "boring things". Same type of deal. It's risky throwing money at a problem that only has a payoff if someone else succeeds their own high risk activity. Like Bigelow currently has no staff, and has totally missed all of its planned milestones. Especially for the boring stuff, you're also going to be cramped up against someone selling solutions that just apes whatever the ISS does. Does only have instant coffee, and not having real laundry, and having to sleep strapped into a sleeping bag kind of suck? Ya. But YOU'RE IN SPACE (and that's roughly just the same thing as camping). The novelty alone should be enough to tide you through your entire first generation of customers.

lmm 5y ago

If you can capture an asteroid full of palladium or whatever then that's worthwhile even if all you do is take chunks of raw asteroid down to Earth for processing. But then once that's in place then it becomes worth doing some basic refining in orbit so that you're not shipping a bunch of dirt down at thousands of dollars per kilogram, and eventually it becomes worth moving more and more of the manufacturing chain up into orbit for the same reason. That's the most plausible way I can see to bootstrap things.

dTal 5y ago
Surely shipping stuff down is basically free.
- lmm 5y ago
  Putting stuff on a ballistic reentry is free, but will burn up a certain amount of your material and is very hard to do safely. Maybe China could bring one down in their big desert and not worry too much about whether it hits anyone who lives there, but many nations would balk at that, and it complicates the retrieval. Otherwise the atmosphere helps you somewhat, but you've still got to fit a heatshield and some way to decelerate. The mass limit for parachutes is pretty low, so we're probably talking about a lifting body and some proper engines - maybe air-breathing engines, which are going to be significantly cheaper (especially fuel-wise) than rocket engines but by no means free. Maybe thousands per kilogram is an overstatement, but the cost is significant and there's only so much you can do about it (short of building a space elevator).