5 ms·

The real money comes from using starship to develop spaced based industrial capacity. Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured i

by kiba 4y ago

The real money comes from using starship to develop spaced based industrial capacity. Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danans 4y ago
> Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper. The raw materials would still need to be shot up into space. And what makes manufacturing and assembly in zero-g cheaper than on the Earth's surface?
- r2_pilot 4y ago
  The idea is probably using ISRU(in-situ resource utilization) with regards to local asteroids to save on launch costs. Manufacturing/assembly would likely be more expensive at first until the techniques and technologies are learned(perhaps one could upsell this as "truly green manufacturing" since there would be no environmental byproducts to affect Earth).
  - danans 4y ago
    > perhaps one could upsell this as "truly green manufacturing" since there would be no environmental byproducts to affect Earth Except for the massive byproducts created on earth to get through the "more expensive" phase. It would be deeply deceptive and cynical to sell that as "green", surpassing even today's deceptive selling of carbon capture and storage technology on fossil fuel power plants.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Starship uses methane fuel. Make that from water and ambient CO2 using clean energy sources, and the environmental impact of launch will be minimal. Fuel is a pretty small cost for rockets anyway so using more-expensive clean fuel wouldn't be prohibitive.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      But less and less is launched per pound of space-produced product as time goes on, until only rare complex (small) components such as microprocessors come from earth. There will be an industrial chain taking aluminum from lunar regolith that's catapulted out to a Lagrange point and then the raw aluminum or printed products will be lowered to more suitable orbits by ion engines that spit out ions from lunar soil. Hate to be the one to mention it, but the military may well be paying most of the freight to set most of this up (covertly or not) since space based you-name-it including hypersonic projectiles are going to be more and more useful as the decades pass.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Specialist components will be made on earth for some time obviously... but there are obvious benefits to maximising the volume of non mass limited payloads for things that get turned into structural components. The obvious first will be anything made from structural plastic, there are 3d printers pioneering printing in zero gravity, with some extra work you can scale that up to make a nice big printer that wouldn't even have to worry about sag, cause of the no gravity... It may not be able to print a pressure vessel, but if you need a million meters of wire conduit and plastic will do the job. Why ship up 10 launches of lightweight payload, or do all the logistics to lift, store, handle, and disperse the payload onto multiple launches with more dense payloads to get the correct volume/mass ratio... or just launch a printer you can keep using, and launch two huge payloads of printer feedstock.
  - manholio 4y ago
    This might be the most nonsensical proposal I have read in a while. Because why should we build things on the ground and deliver the finished products in orbit, when we can push an entire industrial chain into orbit and furnish it with the vast quantities of required inputs, while taking advantage of the vast nothingness that exists there, and the 100000 times more expensive labor. It's like Elon Musk's Mars city, but in vacuum, with zero in situ resource utilization.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      I think you’ve misinterpreted my point, I agreed with the point your making about complex supply chains and components. I specifically said that its only going to make sense for some specific items, and I was specifically thinking the first candidate would be bulk low density support structures. For all the structural aluminium isogrid beams, and perovskite solar panels that are the end products of specialist supply chains with the exact issues your talking about In a large scale on orbit construction project, like a space based solar power station, we could manufacture complex interlocking units on the ground like space station modules on the ISS, and hope all the power routing, and docking, and everything else, will work together when launched… or we can build it the old fashioned way, but with robots or astronauts up in space… bolting, welding, wiring, cabling and routing everything up there from easily made standard parts that meet the requirements. Just like large photovoltaic solar farms are built on earth, with X units of photovoltaic panels, attached to structural support frames suitable for the location they are being installed at (wind loads, thermal range, etc) … and everything cabled together with hundreds of little plastic clips and miles of copper wire in weatherproof plastic conduit. Now some things will obviously be different in space, like hundreds of plastic clips are obviously a space debris risk, so they probably won’t design cabling systems that need that sort of support. But they will need to manage lots of power and data cables which will need some level of protection from the slow but steady degradation by various forms of radiation and plasma from the Sun and deep space, and it turns out a few millimeters of plastic can get you years and years of protection from oxygen plasma which would could eat away at exposed wires and slowly increase the risk of short circuits. Yes it might need to be replaced regularly, but so will other things, and then you don’t need to use crazy specialised oxygen plasma resistant wire insulation… Space is hard, but we build things for way more harsh environmental conditions on the ground all the time in industrial applications. What they don’t need that space currently does, is earth based industry doesn’t usually care about total weight. Starship will revolutionise space not by magic, but by slashing the cost per kilo and allowing us to use more normal engineering procedures and hardware where appropriate. Like panels and wiring and support structural girders. My point was that 3d printing lightweight plastic structural parts where they are needed, will be to space based solar power, what mixing concrete on a construction site is when compared to having everything transported to the site via cement mixers. Sometimes it makes sense for the project to mix on site, other times it won’t. I’m not sure what there is to argue with about this thesis.

by kiba 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danans 4y ago

> Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper. The raw materials would still need to be shot up into space. And what makes manufacturing and assembly in zero-g cheaper than on the Earth's surface?

r2_pilot 4y ago
The idea is probably using ISRU(in-situ resource utilization) with regards to local asteroids to save on launch costs. Manufacturing/assembly would likely be more expensive at first until the techniques and technologies are learned(perhaps one could upsell this as "truly green manufacturing" since there would be no environmental byproducts to affect Earth).
- danans 4y ago
  > perhaps one could upsell this as "truly green manufacturing" since there would be no environmental byproducts to affect Earth Except for the massive byproducts created on earth to get through the "more expensive" phase. It would be deeply deceptive and cynical to sell that as "green", surpassing even today's deceptive selling of carbon capture and storage technology on fossil fuel power plants.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Starship uses methane fuel. Make that from water and ambient CO2 using clean energy sources, and the environmental impact of launch will be minimal. Fuel is a pretty small cost for rockets anyway so using more-expensive clean fuel wouldn't be prohibitive.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    But less and less is launched per pound of space-produced product as time goes on, until only rare complex (small) components such as microprocessors come from earth. There will be an industrial chain taking aluminum from lunar regolith that's catapulted out to a Lagrange point and then the raw aluminum or printed products will be lowered to more suitable orbits by ion engines that spit out ions from lunar soil. Hate to be the one to mention it, but the military may well be paying most of the freight to set most of this up (covertly or not) since space based you-name-it including hypersonic projectiles are going to be more and more useful as the decades pass.
techdragon 4y ago
Specialist components will be made on earth for some time obviously... but there are obvious benefits to maximising the volume of non mass limited payloads for things that get turned into structural components. The obvious first will be anything made from structural plastic, there are 3d printers pioneering printing in zero gravity, with some extra work you can scale that up to make a nice big printer that wouldn't even have to worry about sag, cause of the no gravity... It may not be able to print a pressure vessel, but if you need a million meters of wire conduit and plastic will do the job. Why ship up 10 launches of lightweight payload, or do all the logistics to lift, store, handle, and disperse the payload onto multiple launches with more dense payloads to get the correct volume/mass ratio... or just launch a printer you can keep using, and launch two huge payloads of printer feedstock.
- manholio 4y ago
  This might be the most nonsensical proposal I have read in a while. Because why should we build things on the ground and deliver the finished products in orbit, when we can push an entire industrial chain into orbit and furnish it with the vast quantities of required inputs, while taking advantage of the vast nothingness that exists there, and the 100000 times more expensive labor. It's like Elon Musk's Mars city, but in vacuum, with zero in situ resource utilization.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    I think you’ve misinterpreted my point, I agreed with the point your making about complex supply chains and components. I specifically said that its only going to make sense for some specific items, and I was specifically thinking the first candidate would be bulk low density support structures. For all the structural aluminium isogrid beams, and perovskite solar panels that are the end products of specialist supply chains with the exact issues your talking about In a large scale on orbit construction project, like a space based solar power station, we could manufacture complex interlocking units on the ground like space station modules on the ISS, and hope all the power routing, and docking, and everything else, will work together when launched… or we can build it the old fashioned way, but with robots or astronauts up in space… bolting, welding, wiring, cabling and routing everything up there from easily made standard parts that meet the requirements. Just like large photovoltaic solar farms are built on earth, with X units of photovoltaic panels, attached to structural support frames suitable for the location they are being installed at (wind loads, thermal range, etc) … and everything cabled together with hundreds of little plastic clips and miles of copper wire in weatherproof plastic conduit. Now some things will obviously be different in space, like hundreds of plastic clips are obviously a space debris risk, so they probably won’t design cabling systems that need that sort of support. But they will need to manage lots of power and data cables which will need some level of protection from the slow but steady degradation by various forms of radiation and plasma from the Sun and deep space, and it turns out a few millimeters of plastic can get you years and years of protection from oxygen plasma which would could eat away at exposed wires and slowly increase the risk of short circuits. Yes it might need to be replaced regularly, but so will other things, and then you don’t need to use crazy specialised oxygen plasma resistant wire insulation… Space is hard, but we build things for way more harsh environmental conditions on the ground all the time in industrial applications. What they don’t need that space currently does, is earth based industry doesn’t usually care about total weight. Starship will revolutionise space not by magic, but by slashing the cost per kilo and allowing us to use more normal engineering procedures and hardware where appropriate. Like panels and wiring and support structural girders. My point was that 3d printing lightweight plastic structural parts where they are needed, will be to space based solar power, what mixing concrete on a construction site is when compared to having everything transported to the site via cement mixers. Sometimes it makes sense for the project to mix on site, other times it won’t. I’m not sure what there is to argue with about this thesis.