How to make space exploration profitable.

[halfeye]

Following on from the life on the moon thread, if a little over one pound of e.g. toffee (because that's easy to make, something easier would be better, but I'm not a sweetmaker so I don't know what's easier than toffee) was made in space, and divided into pieces of approximately one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth down to perhap a one tenth of a gram size, then each piece auctioned off with a reserve price of three times the cost of production including the costs of taking the ingredients to orbit and bringing the product back down, I think that with a nice little certificate of authenticity those would sell.

[Eldan]

It's a very nice idea. They could auction of, say, broken parts of the space station too, when they bring them down. The problem, I think, is that the novelty might wear off pretty quickly, so it's probably not a long-term thing?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

A quick google tells me that at current prices a satellite costs anywhere between $50 and $400 million to put into space. The cost of said launch is so oversized that the cost of fabricating the satellite is practically irrelevant*. If you could instead fabricate it in space, you could easily save 90% of that cost.

Grey Wolf

ETA: * some more googling suggests that some satellites can cost to fabricate as much as the launch cost. Still, saving ~50% of the total cost by fabricating them outside the Earth's gravity well is still a heck of a saving.

[monomer]

Here's an article about a company that wants to send coffee beans up in a rocket and use the re-entry heat to roast them.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/how-much-would-you-pay-for-coffee-roasted-in-space/

They say that the roasting is more even because the beans will be in freefall, but this definitely isn't the case since the beans will be under a huge acceleration when in the re-entry stage. Technical quibbles aside, since I highly doubt the resulting roast would be better than any terrestrial methods, the plan is just a way to separate rich people from their money, as the exclusivity of the space coffee might make it desirable.

That said, aside from making luxury goods based on a perceived rarity, there is supposedly a business case to make fibreoptic cable made in freefall (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/09/06/optical-fibre-made-in-orbit-should-be-better-than-the-terrestrial-sort)could be better than what is made on Earth and would be worth the cost of getting the materials into orbit.


A quick google tells me that at current prices a satellite costs anywhere between $50 and $400 million to put into space. The cost of said launch is so oversized that the cost of fabricating the satellite is practically irrelevant. If you could instead fabricate it in space, you could easily save 90% of that cost.

Grey Wolf

The $400M price tag for a launch is really only for payloads that require the Delta IV Heavy rocket. The only regular customer for Delta IV Heavy is the US Department of Defense and NASA, since they are the only ones building payloads heavy enough to require the extra power, or that are going into deep space (like the Parker Solar Probe near-flyby of the Sun, which requires a ridiculous amount of energy to get to).

Regular Geostationary satellites will usually ride on Falcon 9, Atlas V, or Ariane 5, which cost between about $60M to $150M depending on the options. For example, ULA (Atlas V and Delta IV) has a base price (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V) of $109M to put 4,750 kg into a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), up to $153M for 8,900kg to GTO. Ariane is about the same, though they can put two smaller satellites into GTO on a single flight, which can save some cost. SpaceX is currently the cheapest option (https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities), with the base price starting at $62M for 5,500kg to GTO, and is driving the price point down.

Falcon Heavy will also be cutting into the Delta IV Heavy manifest for large payloads since they are much cheaper, and also provide a new options for smaller satellites. For example, SpaceX will be using Falcon Heavy to put Arabsat 6A into GSO. At 6,000kg any traditional launcher which expend the booster would be able to be used, but with the extra power Falcon Heavy provides, it can be brought to a higher transfer orbit so that the satellite can use less of its own fuel getting into its final geostationary orbit, which will increase its service life. All three of the boosters are planned to be recovered which help decrease the cost, as they can put 8,500 kg into GTO for $90M.

To build weather or communication satellites, though, costs ~$200M-$500M, so while the launch cost is significant, at less than or about $100M, it is not the major expenditure of the project.

Additionally, if you are considering manufacturing in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), these rockets can bring up a lot more mass, but at that point they are constrained by the volume. SpaceX doesn't show the cost, but on a fully expended Falcon 9, they can put up to 22,800 kg into LEO. The estimated price for an expended Falcon 9 is about $90M (it's not a coincidence that this is the same price as a Falcon Heavy, they want to drive customers to use recoverable boosters), so it costs a minimum of $3,950/kg to put something into orbit, assuming you can actually cram that much mass into the payload fairing.

[Kato]

Following on from the life on the moon thread, if a little over one pound of e.g. toffee (because that's easy to make, something easier would be better, but I'm not a sweetmaker so I don't know what's easier than toffee) was made in space, and divided into pieces of approximately one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth down to perhap a one tenth of a gram size, then each piece auctioned off with a reserve price of three times the cost of production including the costs of taking the ingredients to orbit and bringing the product back down, I think that with a nice little certificate of authenticity those would sell.

I think I just found a market for my
'totally legit, not at all fake, look, you can basically taste the authentic certificate space toffee'

More seriously, space travel is, as others pointed out, EXPENSIVE. You'd need a really big price tag to make a profit on that. And I doubt you'd get more than for some authentic moon rock (tm). The few people who'd spend serious money on this are (I think) not going to make it profitable, unless you want to just get out even.

I think I have to agree with the statement that you can only really make a profit by going space industry, and that just takes a load of investment..

[factotum]

They say that the roasting is more even because the beans will be in freefall, but this definitely isn't the case since the beans will be under a huge acceleration when in the re-entry stage. Technical quibbles aside, since I highly doubt the resulting roast would be better than any terrestrial methods, the plan is just a way to separate rich people from their money, as the exclusivity of the space coffee might make it desirable.


Scott Manley did a video on that very subject, which pretty much agrees with your assessment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iguAge6m8LA

[halfeye]

I think I just found a market for my
'totally legit, not at all fake, look, you can basically taste the authentic certificate space toffee'

Sure that would happen. It would be fraud, and the ordinary police would ordinarily bust the perpetrators when they found them.


More seriously, space travel is, as others pointed out, EXPENSIVE. You'd need a really big price tag to make a profit on that. And I doubt you'd get more than for some authentic moon rock (tm). The few people who'd spend serious money on this are (I think) not going to make it profitable, unless you want to just get out even.

I think you're mistaken. There are seven billion people on this planet, and a lot of them are rich, there are hundreds of poor people for every rich one, but there are a lot of rich people.

There was that woman who won the auction for that Banksy artwork that then self shredded, she had the offer to not pay and not have it, but she wanted it even after it was shredded, paid £1M, presumably because it was still rare.


I think I have to agree with the statement that you can only really make a profit by going space industry, and that just takes a load of investment..

If people were sane, you would be correct.

[Kato]

Hm, I'm still not really sold on the idea. Mind you, I'm not a great economist.
But I'll voice my concerns anyway.

First off, yes, there are a lot of people with way too much money. And I'm sure some of them are into space stuff, but enough to make it a market? That kind of requires them to buy a lot, not just one expensive item. And for things like the shredded painting, there's rarity value. The next shredded painting isn't going to sell nearly as well, the second (batch of) toffee will be much cheaper than the first.
I guess toffee was just an example but I don't think something 'made in' space has much more value than something 'brought from' space, then again those values are mostly subjective.
And going back to the painting, production value is far different between the two.

I'm not saying you can't make a profit off of space, but I don't see commodity items being something you can make a real market out of. Cheap commodities work because they are cheap to make and sell easily to a wide audience. Space commodity would be the opposite in both.

Of course that refers to current times. If we ever have proper trade between earth and space selling all things, including toffee, can likely make you a profit.

[halfeye]

Hm, I'm still not really sold on the idea. Mind you, I'm not a great economist.
But I'll voice my concerns anyway.

First off, yes, there are a lot of people with way too much money. And I'm sure some of them are into space stuff, but enough to make it a market? That kind of requires them to buy a lot, not just one expensive item.

There are millions of rich folk.


And for things like the shredded painting, there's rarity value.

The painting is unique. But you could start a chocolate factory in space and chocolate from space would still be rare.


The next shredded painting isn't going to sell nearly as well, the second (batch of) toffee will be much cheaper than the first.

Correct, but will it make a profit? I think so.


I guess toffee was just an example but I don't think something 'made in' space has much more value than something 'brought from' space, then again those values are mostly subjective.

Moon rocks are hugely valuable, for dozens of scientific reasons as well as their rarity, but rarity is a part of their appeal/price.


And going back to the painting, production value is far different between the two.

Between which two? I don't understand that statement.


I'm not saying you can't make a profit off of space, but I don't see commodity items being something you can make a real market out of. Cheap commodities work because they are cheap to make and sell easily to a wide audience. Space commodity would be the opposite in both.

The commodity in the item would be that it has been to, or was made in, orbit, and is thus very, very rare. One of the virtues of toffee for this purpose is that to eat toffee you need enough, you can't reasonably sell a smaller amount than can be tasted.


Of course that refers to current times. If we ever have proper trade between earth and space selling all things, including toffee, can likely make you a profit.

The point of doing this would be to help get our civilisation from here (barely getting to orbit) to there (trading between the Earth (and maybe some of the other planets?) and space).

[Xyril]

There are millions of rich folk.


That depends on your definition of "rich." In the U.S., there are currently only 11 million or so "millionaires," defined as folks with more than a million U.S. dollars worth of assets. Note, "assets" does not mean "money to burn." IIRC, economists usually focus on liquid assets--stuff that can easily be converted to cash or otherwise turned into useful stuff, so that includes both stuff that you would fairly readily spend on something you want (stocks, bank accounts, etc.) and stuff that you could technically get money out of fairly easily, but you probably wouldn't sell to fund your space toffee habit (i.e., your house.)

America isn't the most populous nation in the world by any stretch, but it is the wealthiest. Contrast China, which has the highest population and one of the biggest economies, but has fewer than 2 million "high wealth individuals" (the cut off is roughly equivalent to $1.5 million U.S.) Now, even if we assume that China has several times that number who are above $1 million but below $1.5 million, that's only maybe 20 million millionaires. Now we look at smaller, but even wealthier developed nations. Great Britain for example has fewer than a million millionaires. That's in pounds, of course, so using the same reasoning as China, let's scale that up to a few million. Russia, at under 200,000, was only 15th place for number of millionaires. By one account, there are 36 million "millionaires" in the world.

That would be a lot if they were all Richard Branson level spenders, but they're not: 36 million is the hard limit on the number of Richard Bransons, not the actual count. Even though the lower 99% of the top 1% are secure, comfortable, and more than capable of supporting a few luxury industries, they have their limits. If you're selling thousand-dollar purses and making hundreds of dollars off each, you can get a pretty large number of those 36 million millionaires to buy at least a few. If you're selling hundred-thousand-dollar cars, you'll have a much smaller percentage able to make a purchase, but probably still enough to make a profit.

It gets really difficult when you try to create an industry where the initial investment could potentially exceed the billion-dollar mark, but the major value of the end-product is its scarcity. Industries that require a high initial investment work best when you can really ramp up production, spread that investment over millions of sales, and eventually make a profit. However, if you're making enough space toffee for millions of people, it dilutes that value.



The painting is unique. But you could start a chocolate factory in space and chocolate from space would still be rare.


Rare is not unique. Artificial rarity, in particular, requires a tenuous balance. Moreover, people don't become billionaires (and if we're talking about making space sustainable, let alone profitable, we need billionaires, not millionaires) by being stupid with their money. For people with more important things to buy and not enough money to buy it, spending millions of dollars of seems stupid, but for a wealthy collector, trading money on that particular luxury is no more wasteful than spending it on a different luxury that brings you less pleasure, or investing it in order to make even more money that you're afraid to "waste" on something you would enjoy. However, buying Xeno's toffee would be stupid on so many levels.

[wumpus]

Scott Manley did a video on that very subject, which pretty much agrees with your assessment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iguAge6m8LA

Note that Scott Manley *did* point out that he is a huge fan of "space based beer", where not only is the "space ingredient" the yeast, but presumably they aren't all that picky about considering later generations of yeast "equally space beer". So they are able to sell a lot more product than ever went into space.

Granted there is little intrinsic superiority to "space beer", but the argument that "null gee roasting" is superior is pretty weak. Null/low gee fiber optics might be better, but I recall (pre-International Space Station) a much longer list of things believed to be better built in space.

- Furiously ignoring the question of "is the surface of an inhabited planet the ideal location for an exponentially growing industrial economy"?

[LordEntrails]

A quick google tells me that at current prices a satellite costs anywhere between $50 and $400 million to put into space. The cost of said launch is so oversized that the cost of fabricating the satellite is practically irrelevant*. If you could instead fabricate it in space, you could easily save 90% of that cost.

Grey Wolf

ETA: * some more googling suggests that some satellites can cost to fabricate as much as the launch cost. Still, saving ~50% of the total cost by fabricating them outside the Earth's gravity well is still a heck of a saving.
Where are you getting those numbers? Yes the cost of a satellite is $50-500 million. But the launch costs of a satellite are not more than the satellite cost.

Over a decade ago when I worked in the space launch industry (c. 2000), the assumption for a communication satellite (the $300-500mil cost satellites) was $150-200mil. The Atlas IIAR/III was marketed with a projected sales cost of $100mil and a build cost of $65mil (it never reached volume to reach those numbers). And, if you are talking a $50mil satellite, then you are probably piggy backing with up to 5 other "small" satellites on a single launch.

If you look at current public numbers you find:
Falcon 9 at $62mil
Falcon Heavy at $90mil
Atlas V $164-173mil (configuration dependent)
Delta IV $400mil (that number might be for a classified launch)

http://money.com/money/5135565/elon-musk-falcon-heavy-rocket-launch-cost/
https://www.quora.com/Rockets-What-is-cost-of-sending-1-kg-weight-into-space

But, in short, the numbers are not apples to apples. Not only do the vehicles have different satellite mass capabilities, they have different launch profiles, faring dimensions, vibration profiles, etc. And the costs are not* always counting exactly the same costs (integration, facility, post launch management, insurance...)

* EDIT: add "not"

EDIT: and in the end, even a $400mil launch cost does not make the cost of a $50-500mil satellite cost irrelevant.

(Note the $442mil competitive number is NOT for a commercial launch. That is for a classified launch of the Atlas V. Classified launches are, as you can see, many times more expensive than a commercial launch. And if Falcon Heavy ever gets certified for classified launches, the cost Space X charges will be many time more than $92mil. And, you don't put a $1bil classified satellite on a launch vehicle that doesn't maximize reliability, after all, saving $100mil on a $1bil program isn't worth the risk.)

As for the toffee idea, depending upon how much you send, just to get it to space is $10k-20k per kilogram. Then you have to build the satellite/factory and the return system. So, the cost of your toffee is $20k-40k per kg. Say $20k. Then you have to mark that up for overhead, marketing, distribution and profit. So, how many of those millionaires would pay $40,000 for a kilogram of toffee?

And, you need to do at least 5000kg of toffee in order to get those "bulk" prices. Maybe you can find 5000 millionaires suckers?

[factotum]

Where are you getting those numbers? Yes the cost of a satellite is $50-500 million. But the launch costs of a satellite are not more than the satellite cost.

Doesn't it depend on how big the satellite is? I thought launch costs were usually a certain amount per kilo?

[Xyril]

Doesn't it depend on how big the satellite is? I thought launch costs were usually a certain amount per kilo?

It takes a certain amount of energy to take mass into orbit, and that certainly accounts for a large chunk of the costs, but as others have mentioned in this thread, there are numerous other factors that also contribute to the cost of a launch. If someone's selling secondary payload space on a rocket, charging a cost per mass (and probably imposing some per-mass volume limit as well) would make sense. However, I don't think cost is something that simply scales linearly with mass no matter what. (i.e., sending up a single payload that's twice as heavy as what an Atlas V can carry to low earth orbit probably won't cost exactly twice as much.)

The biggest thing to remember is that engineering limits what can be done but economics limit what will be done. There's absolutely no reason you can't send up a satellite that costs less than its launch costs. However, from the information everyone else here has provided, it seems clear that nobody (except possibly Elon Musk) thinks it would be worthwhile to do so. For research in particular, it's amazing how much money you can burn squeezing extra precision into your instruments, and if you're spending millions on a launch anyway, it doesn't make sense to limit your results to shave a few hundred thousand going cheap.

[halfeye]

As for the toffee idea, depending upon how much you send, just to get it to space is $10k-20k per kilogram. Then you have to build the satellite/factory and the return system. So, the cost of your toffee is $20k-40k per kg. Say $20k. Then you have to mark that up for overhead, marketing, distribution and profit. So, how many of those millionaires would pay $40,000 for a kilogram of toffee?

And, you need to do at least 5000kg of toffee in order to get those "bulk" prices. Maybe you can find 5000 millionaires suckers?

The point would initially be to make the first 1kg, and sell it by the gram or less. As someone said, the second 1kg would make a lot less than the first. Toffee may not be the best sweet to make, I just remember tales of people making it at home, so presumably it could be made on the ISS as the ISS currently is, without specialist equipment. Sugar is about £1 per kg? (I haven't bought any in years) and it's the main ingredient. The main cost would be the lift to orbit and the recovery. Would you pay $80 for a gram of guaranteed real space toffee? Would any rich people pay $80,000 for 1kg? It's not about the value for money, it's about the rarity, which is why for the first 1kg at least an auction would be a good way to sell it. It would also be to a slight extent about helping to pay for space exploration.

[monomer]

Doesn't it depend on how big the satellite is? I thought launch costs were usually a certain amount per kilo?

Not really. You pay for the rocket you're bringing your payload up on. So as I previously said, SpaceX's Falcon 9 base price is $62M to bring up to 5,500 kg to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit. They don't publish prices for Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but as long as the mass is low enough for them to be able to recover the first-stage booster, the price would be comparable. If you need to bring up less mass, the price is the same. The reasoning for this is that the cost of rocket fuel for a launch on a Falcon 9 is about $200,000, which is basically nothing when compared to the cost of building the rocket (~$30M for the F9 first stage and ~$20-30M for the inter-stage, second-stage, and fairing).

If you want to save money on your launch, you can go to a less powerful rocket, assuming there is one that meets your needs. Currently the cheapest rocket flying to orbit is the RocketLab Electron, which can get up to 225 kg to orbit for $6M. Now, on a $/kg basis, it is pretty bad compared to SpaceX, but if all you need is one small satellite and you don't want to deal with the hassle of a rideshare (where a number of different payloads are included in one big rocket), this is an option. From there price an capability go up, but after a point, since SpaceX was able to drive their prices so low (due designing a low-cost rocket and being able to recover the booster), wasting the extra capability of the Falcon 9 is worth the price. Probably the most cost efficient mid-point option is India's PSLV which costs about $20-30M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle)to bring $3,800 kg to low-earth orbit.

ULA (Boeing and Lockheed Consortium) has a bit of a different approach, in that the Atlas V is a dial-a-rocket. It starts at the baseline Atlas V 401 which does not use any solid-rocket boosters, starting at a price of $109M to bring 9,800 kg to low-earth orbit. You can then start adding in solid-rocket boosters and better second stages to get up to 18,800 kg to LEO with the Atlas V 551, though that brings the cost up to $153M. They have a pretty nifty website (https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure)where you can configure your launch, but the prices quoted need to be taken with a grain of salt since they are not the actual prices and include possible savings based on "value" such as assured timelines.

[LordEntrails]

Doesn't it depend on how big the satellite is? I thought launch costs were usually a certain amount per kilo?
As others have said, mostly it is not a cost per kg to launch. It costs X dollars to launch a rocket, and that rocket can carry up to X kilograms. If you don't use all the capability (or the payload envelope, size and dimensions are very important) then maybe someone else with a scientific satellite will jump on board and try to buy up the excess capability. But, since space, launch profile, and destination is important, they secondary payloads may not work with a less than "full" primary payload.


The point would initially be to make the first 1kg, and sell it by the gram or less. As someone said, the second 1kg would make a lot less than the first. Toffee may not be the best sweet to make, I just remember tales of people making it at home, so presumably it could be made on the ISS as the ISS currently is, without specialist equipment. Sugar is about £1 per kg? (I haven't bought any in years) and it's the main ingredient. The main cost would be the lift to orbit and the recovery. Would you pay $80 for a gram of guaranteed real space toffee? Would any rich people pay $80,000 for 1kg? It's not about the value for money, it's about the rarity, which is why for the first 1kg at least an auction would be a good way to sell it. It would also be to a slight extent about helping to pay for space exploration.
Yea, so if you only want to make 1kg of toffee, then that kilogram doesn't cost $40k, instead it costs $100 million or such. That's because you still have to build the satellite to make the toffee (regardless of how much toffee it makes) and you still have to buy the launch. Sure, you get to go on as a secondary payload, but you still need a cheap ($50 mil) satellite and a cheap ($50 mil) launch.

Payload cost per kilogram does NOT scale :)

So now, even if you get a really cheap satellite somehow ($10 mil) and a find just the right secondary payload and get a discount for some reason ($10 mil) then you are down to $20mil/kg and lets see, $20,000,000/1,000g = $20,000 per gram. Before you make a profit and only if you somehow get your costs down so incredibly far.

Sure, auction, that's a way to guarantee a profit *not*

[Eldan]

Well, they said on the ISS. Presumably, you could get a packet of sugar to the ISS.

That said, I'm not sure they'd allow astronauts to use sugar in space. Dust of any kind of a giant no-no.

[halfeye]

Well, they said on the ISS. Presumably, you could get a packet of sugar to the ISS.

That said, I'm not sure they'd allow astronauts to use sugar in space. Dust of any kind of a giant no-no.

Yes I said on the ISS. I'm not sure toffee is the best idea, you have to get it hot. Anything that could be made in space without a lot of heat would be better. I think it does have to be made in space.

[InvisibleBison]

Leaving aside the issue of how this could be profitable, I don't see how this constitutes space exploration. You're just doing something in low earth orbit, which is pretty routine.

[Xyril]

Leaving aside the issue of how this could be profitable, I don't see how this constitutes space exploration. You're just doing something in low earth orbit, which is pretty routine.

I think maybe halfeye's idea is that if you do enough of this sort of stuff and make it profitable, you can start piggybacking less profitable onto the same infrastructure. That is of course predicated on having enough millionaires to support such an industry.

[LordEntrails]

Leaving aside the issue of how this could be profitable, I don't see how this constitutes space exploration. You're just doing something in low earth orbit, which is pretty routine.
Gotta agree with this.

And how does this make space exploration profitable? Even if you do "it" on the ISS, you still have to pay the money to get the "ingredients" up "there". And even if you do it with multiple products, you might be able to make a few hundred millions. But that is not even a drop in the bucket of what's needed for meaningful space exploration. Heck, say you do a bunch of these ventures and make $100 million per year, that still only pays for 1 launch per year.

Space exploration will never be profitable until the commercialization of extra-planetary resources is engaged in. i.e. mining. And then more elaborate commerce systems will only make sense when their are people to service in non-Terran locations. i.e. when there are already other colonies.

I'm all for space exploration. Its the ONLY way human civilization shall survive, but it will not initially be funded by commercialization. Huge amounts of money will have to be spent by non-commercial entities before commercialization on any significant scale will be feasible.

[Traab]

From what I gather, pretty much anything is going to be long term, maybe even VERY long term profitable at best. The sheer cost of getting everything you need into space alone is going to magnify startup costs to an absurd level. Lets say, for the sake of argument, asteroid mining turns out to be 75% more productive than identical mining on earth. You still have to account for the initial cost of starting the operation along with whatever upkeep is required for such a venture before you can even consider turning a profit on it. Also, of course, bringing the material mined to market. So unless you are willing to wait possibly decades to start seeing profit come in, while investing probably more money than most nations HAVE, we need to find something that can only be done in space that is hugely important before space based economy happens outside of novelty nonsense.

That being said, if someone DOES go crazy enough to invest hundreds of billions into starting space based operations, then future groups could potentially use that starting point themselves for less startup cost, which would reduce the time till you see a return on investment from absurd to impractical.

[halfeye]

And how does this make space exploration profitable? Even if you do "it" on the ISS, you still have to pay the money to get the "ingredients" up "there". And even if you do it with multiple products, you might be able to make a few hundred millions. But that is not even a drop in the bucket of what's needed for meaningful space exploration. Heck, say you do a bunch of these ventures and make $100 million per year, that still only pays for 1 launch per year.

The point is to make a profit. You may only pay for one launch a year, but that's a launch that is free for everyone else flying on it.


Space exploration will never be profitable until the commercialization of extra-planetary resources is engaged in. i.e. mining. And then more elaborate commerce systems will only make sense when their are people to service in non-Terran locations. i.e. when there are already other colonies.

We've got all of the rare earths on Earth. There is no way bringing them down from space will ever be profitable. If anything stops being rare, the price goes down.


I'm all for space exploration. Its the ONLY way human civilization shall survive, but it will not initially be funded by commercialization. Huge amounts of money will have to be spent by non-commercial entities before commercialization on any significant scale will be feasible.

Why would that be a necessary truth? I don't think that is a necessary truth. I'm in favour the human colonisation of space too.

[Traab]

The point is to make a profit. You may only pay for one launch a year, but that's a launch that is free for everyone else flying on it.



We've got all of the rare earths on Earth. There is no way bringing them down from space will ever be profitable. If anything stops being rare, the price goes down.



Why would that be a necessary truth? I don't think that is a necessary truth. I'm in favour the human colonisation of space too.

Theoretically there will come a time when we run out of needed materials to do things, similar to the whole projected time where we run out of oil that keeps getting shoved back another 20 years every time new tech is developed so we can get more. There is also the "all our eggs in one basket" theory that works something like, If another planet killer asteroid heads for earth and bruce willis is too old to go punch it into dust, we might lose this as a habitable world for quite some time and settlements on other worlds, moons, space faring colonies, might be the only way our race survives. If we dont already have them, we are likely dead as a species or close to it. And, you know, assuming our species still exists in roughly 4 billion years we are going to have to move. What with the sun eating our planet and all. Less ridiculous, there is also the possibility that we will irreparably wreck this world and having some place else to go would be handy when this world can no longer support life because we didnt recycle enough gluten. Gotta keep our carb footprint low, you know?

[LordEntrails]

The point is to make a profit. You may only pay for one launch a year, but that's a launch that is free for everyone else flying on it.
Yep, and businesses that are interested in making a profit insist on a return on investment commencement with the risk. And if you don't believe folks like me and Traab saying we don't see it as a reasonable endeavor, then ask yourself why folks like Rutan, Musk et al haven't gone through with such? They have the money, they have the technological companies to do what you are proposing, they have the interest in space exploration, and they consider "out-of-the-box" ideas. Yet not one of them have ever proposed such a thing.

Heck, Musk even sent a $200,000 car into space because he had nothing better to put there. If launching a toffee machine into space for free and returning the toffee to space (or any other type of self-funding idea) was reasonable, why would he waste $200k rather than invest something he could have turned a profit with?



We've got all of the rare earths on Earth. There is no way bringing them down from space will ever be profitable. If anything stops being rare, the price goes down.
Yes, agreed. But not sure how that is related to my statement you were quoting.



Why would that be a necessary truth? I don't think that is a necessary truth. I'm in favour the human colonisation of space too.
That space exploration will not be initiated by commercial endeavors? Because businesses are all about maximizing financial profit and minimizing risk. Currently space exploration has a high risk and very little prospect for profit, therefore businesses won't do it.

Even Musk isn't just throwing his money into a purely commercial venture. Yes he sees future potential. But he also is spending a great deal of money he has made elsewhere for altruistic reasons. And he is limiting his commercial risk by trying to build a space launch system that competes for current SLS customers, i.e. US government and communication satellites.

Have you watched the recent "Mars" series from PBS/National Geographic? It's on Netflix and other places. It talks about colonization and exploration and the commercialization. It has interviews with Musk and other experts. It will give you a bunch of information and opinions that I think you will really appreciate.

[The Glyphstone]

Musk could have made money by selling that lift space to someone with a satellite. He sent the car as a publicity stunt on a grand scale, and it worked phenomenally.

[halfeye]

commencement

Commensurate?


And if you don't believe folks like me and Traab saying we don't see it as a reasonable endeavor, then ask yourself why folks like Rutan, Musk et al haven't gone through with such? They have the money, they have the technological companies to do what you are proposing, they have the interest in space exploration, and they consider "out-of-the-box" ideas. Yet not one of them have ever proposed such a thing.

They don't have access to the ISS or anything like it.


Yes, agreed. But not sure how that is related to my statement you were quoting.

The early part about space mining being profitable.


That space exploration will not be initiated by commercial endeavors? Because businesses are all about maximizing financial profit and minimizing risk. Currently space exploration has a high risk and very little prospect for profit, therefore businesses won't do it.

Even Musk isn't just throwing his money into a purely commercial venture. Yes he sees future potential. But he also is spending a great deal of money he has made elsewhere for altruistic reasons. And he is limiting his commercial risk by trying to build a space launch system that competes for current SLS customers, i.e. US government and communication satellites.

There is very little profit without some risk. There are a lot of people who want people in space, Musk and Carmack for two.


Have you watched the recent "Mars" series from PBS/National Geographic? It's on Netflix and other places. It talks about colonization and exploration and the commercialization. It has interviews with Musk and other experts. It will give you a bunch of information and opinions that I think you will really appreciate.

No, I don't rate Mars as a sensible destination.

[LordEntrails]

They don't have access to the ISS or anything like it.
Yet somehow that's the suggested location for toffee making?


There is very little profit without some risk. There are a lot of people who want people in space, Musk and Carmack for two.
And they are doing so for altruistic reasons, not commercial. Sure, they are investing loads of money in it in something of a commercial sense, but they are doing so not for commercial reasons, but for altruistic reasons. (Thankfully)


No, I don't rate Mars as a sensible destination.
What? That's not why I recommended the show. I recommended the show because it uses Mars as a discussion platform for commercial exploration of space. (As well as social and technological discussions and others). Many of the interviews and corresponding plot lines are about Mars, they are about how commercial, scientific, and other interests will clash and how they might be resolved or the problems competing interests might cause.

In other words, they have thoughtful, intelligent and informed discussions among real-world experts on the topics that are brought up in this thread.

[Traab]

At this point for space to ever be profitable somebody is going to have to bite the bullet, take the MASSIVE hit to their finances for little return, and go ahead and create some sort of space based operation that can be expanded upon by future endeavors. That person will never see a dime of profit, but will at least be in the history books as the person/corporation/nation that went ahead and did it anyways. From that point on it might actually become profitable to do things in space because the initial expenditure has been done. Does the moon have mineral deposits that can be mined? More importantly, do they have the resources needed to expand without importing more stuff from earth? If the answer is yes, then profit can happen as well as advancement in space travel. If we still need to keep shuttling (hur hur) resources up to the moon to build on from there its still going to be shaky as heck that it might ever be able to turn a profit. The goal would be space based independence. Being in space would straight away gut large portions of the cost for every launch we go through on earth. Whether its the moon, or a much larger space station, further space trips starting from there will be far easier and cheaper from then on.

Only other option is the next great tech breakthrough. A paradigm shift on par with going from vacuum tubes to transistors. A quantum leap forward in potential that somehow makes leaving earths orbit far easier cheaper and safer. A source of propulsion thats far more compact, long lasting, and efficient, the creation of portal guns capable of engulfing a space ship, i dunno, SOMETHING

[Excession]

At this point for space to ever be profitable...

Building, building, and running satellites is already profitable. I know it's old hat, but it still counts as space. There were, admittedly, early endeavours like Iridium where the initial investors lost a lot of money, but that's changed now. Iridium 2 is a thing that is happening now for example, and bigger (or smaller) and better communication, TV, and weather sats are launching all the time. One thing this is doing is massively reducing the cost of launching rockets. That's a big change that is happening right now.

These things used to be the reserve of big governments, but now lots of private companies are in all parts of the field and making money. Science and military missions also make a lot of money for private companies, even if it is public money to start with.

Putting people in space? Governments might lead the way again, with China talking big on moon bases for example, and the USA is still planning a Mars mission, or some crazy billionaire might do it.

Tourism into low earth orbit could make money, even if it does cost millions for a trip some people would pay for that. Asteroid mining might be a thing, though probably with robots Selling air, water, or steel to a space hotel or the ISS at 20% off the cost of launching it might be an early market. There are companies that claim to be working on these things, and yes, in some cases their investors are going to lose everything, but that's pretty common for explorations into entirely new products and markets. Once something looks like working you'll see those small companies scooped up by larger ones, like a big cruise or hotel line buying a space tourism company or a big mining company buying a asteroid mining start-up. When that happens the initial investors will make a huge amount of money.

[Kato]

I guess literal space exploration is a bit different from many things we have discussed. Neither getting toffee from space nor putting up satellites is "exploration."

Satellites are clearly profitable, though it amazes me a little, but I think we've gotten good at making them small / light. I have no idea how high the exchange rate is or if we will (soon) reach a point when we need hardly new sats put up. (I guess not but who knows)

Doing research /exploration on its own has rarely been profitable in human history. It becomes so if you find some new ressource or if you 'invent' something. But inventing something in space that would make a profit or finding a new source of X that is worth looking for... Seems unlikely to the point where I don't see many people going after it.

[Mechalich]

The real problem with making space exploration 'profitable' is that almost any cool technology you think of for some sort of space based industry, for example, 3D Printed autonomous mining drones, is also something you could deploy to great profitability here on Earth. And, at the end of the day, industry is ~100 elements, power, and software, and space doesn't have a monopoly on any of those things.

The list of things you could do on Mars, for example, really isn't any different from the list of things you could do on Earth, with the exception of 'study the unique Martian environment,' and that's pretty much a pure R&D move. Now, pure R&D may very well be vastly profitable, but the up-front costs of space are huge and the current economic system isn't really capable of easily shouldering such massive capital costs (though Elon Musk is trying). This isn't exactly unique to space exploration. Basic research into fundamental physics might potentially pay out massive dividends economically, but private industry hasn't exactly rushed out to build gigantic particle accelerators.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Making toffee in space is essentially pretty similar to using sponsoring or ad revenue. People are paying to be associated with you and what you do. Some rich investor person buys the only batch of toffee to ever be made in space to show how cool they are and how they totally have a thing with space and you should come to them first if you're looking for investors in a space project. There's no inherent value from the stuff being made in space and that means it's hard to scale up. Sell a single spot for a commercial during the super bowl and the price goes absurdly high, sell advertisement space on an ads only station and you're begging for people to take the spots, and for people to watch it as well.

It also reminds me of bad kickstarters that, with the best intentions, promise all sort of extra's to people who pledge more. Every penny you spend on those extra's cannot be spent on the product you are actually trying to fund. Time and lift capacity used for making toffee is not used on exploring space.

Things like this can be a source of revenue, but they'll never be the only source for an expensive thing like going to space.

[monomer]

Making toffee in space is essentially pretty similar to using sponsoring or ad revenue. People are paying to be associated with you and what you do. Some rich investor person buys the only batch of toffee to ever be made in space to show how cool they are and how they totally have a thing with space and you should come to them first if you're looking for investors in a space project. There's no inherent value from the stuff being made in space and that means it's hard to scale up.

It should be noted that one of the investor's in Super Heavy / Starship (previously known as BFR) is a Japanese Billionaire,Yusaku Maezawa, who has purchased the first ride on Starship to send up a bunch of artists on a mission around the moon (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/nasa-isnt-going-to-pay-for-the-bfr-so-musk-charts-a-new-course/). In this case, beyond the novelty/rarity factor of creating art in space, one can envision artists making something that could only be made in space, or with the moon as a backdrop. In this case, the art produced may be basically priceless, as it could result in some truly original work, and the first attempt would be the most sought after.

[Xyril]

It should be noted that one of the investor's in Super Heavy / Starship (previously known as BFR) is a Japanese Billionaire,Yusaku Maezawa, who has purchased the first ride on Starship to send up a bunch of artists on a mission around the moon (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/nasa-isnt-going-to-pay-for-the-bfr-so-musk-charts-a-new-course/). In this case, beyond the novelty/rarity factor of creating art in space, one can envision artists making something that could only be made in space, or with the moon as a backdrop. In this case, the art produced may be basically priceless, as it could result in some truly original work, and the first attempt would be the most sought after.

That's really cool--I had heard about that guy, but I had no idea that he was bringing a bunch of artists with him.

As others have pointed out, this kind of thing probably can't scale up enough to cover a significant part of the truly massive costs of getting into space, but it's probably useful in terms of getting a decent amount of capital and publicity up front. Plus, it's cool enough that it's probably worth doing for its own sake.

[druid91]

The real problem with making space exploration 'profitable' is that almost any cool technology you think of for some sort of space based industry, for example, 3D Printed autonomous mining drones, is also something you could deploy to great profitability here on Earth. And, at the end of the day, industry is ~100 elements, power, and software, and space doesn't have a monopoly on any of those things.

The list of things you could do on Mars, for example, really isn't any different from the list of things you could do on Earth, with the exception of 'study the unique Martian environment,' and that's pretty much a pure R&D move. Now, pure R&D may very well be vastly profitable, but the up-front costs of space are huge and the current economic system isn't really capable of easily shouldering such massive capital costs (though Elon Musk is trying). This isn't exactly unique to space exploration. Basic research into fundamental physics might potentially pay out massive dividends economically, but private industry hasn't exactly rushed out to build gigantic particle accelerators.

I mean, the primary bonus of going to mars is mars isn't owned by anyone. You could do heavy industry all day long and noone would care. Strip mine things all you want.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

It should be noted that one of the investor's in Super Heavy / Starship (previously known as BFR) is a Japanese Billionaire,Yusaku Maezawa, who has purchased the first ride on Starship to send up a bunch of artists on a mission around the moon (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/nasa-isnt-going-to-pay-for-the-bfr-so-musk-charts-a-new-course/). In this case, beyond the novelty/rarity factor of creating art in space, one can envision artists making something that could only be made in space, or with the moon as a backdrop. In this case, the art produced may be basically priceless, as it could result in some truly original work, and the first attempt would be the most sought after.

Better than toffee, better than the Mars One plan to finance a Mars mission by making it a reality show (those guys recently went bankrupt). Art is one of those things that tends to massively overinflate if people think other people might think there's something unique about it. But I would still suggest not banking on it paying for the complete development of a huge moon rocket. And even if it does I would not bank on the trick working for every launch from there on in.

[Eldan]

I mean, the primary bonus of going to mars is mars isn't owned by anyone. You could do heavy industry all day long and noone would care. Strip mine things all you want.

The question is how much you'd have to invest first to make it profitable. The Apollo moon mission cost 20 billion dollars, or 200 billion adjusted for inflation. Mars would be exponentially more expensive. The question is if you could get anyone to invest trillions up front for something that may fail at any time (say, there's a solar flare and your entire mining crew dies on the way up), to mine bulk raw materials that you mostly also could get by strip mining some third world country. Politically and ethically unpleasant, but cheaper and companies have experience with that already.

[Mechalich]

I mean, the primary bonus of going to mars is mars isn't owned by anyone. You could do heavy industry all day long and noone would care. Strip mine things all you want.

Sure you can do all the heavy industry you want on Mars - but the tyranny of the rocket equation means that anything you produce is only going to be profitable within Mars' gravity well. As a result, in order to make heavy industry on Mars worth bothering with you need to have a Mars colony in place first, only there's no reason to build a permanent colony unless you're trying to make it an economic success in the first place. That's the fundamental Catch-22 of space development.

Remember, space has no raw materials that are not available on Earth, since raw materials ultimately just boils down to the periodic table (and space isn't good at providing long-chain hydrocarbons anyway). So a space extraction or industrial process can only have supplies that are more convenient than those of Earth. Now, that convenience can be pretty impressive, there are some asteroids out there that are pretty much solid blocks of metal ore and don't represent a gravity well of any consequence. However, in order to utilize them you still have to haul at least a power source, a fabber, and some feedstock out to them, and once you have your extracted metals you then have to bring them back to some location where people want to use them, and if those people are on a planet that means you have to put them down into a gravity well without them either burning up or leaving big craters.

It's worth noting that it's not all that difficult to imagine a profitable series of space industries servicing other people in space, because once you're talking about moving things from one microgravity location to another you're just transferring orbits and most of the expensive rocketry can be avoided. If you can build a space elevator, then, you can start to bring planets and moons into the mix in a limited way, but that breakthrough's a ways off if it's possible at all.

[Eldan]

Hm. From what I remember, we could potentially make a lunar space elevator out of Kevlar. What would we need for a Mars elevator? Anyone run the numbers? If we could put an elevator there, that would instantly make it much more interesting as a base for the aerospae industry to get their bulk materials.

[factotum]

Hm. From what I remember, we could potentially make a lunar space elevator out of Kevlar. What would we need for a Mars elevator? Anyone run the numbers? If we could put an elevator there, that would instantly make it much more interesting as a base for the aerospae industry to get their bulk materials.

Why? What could the aerospace industry get on Mars that they can't already get on Earth much, much cheaper?

[Eldan]

Very long term, I mean. Having mines on mars with a space elevator could be a cheaper way to build big things in space than shipping them up from Earth. Very, very long term .

[LibraryOgre]

So, a former GM of mine (https://twitter.com/phalanx) is a Vice President at Made in Space (https://madeinspace.us); when he was GMing me, he was working for NASA (seriously, he and another NASA engineer would have conversations about office politics that were AMAZING). Anyway, here's a mission statement from Made In Space


Made In Space is primarily concerned with how the unique traits of the space environment such as persistent microgravity and vacuum conditions can be harnessed to offer new commercial solutions. By manufacturing and assembling structures on orbit, rather than on the planet's surface, we unlock incredible design possibilities for extending the life of current on-orbit assets or entirely new structures. By pulling fiber in microgravity, we address one of the most critical barriers to perfect ZBLAN on the surface–gravity-caused crystallization. By setting up a prototyping platform on the ISS National Lab, we give researchers the ability to prototype tools and designs in the environment of space with short iteration cycles.

So, how to make space profitable?

You start on the ground. You design modules that can support long-term space presence and serve as manufacturing centers in space. You shoot them up there, and keep them supplied with raw materials. With space-side manufacturing, you can ship up raw materials (cheaper, denser), and produce things your space industry needs without the difficulties of shipping up produced goods. As your space program grows, you can start exploiting existing resources, be they decomissioned satellites or, eventually, grabbing rocks from the sky and mining them for useful materials.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

At that point though, how much does Mars really offer over for instance a large asteroid station with a habitat module spun up for gravity?

[Xyril]

The question is how much you'd have to invest first to make it profitable. The Apollo moon mission cost 20 billion dollars, or 200 billion adjusted for inflation. Mars would be exponentially more expensive. The question is if you could get anyone to invest trillions up front for something that may fail at any time (say, there's a solar flare and your entire mining crew dies on the way up), to mine bulk raw materials that you mostly also could get by strip mining some third world country. Politically and ethically unpleasant, but cheaper and companies have experience with that already.

With its weaker gravity well and greater distance from the sun, Mars would have the advantage of easier access to end-users out in space, but that presupposes the existence of profitable space exploration beyond Mars, which brings us back to square one. Also, given that steel is pretty great for a lot of construction, mining iron-rich asteroids would probably be much better at providing a source of most raw materials without the need for such a high escape velocity. Also, they can be moved as is to whatever distant space outpost you're building. Plus, the asteroid belt basically starts off closer.

If we find something truly rare on Mars, with substantial value to technologies to be deployed in space, that could become worthwhile--again, presupposing we find some other economic driver for all that other space exploration. Tantalum, for example, is very useful in electronics, and if we can create systems that autonomously manufacture probes or other automated machinery in space, then it might make sense to mine it from Mars and launch it into space from there.

In order to make it economical to ship it back to Earth, it would have to be very, very rare and have intrinsic value. There was a thread in this forum a while back--I believe about asteroid mining--where somebody made an important point about how commodities that derive value primarily from scarcity and prestige (such as gold) lose value particularly quickly when you reduce that scarcity. Profiting from space-gold-prospecting would require a very precarious balance between bringing in enough gold to recoup your investment and bringing in so much that you flood the market and tank prices. Moreover, because it's such an investment-heavy venture (most likely, the marginal cost of mining each bit of gold and sending it to Earth will be tiny compared to the amount spent getting those asteroid miners in place), if there is any competition at all there is a high likelihood of a price war that will either destroy the industry or drastically destabilize the market until the dust settles. Just imagine a lemonade stand industry where it costs a million dollars to buy a lemonade replicator, but less than a penny to create each glass of lemonade. With multiple competitors, each stand will be very tempted to get their marginal profits as low as possible to try to outlast the competition and emerge with a monopoly to recoup their original investment. Meanwhile, the market suffers whatever consequences would stem from a prolonged period of artificially low lemonade prices--probably diabetes.

This would still be an issue with a material with intrinsic value in some other industry--such as the various rare earth elements used in various high tech industries. However, with those there would at least be some other driver for demand that would be able to absorb a bit more increase in supply without tanking prices.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

But most of those advantages apply to asteroid stations. As a bonus, the metals in most asteroids have not in large amounts sunken into a core, thus much more of those can be mined near the surface.

[LordEntrails]

Satellites are clearly profitable, though it amazes me a little, but I think we've gotten good at making them small / light. I have no idea how high the exchange rate is or if we will (soon) reach a point when we need hardly new sats put up. (I guess not but who knows)
We will need new satellites. Partly because old ones die; they run out of fuel for station keeping, their batteries degrade, their solar panels degrade, parts stop working. Second, existing satellites use existing technologies; hence they are limited and as we want them to do more, handle more data/bandwidth, provide higher resolution images, different EM spectrums, etc, they need to be replaced (since they are not designed to be upgraded in place.)


Doing research /exploration on its own has rarely been profitable in human history. It becomes so if you find some new ressource or if you 'invent' something. But inventing something in space that would make a profit or finding a new source of X that is worth looking for... Seems unlikely to the point where I don't see many people going after it.
This is exactly why early exploration is done with government funding/support. And has been the model to date for space. At some point, it becomes reasonable for non-government groups to support. Just like early colonization of North America.

I mean, the primary bonus of going to mars is mars isn't owned by anyone. You could do heavy industry all day long and noone would care. Strip mine things all you want.
As of today. It is likely their will be international laws regulating such endeavors soon after such becomes possible. Again, I refer youto the Mars series, it addresses this issue directly.

So, how to make space profitable?

You start on the ground. You design modules that can support long-term space presence and serve as manufacturing centers in space. You shoot them up there, and keep them supplied with raw materials. With space-side manufacturing, you can ship up raw materials (cheaper, denser), and produce things your space industry needs without the difficulties of shipping up produced goods. As your space program grows, you can start exploiting existing resources, be they decomissioned satellites or, eventually, grabbing rocks from the sky and mining them for useful materials.
This is a good start, but again it is of limited availability and use. IMO, the value in endeavors such as Made in Space is that it bring us practical experience. It allows trial and error, not just in manufacture (which is vital), but also in space launch etc.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

At that point though, how much does Mars really offer over for instance a large asteroid station with a habitat module spun up for gravity?

It's already in a stable orbit around the sun, and has a hell of a lot of more material ready to be mined, including water? Floating space debris seems to come in two types: those with metals and those with water, so they'd be a pain if you want both.

Capturing an asteroid for use as a station is non-trivial. I mean, I suppose we could set it up in the asteroid belt, but that's just a smaller version of setting it up on Mars. Although I suppose it could be easier to make it spin to 1g.

No, I don't have a fool-proof answer for you. I honestly believe that space can be profitable, but I don't know enough to say if Moon/Mars/Ceres/NeoMoon would be the most economical first step. If I had to guess, though, Moon with kevlar Space Elevator is likely the most realistic at this time.

(Speaking of, I too would like to know if a Mars Space Elevator can be built with existing tech. With a rotation so much closer to Earth's and a mere 2x Moon gravity, I would think it need a much shorter Space Elevator, which means it needs to support far less of its own weight, right? I tried to do the research a while back, but got lost)

Grey Wolf

[Xyril]

given that steel is pretty great for a lot of construction, mining iron-rich asteroids would probably be much better at providing a source of most raw materials without the need for such a high escape velocity. Also, they can be moved as is to whatever distant space outpost you're building. Plus, the asteroid belt basically starts off closer.


But most of those advantages apply to asteroid stations. As a bonus, the metals in most asteroids have not in large amounts sunken into a core, thus much more of those can be mined near the surface.

...which is why I specified that rare elements not found in asteroids would be the only scenario where it would make sense.

[gomipile]

Hm. From what I remember, we could potentially make a lunar space elevator out of Kevlar. What would we need for a Mars elevator? Anyone run the numbers? If we could put an elevator there, that would instantly make it much more interesting as a base for the aerospae industry to get their bulk materials.

Phobos' orbit is smaller than areostationary orbit, so a space elevator there would have to be intentionally vibrated at a low frequency that moves it out of the way of the moon as it passes. Even with lower tensile strengths required, that poses a massive engineering challenge.

[The Glyphstone]

Phobos' orbit is smaller than areostationary orbit, so a space elevator there would have to be intentionally vibrated at a low frequency that moves it out of the way of the moon as it passes. Even with lower tensile strengths required, that poses a massive engineering challenge.

Would it be a smaller engineering challenge to move Phobos out of Mars orbit?

[factotum]

Would it be a smaller engineering challenge to move Phobos out of Mars orbit?

Probably not. Phobos is very small--for a moon. That still means it's a chunk of rock nearly 6,000 cubic kilometres in volume and massing more than 10^13 tonnes. Giving it enough delta-V to move it above geostationary orbit would be a massive undertaking that would either require a lot of materials, a lot of time, or probably both.

[Eldan]

Phobos' orbit is smaller than areostationary orbit, so a space elevator there would have to be intentionally vibrated at a low frequency that moves it out of the way of the moon as it passes. Even with lower tensile strengths required, that poses a massive engineering challenge.

Oh yeah. I forgot that part of Red Mars.

[Traab]

Its looking more and more like the only reason to go out in space and do anything there, like setup mining and whatnot, is to go further into space. Its not so much profitable as it is long term cheaper and more effective if you can build, fuel, and staff spaceships outside earths orbit. Of course even that has limited returns as current tech will only make it possible to travel so far so fast even without having to escape earth to get going first. There isnt much of anything to be found or done in space that is cost effective enough to justify doing it there instead of on earth currently. Even the things which technically could be more profitable are such long term investments as to be insane. Strip mining mars could be remarkably efficient as you can use the most effective methods for removal of ore without caring about the environment, but its still something that would take decades to offset the initial cost of getting everything in place to setup mining, transport materials back and forth, etc etc etc. And the risk involved is through the roof. If a mine collapses on earth, we have rescue services to help look for survivors. If an accident happens on mars, you dead son, you dead. So even if there was an investor crazy enough to fund a project that best case would start showing a profit when his grand child inherits the family business, the odds of it lasting long enough to pay off are probably pretty low. And thats assuming mining on mars IS efficient enough to offset the costs involved in basically colonizing a planet to setup mining operations.

[halfeye]

Its looking more and more like the only reason to go out in space and do anything there, like setup mining and whatnot, is to go further into space.

Well yes, but there is a lot of space in space.


Its not so much profitable as it is long term cheaper and more effective if you can build, fuel, and staff spaceships outside earths orbit. Of course even that has limited returns as current tech will only make it possible to travel so far so fast even without having to escape earth to get going first. There isnt much of anything to be found or done in space that is cost effective enough to justify doing it there instead of on earth currently. Even the things which technically could be more profitable are such long term investments as to be insane. Strip mining mars could be remarkably efficient as you can use the most effective methods for removal of ore without caring about the environment, but its still something that would take decades to offset the initial cost of getting everything in place to setup mining, transport materials back and forth, etc etc etc. And the risk involved is through the roof. If a mine collapses on earth, we have rescue services to help look for survivors. If an accident happens on mars, you dead son, you dead. So even if there was an investor crazy enough to fund a project that best case would start showing a profit when his grand child inherits the family business, the odds of it lasting long enough to pay off are probably pretty low. And thats assuming mining on mars IS efficient enough to offset the costs involved in basically colonizing a planet to setup mining operations.

The thread title was aimed at making the current generation or five or six generations of space exploration and colonisation more economically viable than it currently is.

I personally don't think mining or any other heavy industry for export (or whatever the word ought to be) back to Earth will ever be profitable. There might turn out to be something you can generate in micro gravity that is useful and will survive the journey back to Earth, but it will have to be small I think.

I really don't think Mars is a suitable planet for colonisation, better than Jupiter, but not good.

[Traab]

Well yes, but there is a lot of space in space.



The thread title was aimed at making the current generation or five or six generations of space exploration and colonisation more economically viable than it currently is.

I personally don't think mining or any other heavy industry for export (or whatever the word ought to be) back to Earth will ever be profitable. There might turn out to be something you can generate in micro gravity that is useful and will survive the journey back to Earth, but it will have to be small I think.

I really don't think Mars is a suitable planet for colonisation, better than Jupiter, but not good.

Ah fair enough I must have missed that part of the original topic. But still, unless we make a quantum leap forward in tech, discover the next big thing as regards to space travel, I just dont see us really getting very far. Like, at best eventually creating bio dome style colonies on other planets/moons/whatever nearby and spreading further from there. And even then I dont see it happening until there is a driving reason. Like we learn the end of the world WILL happen inside a century and the only way to survive is to flee to another planet/moon/whatever. After all, its going to be stupidly expensive to pull off so even though im sure there are enough people to form a solid large nation who are willing and eager to risk it all living on the moon or wherever, they dont control the vastly deep purses needed to fund it. And again, earth is just a better place to live currently. Its where all our stuff is!

[Chen]

Short term the only real money from space exploration will be continued launching of satellites and then space tourism. Large scale endeavours are not going to be profitable until theres some sort of infrastructure in space to take advantage of these “close” resources.

[halfeye]

earth is just a better place to live currently. Its where all our stuff is!

You mean like England was where all the stuff was? Because it mostly was.

A lot of (mostly fairly small) colonies failed, with no survivors.

That was a different situation, but there are some similarities at least. There are a lot of people who want to go. There are a lot of people who don't want to go, but giving them a veto over other people going seems excessive to me.


Short term the only real money from space exploration will be continued launching of satellites and then space tourism. Large scale endeavours are not going to be profitable until theres some sort of infrastructure in space to take advantage of these “close” resources.

Space tourism is probably a good thing, I'm not at all sure that Virgin's almost space tourism is good since they don't get to orbit and their craft probably can't be sensibly or economically be converted to get to orbit. Satellites which are profitable are great.

This book was published in 1971:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N%2BSnq1tGL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Space-Philip-Kenneth-Gatland/dp/B0010P5H16

It's full of spacecraft that might have been built in the then future. None of them were (they didn't have the shuttle as such, and didn't cover basic rockets). That the Apollo missions were the peak of space travel does make me slightly angry.

[Kato]

You wanting space colonies to be a thing doesn't mean it can be a thing. We cannot get everything we want. And living in space might be one of the things that doesn't work out. That doesn't mean it's anyone's fault or people want to keep others from their dreams. Maybe you'll get your wish one day, maybe one of your descendants will. Or maybe it turns out we're stuck on this rock for one reason or another.

[Traab]

You mean like England was where all the stuff was? Because it mostly was.

A lot of (mostly fairly small) colonies failed, with no survivors.

That was a different situation, but there are some similarities at least. There are a lot of people who want to go. There are a lot of people who don't want to go, but giving them a veto over other people going seems excessive to me.



Space tourism is probably a good thing, I'm not at all sure that Virgin's almost space tourism is good since they don't get to orbit and their craft probably can't be sensibly or economically be converted to get to orbit. Satellites which are profitable are great.

This book was published in 1971:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N%2BSnq1tGL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Space-Philip-Kenneth-Gatland/dp/B0010P5H16

It's full of spacecraft that might have been built in the then future. None of them were (they didn't have the shuttle as such, and didn't cover basic rockets). That the Apollo missions were the peak of space travel does make me slightly angry.

I think we both know there is a difference between colonizing "The New World" and "An Actual New World" when it comes to potential issues and profitability. For one thing we already know that el dorado cant be found on mars. Or the moon for that matter. Secondly, the cost to profit ratio of sending things by sail boat from north america to the british isles is far more economically viable than mars to earth. The tech to travel to the new world and establish a colony was already in existence, well tested, well established. And the initial outlay of doing so was far lower. Sure you generally had to talk to the king or queen to get funding for it, but better them than every king or queen in europe needing to sign on to pay for it all with not even the most positive of estimates showing a profit to be made for the first century.

[halfeye]

I think we both know there is a difference between colonizing "The New World" and "An Actual New World" when it comes to potential issues and profitability. For one thing we already know that el dorado cant be found on mars. Or the moon for that matter. Secondly, the cost to profit ratio of sending things by sail boat from north america to the british isles is far more economically viable than mars to earth. The tech to travel to the new world and establish a colony was already in existence, well tested, well established. And the initial outlay of doing so was far lower. Sure you generally had to talk to the king or queen to get funding for it, but better them than every king or queen in europe needing to sign on to pay for it all with not even the most positive of estimates showing a profit to be made for the first century.

Sailing is easy now, it wasn't back then. Finding the same place twice was difficult. We could find Alpha Centauri now, navigation is almost solved.


You wanting space colonies to be a thing doesn't mean it can be a thing. We cannot get everything we want. And living in space might be one of the things that doesn't work out. That doesn't mean it's anyone's fault or people want to keep others from their dreams. Maybe you'll get your wish one day, maybe one of your descendants will. Or maybe it turns out we're stuck on this rock for one reason or another.

We are coming up on the fiftieth Aniversary of the Apollo missions, and we haven't done anything better since. Skylab was nice, it was more or less part of Apollo, then it went down. The ISS is nice, so NASA wants to scrap it.

I was a child when the first Apollo mission was live on TV, and I watched it. Fuzzy as heck, but important. Since then, not much.

Space colonies almost certainly could be a thing, if there was sufficient political will.

[gomipile]

For one thing we already know that el dorado cant be found on mars. Or the moon for that matter.

Of course not. They(plural) are in the asteroid belt.

[monomer]

We will need new satellites. Partly because old ones die; they run out of fuel for station keeping, their batteries degrade, their solar panels degrade, parts stop working. Second, existing satellites use existing technologies; hence they are limited and as we want them to do more, handle more data/bandwidth, provide higher resolution images, different EM spectrums, etc, they need to be replaced (since they are not designed to be upgraded in place.)

Yeap, there were plans to give satellites the ability to be refueled, but I'm guessing most operators ran the numbers and decided it wasn't worth the cost of refueling a 20+ year old satellite to stay in orbit for another few decades, especially considering the advances in technology.

For example, each the three Viasat-3 satellites that will be launched over the next few years will have as much network capacity as all other communications satellites combined (https://www.viasat.com/products/high-capacity-satellites).

[Traab]

I wonder how much money you could make setting up a service to remove orbital debris? I mean, its a serious issue for launches as well as collisions with satellites. We have a lot of junk floating around our planet of all shapes and sizes, so the idea of sending up a device meant to basically collect, or deflect the debris in such a way that, if small enough, it safely burns up on reentry, or is collected like a space faring roomba and brought back down that way.

[Tvtyrant]

Colonies were immediately profitable, those that weren't struggled immensely in their early period and had to argue that they probably would be one day. They generated net resources for the home countries, increasing the food supply and resources faster then they increased in population. They also took very little upkeep, Massachusetts for instance dealt with its own military struggles and protected the surrounding colonies until about 1700.

A space colony can't just be a wood boat with some brave people, it takes constant maintenance and supplies from Earth. We struggle to feed and house people on a planet we were custom designed to live on by 400+ million years of trial and error, space habitation would be a monstrous injustice to those people unless it can be self-sufficient (or better yet be a net profit.)

[Mechalich]

I wonder how much money you could make setting up a service to remove orbital debris? I mean, its a serious issue for launches as well as collisions with satellites. We have a lot of junk floating around our planet of all shapes and sizes, so the idea of sending up a device meant to basically collect, or deflect the debris in such a way that, if small enough, it safely burns up on reentry, or is collected like a space faring roomba and brought back down that way.

Removal of debris is a business enterprise that is wanting on technological developments to happen. There is active research in this area to figure out how to remove debris without producing more debris at the same time in an economical way. Figure that this is something that will happen, on at least the small scale, sometime in the current century.

[LordEntrails]

Removal of debris is a business enterprise that is wanting on technological developments to happen. There is active research in this area to figure out how to remove debris without producing more debris at the same time in an economical way. Figure that this is something that will happen, on at least the small scale, sometime in the current century.
I agree that it will happen, but I don't think it will be done in a commercial manner. After all, why would a commercial company pay for it? They will just chose another parking orbit. IMO it will be consortiums and or governments that will finance the endeavors. King of like roads and road cleanup.

I guess if it gets bad enough, a commercial company might pay to have one of its old satellites removed so it can replace it with a new one. But, maybe I'm pessimistic and think it will be up to non-commercial entities to clean things up first.

[factotum]

Sailing is easy now, it wasn't back then. Finding the same place twice was difficult.

Actually, no, finding the same place is easy, even back then--you just sail westward along a constant line of latitude. We've been able to find our latitude for hundreds of years to a fair degree of accuracy, because you can do it by measuring the sun's altitude above the horizon at its highest point. It's longitude that was impossible to measure before the invention of sufficiently accurate naval chronometers.

[gomipile]

I wonder how much money you could make setting up a service to remove orbital debris? I mean, its a serious issue for launches as well as collisions with satellites. We have a lot of junk floating around our planet of all shapes and sizes, so the idea of sending up a device meant to basically collect, or deflect the debris in such a way that, if small enough, it safely burns up on reentry, or is collected like a space faring roomba and brought back down that way.

There's a decent hard science fiction manga/anime series about this called Planetes.

[Fat Rooster]

Space tourism is probably a good thing, I'm not at all sure that Virgin's almost space tourism is good since they don't get to orbit and their craft probably can't be sensibly or economically be converted to get to orbit. Satellites which are profitable are great.

They do have plans for an orbital rocket, and personally I think air launched is the correct direction for large scale exploitation of space. The complexity of an air launched vehicle currently outweighs the benefits, but that complexity is mostly a R&D problem, that only needs done once. The falcon 9 separates at about Mach 6 in return to pad mode, and that is within reach of a standard ramjet (just). Building a ramjet aircraft that could carry the 100 ton falcon 9 second stage up to Mach 6 and execute the high G pull up (~3) to get enough 'airtime'* would be highly non trivial, but does not require anything particularly exotic tech wise. Anything better than 123 tons of fuel to do the manoeuvre is an improvement, and should be doable with current tech (and lots of $$ for R and D).

Of note is that the high altitudes and thin atmosphere mean that you don't get the same drag reducing benefits of size, so smaller rockets are possible. Not starting on the ground means that thrust to weights less than 1 are also viable, though it places higher stresses on the loft trajectory. That means less of the expensive rocket engines are required for the same fuel tank volume.

Granted this doesn't look much like their current design, but the experience in air launching and supersonic flight (including high G pullups) will make moving in this direction quite natural. A 3 stage design using a drone version of their current craft could easily launch a small final stage capable of putting a few cubesats into orbit, and would require just the final stage to be designed. As a way to further the technology without people on board it is a natural direction.

* The airtime is required partly to let the rocket point prograde rather than angling up, and partly because getting into extremely thin air will make separation simpler. One non obvious advantage to this approach is in terms of structure of the final stage. The falcon 9 second stage has to be able to deal with the accelerations from the first stage with it's own structure, that it then carries to orbit. It will produce similar accelerations on it's own, but will have much less fuel by the time it does. The forces that the structure has to deal with stay lower.

[wumpus]

Yeap, there were plans to give satellites the ability to be refueled, but I'm guessing most operators ran the numbers and decided it wasn't worth the cost of refueling a 20+ year old satellite to stay in orbit for another few decades, especially considering the advances in technology.

For example, each the three Viasat-3 satellites that will be launched over the next few years will have as much network capacity as all other communications satellites combined (https://www.viasat.com/products/high-capacity-satellites).

One thing that really matters here is the orbit. For LEO (low Earth orbit), things tend to fall back down in a few years without fuel keeping them up. I think it only takes a few hundred kph to decelerate something at ISS level so that it falls back down in a single orbit (getting it down in a week presumably takes a lot less).

Out in Geosync land, things are different. Such satellites are required to boost themselves into the "graveyard orbit" where they won't interfere with other satellites. Another reason they may replace a 20+ year old (or less) satellite is simply to keep the valuable orbital position, and have more communication bandwidth to/from that position.

Not to say there aren't other, funky orbits (polar orbits for Earth observation, sun synchronous orbits for doing same while always in sunlight). My favorite being a Molniya orbit. This "hovers" over one spot on the globe for nearly 12 hours, then dips down across the equator and back up and then hangs over the opposite side of the planet (but equally above/below the equator, not directly across) for another 12 hours. I think you could cover the East coast of the US and China, and the West coast of the US and India, but haven't really looked at the numbers.

[halfeye]

They do have plans for an orbital rocket, and personally I think air launched is the correct direction for large scale exploitation of space. The complexity of an air launched vehicle currently outweighs the benefits, but that complexity is mostly a R&D problem, that only needs done once. The falcon 9 separates at about Mach 6 in return to pad mode, and that is within reach of a standard ramjet (just). Building a ramjet aircraft that could carry the 100 ton falcon 9 second stage up to Mach 6 and execute the high G pull up (~3) to get enough 'airtime'* would be highly non trivial, but does not require anything particularly exotic tech wise. Anything better than 123 tons of fuel to do the manoeuvre is an improvement, and should be doable with current tech (and lots of $$ for R and D).

Of note is that the high altitudes and thin atmosphere mean that you don't get the same drag reducing benefits of size, so smaller rockets are possible. Not starting on the ground means that thrust to weights less than 1 are also viable, though it places higher stresses on the loft trajectory. That means less of the expensive rocket engines are required for the same fuel tank volume.

Granted this doesn't look much like their current design, but the experience in air launching and supersonic flight (including high G pullups) will make moving in this direction quite natural. A 3 stage design using a drone version of their current craft could easily launch a small final stage capable of putting a few cubesats into orbit, and would require just the final stage to be designed. As a way to further the technology without people on board it is a natural direction.

* The airtime is required partly to let the rocket point prograde rather than angling up, and partly because getting into extremely thin air will make separation simpler. One non obvious advantage to this approach is in terms of structure of the final stage. The falcon 9 second stage has to be able to deal with the accelerations from the first stage with it's own structure, that it then carries to orbit. It will produce similar accelerations on it's own, but will have much less fuel by the time it does. The forces that the structure has to deal with stay lower.

NASA's X series of planes were interesting too, but so far they haven't reached orbit and craft launched from planes don't look particularly likely to do so in say the next five or ten years. Rockets may be sort of crude, but they work now. In a contest between perfect and good enough, at this time for me the rocket wins by a pretty large margin. It may be that at a later time the economies inherent in launching to orbit from planes will make sense, but now it's not a working technology, and doesn't seem likely to become one in the forseeable future.


Actually, no, finding the same place is easy, even back then--you just sail westward along a constant line of latitude. We've been able to find our latitude for hundreds of years to a fair degree of accuracy, because you can do it by measuring the sun's altitude above the horizon at its highest point. It's longitude that was impossible to measure before the invention of sufficiently accurate naval chronometers.

With what level of accuracy?

If I remember rightly there were whole colonies lost and not rediscovered. Once a settlement got established and running things took off, but the early colonies were very precarious indeed.

[The Glyphstone]

With what level of accuracy?

If I remember rightly there were whole colonies lost and not rediscovered. Once a settlement got established and running things took off, but the early colonies were very precarious indeed.

Colonies failed or were abandoned, but not literally 'lost'. They might run out of supplies or suffer some disaster, and a ship heading to bring them said supplies could easily sink or be driven off course by a storm, but it's not because people just forgot how to get to their location.

[Hackman]

We are coming up on the fiftieth Aniversary of the Apollo missions, and we haven't done anything better since. Skylab was nice, it was more or less part of Apollo, then it went down. The ISS is nice, so NASA wants to scrap it.

I was a child when the first Apollo mission was live on TV, and I watched it. Fuzzy as heck, but important. Since then, not much.


I think it's silly to discount the last ~40 years of space of exploration just because there was no meatbag on board.

[factotum]

If I remember rightly there were whole colonies lost and not rediscovered. Once a settlement got established and running things took off, but the early colonies were very precarious indeed.

I'm assuming you're probably thinking about the Lost Colony of Roanoke? As The_Glyphstone points out, they never lost track of where that was located, they just lost track of all the people, who vanished from the colony in between supply shipments. Once you actually reach land then you can use landmarks to figure out where you are.

[Tvtyrant]

They did in fact lose Vinland and Greenland after the first crusade, so it isn't impossible to do. Some of the Conquistador expeditions went places they couldn't retrace due to just treking around the woods as well.

[halfeye]

I think it's silly to discount the last ~40 years of space of exploration just because there was no meatbag on board.

Exploration is not colonisation.

I also disagree that what has been done by robots is all exploration, which is about making maps and measuring distances. What the robots have done is mostly science, and it's hugely worthwhile, but except for the tiny percentage that has applications on Earth, until people follow, it's pretty pointless.

[monomer]

We are coming up on the fiftieth Aniversary of the Apollo missions, and we haven't done anything better since. Skylab was nice, it was more or less part of Apollo, then it went down. The ISS is nice, so NASA wants to scrap it.

NASA doesn't want to scrap the ISS, and in fact they have a number of crucial experiments on the long-term health affects of living in free-fall for extended periods which they think need to run until at least 2028. (NASA ISS Audit PDF (https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-18-021.pdf))

The issue is that the current ISS funding runs out in 2024, and Congress hasn't agreed on any continued funding after that. NASA is currently spending about $3.4B each year on ISS, including maintenance, operations, cargo/crew transportation, and experiments (international partners also contribute, but NASA's share is far and away the most (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cost)), and with the station approaching end-of-life, maintenance costs will only increase. So if NASA doesn't get a budget increase, they will start having a hard time paying for other exploration projects. While I would be disappointed to lose our only permanent space habitat, imagine what they could do in LEO with $3B and a fleet of Falcon Heavys.

There is a "plan" to sell the ISS to private industry in 2025, but no one wants it since there isn't likely to be a business case where commercial enterprises could actually make a profit with it. Sure, a private company could probably shave some costs off of the current $3.4B, but there will still a huge annual cost there that they would have to make up. And it doesn't help that the ISS' orbit is at an inclination of 52 deg, which is only easy to get to for the Russians while everyone else has to make a fuel-inefficient dogleg to get there. So yeah, I doubt anyone will be banging on the doors for the chance to buy a worn-out space station in a wonky orbit.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Sure, a private company could probably shave some costs off of the current $3.4B,

Doubtful. It's a very specialized project with lots of things involved pretty much no private company currently has, including a suitable rocket (or good enough contacts with someone else who has those), a suitable launch site, space craft with the right docking equipment, trained astronauts, trained ground crews, lots and lots of knowledge on the sysyems, etc. Setting all of that stuff up for a few years of operation is expensive.

It's one of my pet peeves for things politicians say (that isn't directly political so I can discuss it here): privatization does not automatically under all circumstances equal less costs.

[halfeye]

It's one of my pet peeves for things politicians say (that isn't directly political so I can discuss it here): privatization does not automatically under all circumstances equal less costs.

I agree, but I think it is directly political.

[wumpus]

They do have plans for an orbital rocket, and personally I think air launched is the correct direction for large scale exploitation of space. The complexity of an air launched vehicle currently outweighs the benefits, but that complexity is mostly a R&D problem, that only needs done once. The falcon 9 separates at about Mach 6 in return to pad mode, and that is within reach of a standard ramjet (just). Building a ramjet aircraft that could carry the 100 ton falcon 9 second stage up to Mach 6 and execute the high G pull up (~3) to get enough 'airtime'* would be highly non trivial, but does not require anything particularly exotic tech wise. Anything better than 123 tons of fuel to do the manoeuvre is an improvement, and should be doable with current tech (and lots of $$ for R and D).


Some issues with air launch:

You really can't "grow" your rocket if you use air launch without a much more expensive program to grow your aircraft.

Stratolaunch Launch Systems died with Paul Allen. It is possible that out of the wreckage of the smallsat market (not a problem with launching smallsats, but there are *way* too many companies trying to compete there) that somebody will swoop down and by the Stratolaunch plane (at post-bankruptcy prices) and enough small rockets to build something.

Ramjet to mach 5 - sounds great in theory, but the details get hairy. Probably the biggest issue is that you probably want to jettison the ramjets *after* leaving the atmosphere, presumably making them side-mounted boosters (so the main rocket can get them out of the atmosphere). During the SR-71 drone testing (launching a drone rocket from a SR-71), Launch Control Officer (LCO) Ray Torick died after ejection and this pretty much canceled the program.

There's also the issue of recovering your boosters. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin favor propulsive landings and you can't do that with a ramjet. Of the other programs, only the Chinese and Indians appear to have the ambitions needed to cut costs enough by things like recovery, but aren't married to propulsive recovery.

For a more ambitious look at this see the X-43 program and the followup X-51 program. Unfortunately these are both dead, and the only source of funding seems to be in idiotic "hypersonic weapons programs" (hint: these threaten to do what weapons that were fielded to do in the mid-cold war did, only inefficiently and badly).

Also don't completely forget about air-augmented rockets. The idea is to add outside air to the rocket exhaust and just it for propulsion much like you make a hydrogen rocket fuel rich to allow additional hydrogen exhaust. As far as I know, it was only planned on the USSR Gnom missile, which was scrapped before building a rocket. These wouldn't get nearly the Isp of a ramjet, but would get the thrust of a rocket and allow propulsive landings (pretty much like the boosters on a falcon heavy). They may well be the first step in low fuel launches (presumably replacing the first stage in things like the Super Heavy Booster, or the New Armstrong, assuming you can work around the airflow issues of the subsequent stage[s]).

[Fat Rooster]

Some issues with air launch:

You really can't "grow" your rocket if you use air launch without a much more expensive program to grow your aircraft.

Stratolaunch Launch Systems died with Paul Allen. It is possible that out of the wreckage of the smallsat market (not a problem with launching smallsats, but there are *way* too many companies trying to compete there) that somebody will swoop down and by the Stratolaunch plane (at post-bankruptcy prices) and enough small rockets to build something.

Ramjet to mach 5 - sounds great in theory, but the details get hairy. Probably the biggest issue is that you probably want to jettison the ramjets *after* leaving the atmosphere, presumably making them side-mounted boosters (so the main rocket can get them out of the atmosphere). During the SR-71 drone testing (launching a drone rocket from a SR-71), Launch Control Officer (LCO) Ray Torick died after ejection and this pretty much canceled the program.

There's also the issue of recovering your boosters. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin favor propulsive landings and you can't do that with a ramjet. Of the other programs, only the Chinese and Indians appear to have the ambitions needed to cut costs enough by things like recovery, but aren't married to propulsive recovery.

For a more ambitious look at this see the X-43 program and the followup X-51 program. Unfortunately these are both dead, and the only source of funding seems to be in idiotic "hypersonic weapons programs" (hint: these threaten to do what weapons that were fielded to do in the mid-cold war did, only inefficiently and badly).

Also don't completely forget about air-augmented rockets. The idea is to add outside air to the rocket exhaust and just it for propulsion much like you make a hydrogen rocket fuel rich to allow additional hydrogen exhaust. As far as I know, it was only planned on the USSR Gnom missile, which was scrapped before building a rocket. These wouldn't get nearly the Isp of a ramjet, but would get the thrust of a rocket and allow propulsive landings (pretty much like the boosters on a falcon heavy). They may well be the first step in low fuel launches (presumably replacing the first stage in things like the Super Heavy Booster, or the New Armstrong, assuming you can work around the airflow issues of the subsequent stage[s]).

The aim was not for it to grow. I was looking towards the limit point in terms of a large mature industry, which means that R&D costs are ignored. The 737 for example has had more than 10,000 built. Once a system is doing 100,000 launches plus, saving 50 tons of fuel per launch starts to justify substantial R&D. Current commercial systems are not even used enough to justify specialised engines for each stage, which shows how far away we are from that.

The D21 system did cause one crash, but otherwise it worked! It's not like staging has never been a problem in modern rockets. What's more, it worked in atmospheric flight, which is even harder than what I am suggesting. The technology for a Mach 3 air launch is more than 50 years old. The concept I am suggesting is a zoom climb at ~Mach 3 using a 'conventional' jet, using the hang time to switch mode to ramjet mode (you probably don't want to be messing with significant airflow too much at those speeds, hence leaving the atmosphere to do it. Diving back also lets you maintain a more consistent angle of attack, improving efficiency and simplifying things). You then Dive into the atmosphere, fire up the ramjet, and zoom climb back out again at Mach 5. You effectively get an energised bounce (Neil Armstrong did something very similar, only without extra power, and by mistake). You then get to separate above any substantial atmosphere, which is no different from any other staging event. You reenter the atmosphere with the engine in conventional mode, using a stalled intake to increase drag until you get to the point where it will actually work, and then fly back and land. The ramjet stays with the first stage, and is recovered with it. Later stages are recovered however you would with any other rocket. Should be doable with about 15% takeoff weight in fuel*, meaning 15% payload capacity is enough to improve on current efficiency, even neglecting the hundreds of tons of oxidiser not needed. Getting 35% should be doable, and would half the total fuel used.

*Assuming 2000s up to Mach 3, based on the SR71, and 1300s for the ramjet acceleration (Quick look didn't find good real data on ramjets). Lift to Drag of 6 for the pullup, and a couple percent added on for gravity drag. Probably a little conservative, as 4000s should be possible up to Mach 1.8ish, and for much of the gravity drag.

The aircraft would be the bastard child of the Valkerie, X15, and D21. While those aircraft are awesome, they are also all extremely old. The specification of this aircraft would be closest to the X15, in that sustained high speeds are not actually required. It just needs to be able to sprint, and behave at extreme altitude.

Simple this is not, and the number of disciplines involved is impressive. It is also extremely natural for rocket engineers to say "Why not just use a rocket? We know they can do it, and we already have these rockets". That doesn't make it the best way when the first stage problem is considered in isolation and scale is a non factor. The atmosphere can be used for large gains in terms of fuel efficiency, when that starts to become important. Currently it isn't, but when it becomes so Virgin Galactic will have a head start in terms of relevant expertise.

Air augmented rockets look like a dead end, by playing to the strengths of neither. Rockets really want to work in a Vacuum, and work fast. That means aero drag is more important than gravity drag for rockets (Rockets exist that break Mach 6 within 2 KM). Air breathers need much lower flatter trajectories, and want to spend as much time as possible gobbling air. That means lift to favourably trade gravity drag for aerodynamic drag is really useful. An SSTO would want to abuse the benefits of both, but those are stupid. More sensible is to use the atmosphere until it is not useful, and then stage into a rocket (ditching all the heavy but efficient atmospheric stuff). You would also likely lose any gains if you tried to land propulsively, as the extra hardware would have to be landed again, and propulsive landings are all about keeping the empty weight down to a far greater extent than is usual for first stages. If you want a lifting landing, you might as well use the lift on takeoff and use a more efficient engine.

Scramjets generally push what the atmosphere can do a little too far I think, though the 2000s theoretical specific impulse at orbital speeds looks really shiny. 50% weight hydrogen could get you orbital if you got anywhere near theoretical limits, but oxygen is basically free and a hydrogen rocket can get about 50% of that performance per hydrogen anyway. When you consider that your typical rocket is throwing stuff out the back at about 3km/s, and that at Mach 6 the stuff entering an engine is going just shy 2km/s, you start to appreciate how hard getting useful thrust out of these things is. Given that they also don't even really start to work until Mach 5, really need bulky hydrogen to make sense (terrible for atmospheric drag) and the inlet design is radically different from a more conventional engine (making diverting as appropriate impractical), I don't see them having a place. Super cool though, and supersonic combustion might have a place in very hot burning rockets as afterburners, so the tech might not go to waste.

Recovery of a rocket propulsively makes sense, as it uses the hardware available, while recovery of a lifting stage using the lift also makes use of the existing hardware. I'm still not sold on propulsive landings for upper stages though, as heat shields scale pretty well with the mass of the craft, and spreading one out to a wing is not that much of a tax. SpaceX's active shielding might work out lighter, but you can still shape it into a wing. Getting expertise in propulsive landings is well worth doing even if it wasn't the most efficient though, as there is no other way to land on the moon or mars, which is their ultimate goal.

I'm torn on the stratolaunch, as the aircraft is magnificent. The problem is that it doesn't give much improvement in terms of delta V for a first stage, as you need to fit the engines on the plate which means small nozzles anyway, and it just adds complexity. Horizontal launches require that you either keep your thrust to weight above 1 (actually higher than ground launches), or deal with lateral forces from a lifting surface while in flight. It doesn't look designed to zoom climb, which is really required. Rockets like to go the direction you point them, and that really should be up. An air breathing stage could be built; possibly a ramjet to Mach 5 after a solid booster to Mach 2, but then you have built 3 stages to get the point that can be done in 1 fat rocket stage. If you are building a recoverable air breathing stage, then you might as well use the recovery system as a launch system, and skip the stratolaunch and the rocket.

The stratolaunch is a good example of how not to do airlaunch. Slow and level is bad. Fast and rapidly climbing is good. See the ASM-135_ASAT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT). It is not orbital, but illustrates the point.

[halfeye]

The aim was not for it to grow. I was looking towards the limit point in terms of a large mature industry, which means that R&D costs are ignored. The 737 for example has had more than 10,000 built. Once a system is doing 100,000 launches plus, saving 50 tons of fuel per launch starts to justify substantial R&D. Current commercial systems are not even used enough to justify specialised engines for each stage, which shows how far away we are from that.

The D21 system did cause one crash, but otherwise it worked! It's not like staging has never been a problem in modern rockets. What's more, it worked in atmospheric flight, which is even harder than what I am suggesting. The technology for a Mach 3 air launch is more than 50 years old. The concept I am suggesting is a zoom climb at ~Mach 3 using a 'conventional' jet, using the hang time to switch mode to ramjet mode (you probably don't want to be messing with significant airflow too much at those speeds, hence leaving the atmosphere to do it. Diving back also lets you maintain a more consistent angle of attack, improving efficiency and simplifying things). You then Dive into the atmosphere, fire up the ramjet, and zoom climb back out again at Mach 5. You effectively get an energised bounce (Neil Armstrong did something very similar, only without extra power, and by mistake). You then get to separate above any substantial atmosphere, which is no different from any other staging event. You reenter the atmosphere with the engine in conventional mode, using a stalled intake to increase drag until you get to the point where it will actually work, and then fly back and land. The ramjet stays with the first stage, and is recovered with it. Later stages are recovered however you would with any other rocket. Should be doable with about 15% takeoff weight in fuel*, meaning 15% payload capacity is enough to improve on current efficiency, even neglecting the hundreds of tons of oxidiser not needed. Getting 35% should be doable, and would half the total fuel used.

*Assuming 2000s up to Mach 3, based on the SR71, and 1300s for the ramjet acceleration (Quick look didn't find good real data on ramjets). Lift to Drag of 6 for the pullup, and a couple percent added on for gravity drag. Probably a little conservative, as 4000s should be possible up to Mach 1.8ish, and for much of the gravity drag.

The aircraft would be the bastard child of the Valkerie, X15, and D21. While those aircraft are awesome, they are also all extremely old. The specification of this aircraft would be closest to the X15, in that sustained high speeds are not actually required. It just needs to be able to sprint, and behave at extreme altitude.

Simple this is not, and the number of disciplines involved is impressive. It is also extremely natural for rocket engineers to say "Why not just use a rocket? We know they can do it, and we already have these rockets". That doesn't make it the best way when the first stage problem is considered in isolation and scale is a non factor. The atmosphere can be used for large gains in terms of fuel efficiency, when that starts to become important. Currently it isn't, but when it becomes so Virgin Galactic will have a head start in terms of relevant expertise.

Air augmented rockets look like a dead end, by playing to the strengths of neither. Rockets really want to work in a Vacuum, and work fast. That means aero drag is more important than gravity drag for rockets (Rockets exist that break Mach 6 within 2 KM). Air breathers need much lower flatter trajectories, and want to spend as much time as possible gobbling air. That means lift to favourably trade gravity drag for aerodynamic drag is really useful. An SSTO would want to abuse the benefits of both, but those are stupid. More sensible is to use the atmosphere until it is not useful, and then stage into a rocket (ditching all the heavy but efficient atmospheric stuff). You would also likely lose any gains if you tried to land propulsively, as the extra hardware would have to be landed again, and propulsive landings are all about keeping the empty weight down to a far greater extent than is usual for first stages. If you want a lifting landing, you might as well use the lift on takeoff and use a more efficient engine.

Scramjets generally push what the atmosphere can do a little too far I think, though the 2000s theoretical specific impulse at orbital speeds looks really shiny. 50% weight hydrogen could get you orbital if you got anywhere near theoretical limits, but oxygen is basically free and a hydrogen rocket can get about 50% of that performance per hydrogen anyway. When you consider that your typical rocket is throwing stuff out the back at about 3km/s, and that at Mach 6 the stuff entering an engine is going just shy 2km/s, you start to appreciate how hard getting useful thrust out of these things is. Given that they also don't even really start to work until Mach 5, really need bulky hydrogen to make sense (terrible for atmospheric drag) and the inlet design is radically different from a more conventional engine (making diverting as appropriate impractical), I don't see them having a place. Super cool though, and supersonic combustion might have a place in very hot burning rockets as afterburners, so the tech might not go to waste.

Recovery of a rocket propulsively makes sense, as it uses the hardware available, while recovery of a lifting stage using the lift also makes use of the existing hardware. I'm still not sold on propulsive landings for upper stages though, as heat shields scale pretty well with the mass of the craft, and spreading one out to a wing is not that much of a tax. SpaceX's active shielding might work out lighter, but you can still shape it into a wing. Getting expertise in propulsive landings is well worth doing even if it wasn't the most efficient though, as there is no other way to land on the moon or mars, which is their ultimate goal.

I'm torn on the stratolaunch, as the aircraft is magnificent. The problem is that it doesn't give much improvement in terms of delta V for a first stage, as you need to fit the engines on the plate which means small nozzles anyway, and it just adds complexity. Horizontal launches require that you either keep your thrust to weight above 1 (actually higher than ground launches), or deal with lateral forces from a lifting surface while in flight. It doesn't look designed to zoom climb, which is really required. Rockets like to go the direction you point them, and that really should be up. An air breathing stage could be built; possibly a ramjet to Mach 5 after a solid booster to Mach 2, but then you have built 3 stages to get the point that can be done in 1 fat rocket stage. If you are building a recoverable air breathing stage, then you might as well use the recovery system as a launch system, and skip the stratolaunch and the rocket.

The stratolaunch is a good example of how not to do airlaunch. Slow and level is bad. Fast and rapidly climbing is good. See the ASM-135_ASAT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT). It is not orbital, but illustrates the point.

Hm. I'm reminded of Bloodhound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_(missile)#Variants

That's one of the very few uses of ramjets I'm aware of. Again, needs to be launched to operating speed by other means.

[druid91]

As of today. It is likely their will be international laws regulating such endeavors soon after such becomes possible. Again, I refer youto the Mars series, it addresses this issue directly.

Eh, I seriously doubt that will be a relevant issue. The distance makes effective governance by a terrestrial authority next to impossible.


Sure you can do all the heavy industry you want on Mars - but the tyranny of the rocket equation means that anything you produce is only going to be profitable within Mars' gravity well. As a result, in order to make heavy industry on Mars worth bothering with you need to have a Mars colony in place first, only there's no reason to build a permanent colony unless you're trying to make it an economic success in the first place. That's the fundamental Catch-22 of space development.

Remember, space has no raw materials that are not available on Earth, since raw materials ultimately just boils down to the periodic table (and space isn't good at providing long-chain hydrocarbons anyway). So a space extraction or industrial process can only have supplies that are more convenient than those of Earth. Now, that convenience can be pretty impressive, there are some asteroids out there that are pretty much solid blocks of metal ore and don't represent a gravity well of any consequence. However, in order to utilize them you still have to haul at least a power source, a fabber, and some feedstock out to them, and once you have your extracted metals you then have to bring them back to some location where people want to use them, and if those people are on a planet that means you have to put them down into a gravity well without them either burning up or leaving big craters.

It's worth noting that it's not all that difficult to imagine a profitable series of space industries servicing other people in space, because once you're talking about moving things from one microgravity location to another you're just transferring orbits and most of the expensive rocketry can be avoided. If you can build a space elevator, then, you can start to bring planets and moons into the mix in a limited way, but that breakthrough's a ways off if it's possible at all.

You don't need rockets to get to orbit on Mars. The gravity there is lower than on earth. Low enough that we could build practical space elevators with modern materials.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

You don't need rockets to get to orbit on Mars. The gravity there is lower than on earth. Low enough that we could build practical space elevators with modern materials.

As was discussed earlier, modern materials might have a bit of trouble surviving the impact of Mar's moon Phobos as it does it's twice-daily intersection with the equator plane at sub-geostationary heights, or surviving the dance necessary to keep the tether from impacting said moon.

Also, it is disingenuous to claim "You don't need rockets to get to orbit on Mars" when you do, in fact, need a rocket until such time as there is a space elevator.

Grey Wolf

[Chen]

As was discussed earlier, modern materials might have a bit of trouble surviving the impact of Mar's moon Phobos as it does it's twice-daily intersection with the equator plane at sub-geostationary heights, or surviving the dance necessary to keep the tether from impacting said moon.

Also, it is disingenuous to claim "You don't need rockets to get to orbit on Mars" when you do, in fact, need a rocket until such time as there is a space elevator.

Grey Wolf

A mass driver could probably work too. Doesnt need all that much room due to significantly lower escape/orbital velocity. Even shortet if its mainly for cargo with conventional, reusable launch vehicles for people.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

A mass driver could probably work too. Doesnt need all that much room due to significantly lower escape/orbital velocity. Even shortet if its mainly for cargo with conventional, reusable launch vehicles for people.

I'd imagine the rarified atmosphere would also help, not to mention you could probably build it up the very gentle slope of the solar system's largest mountain.

Grey Wolf

[factotum]

A mass driver could probably work too. Doesnt need all that much room due to significantly lower escape/orbital velocity. Even shortet if its mainly for cargo with conventional, reusable launch vehicles for people.

Escape velocity on Mars isn't as low as you maybe think it is--it's about 5km/s (compared to 11km/s for Earth). You would need a lot of acceleration in your mass driver to achieve that speed, and a very robustly designed craft to survive going through even the thin Martian atmosphere so fast.

[Chen]

Escape velocity on Mars isn't as low as you maybe think it is--it's about 5km/s (compared to 11km/s for Earth). You would need a lot of acceleration in your mass driver to achieve that speed, and a very robustly designed craft to survive going through even the thin Martian atmosphere so fast.

Half the escape velocity means 1/4 the length which is a significant savings. Not to say it wouldnt still be a huge task, but we’re talking about it in the context of building a space elevator which is also a huge task. Hell you even have Olympus mons there to run your mass driver up which gets you past most of the atmosphere anyways.

[Fat Rooster]

Escape velocity on Mars isn't as low as you maybe think it is--it's about 5km/s (compared to 11km/s for Earth). You would need a lot of acceleration in your mass driver to achieve that speed, and a very robustly designed craft to survive going through even the thin Martian atmosphere so fast.

We don't need to escape to be useful. Getting orbital allows the use of more efficient low thrust engines, meaning that the mass driver only needs to provide 3.8km/s. Lets call it 4 to give us a bit more time to circularise.
The top of Olympus mons is at a pressure of 72pascal, which corresponds to an altitude on earth of more than 40km. The X43 was designed to fly at 3km/s for a sustained period* at more than 1000 pascals (30km). I could not find data on the temperature of the atmosphere of mars at that altitude, so not sure about the density, but it can't be below -100C as CO2 would snow out. The air at 30km is at -80C on earth, so together with CO2 being ~50% more dense, we still get that the X43 was designed for an order of magnitude more atmosphere. You would be rising pretty fast too, so the atmosphere is not much of an issue.

One quirk to consider is that unlike earth the atmosphere does not contain oxygen or hydrogen. That means that carbon based heat shielding is considerably more robust than for earth. It will still react to give carbon monoxide, but this is not nearly so much of a problem.

*It never did, but it was designed to.

The size of Olympus Mons is... impressive. It is about as wide as France. You could build 150km of driver if you started right at the base. That corresponds to an acceleration of ~50G. Not exactly human capable, but not too far out there for bulk cargo when you consider what we can fire out of guns, and that we have built rockets that do 100G.

If you were to build the driver for 1000km on the flat leading towards the mountain, and then just worried about the turn onto the 1~7 gradient up the side of the mountain, and allow ourselves 5G on the turn (11 seconds), we get that we would need about 44km horizontal distance, and only 3km vertical distance. If we pretend that Olympus mons is a perfect gradient with a flat plane beside it, the height above the base of the mountain would only be 750m.


The 'easiest' way to get off mars involving infrastructure is probably an 'air' breathing engine up to 1.9km/s (surface), zoom climbing, and then catching a rope dangled from Phobos. Yes it looks like something out of a cartoon, and the challenges involved in catching the rope in those conditions are extreme, but the physics works just fine. Air breathing* could pretty easily get to 1km/s, so even with a rocket for the rest you only need 1km/s, which is pre-tyranny as far as the rocket equation goes. A rocket second stage would let you maneuver higher anyway, and could be used for propulsive landings and takeoffs (Wing landings on Mars are hard). With enough time we could raise the orbit of Phobos to bring the velocity down (though requiring a stronger rope), to bring the docking velocity down. We would probably need systems in place to do this anyway, as otherwise we would eventually crash Phobos into Mars (though bringing the docking velocity up beyond what is possible would stop us first).

*Using the atmosphere as a mostly inert working fluid, while bringing both fuel and oxidiser. Some carbon would be oxidised by CO2 into CO, and you could build it with just fuel, but the technical challenges are extreme.

Step 2 might be building a mass driver instead of the aircraft. Getting to the 2km/s required for a capture is considerably easier than getting to 4km/s. Still hard, and now we are tied to locations. I don't know how close to equatorial the orbit of Phobos is, but significant deviation would make tight management of Phobos' orbit required in order to keep the positions syncing up. Always catching in the same place could result in significant eccentricity too.

Step 3 would be raising Phobos to Mars synchronous, and using a conventional elevator. Craft catching the rope in front of Phobos apply a slight prograde force, so if they then swung back (slowing them down) and let go again, they would raise the orbit slightly. This could be done with no loss terms except energy.

[Eldan]

Pavonis, probably, not Olympus. Pavonis is exactly on the equator.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Pavonis, probably, not Olympus. Pavonis is exactly on the equator.

I get that for the space elevator, closer to the equator is better than the height advantage of Olympus, but is it that crucial for a mass driver? That's 12 km of extra atmosphere you are piling on.

Grey Wolf

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I get that for the space elevator, closer to the equator is better than the height advantage of Olympus, but is it that crucial for a mass driver? That's 12 km of extra atmosphere you are piling on.

Grey Wolf

But it's also free extra launch speed from the rotation of the planet.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But it's also free extra launch speed from the rotation of the planet.

Yes, I understand that, but does it really compensate? That is a lot more km of atmosphere to slog through for the sake of the extra v. I'm not saying its right or wrong, I'm just asking for the numbers. Yes, if launching at equator vs wherever Olympus is means you get an extra 1 m/s for free, and slogging though the 12 km of atmosphere only takes away .5 m/s, then it's worth it. But I don't know what the actual numbers are, thus my question.

Grey Wolf

[factotum]

The main problem with not launching on the equator is that it makes it much harder to achieve an equatorial orbit. You can't just launch due east from some point far north or south of the equator and go into a nice equatorial orbit, because the orbit by definition has to be an ellipse around the centre of mass of the planet. This is especially a problem if you're launching via a ground-based mass driver, because any fuel you have to load onto your craft for manoeuvring subtracts from the payload capacity.

[Eldan]

Yes, I understand that, but does it really compensate? That is a lot more km of atmosphere to slog through for the sake of the extra v. I'm not saying its right or wrong, I'm just asking for the numbers. Yes, if launching at equator vs wherever Olympus is means you get an extra 1 m/s for free, and slogging though the 12 km of atmosphere only takes away .5 m/s, then it's worth it. But I don't know what the actual numbers are, thus my question.

Grey Wolf

Well, I mean, on Earth, launching eastwards at the equator gives you a boost of about 450 m/s.

Quick back of the envelope calculation... radius of the circle... sin of 90° - the lattitude...

Okay, at 18° lattitude, where Olympus mons is, you'd still get 95% of the boost.

Probably irrelevant then.

Edit: but as the previous poster says, your orbit would be super-wonky.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

The main problem with not launching on the equator is that it makes it much harder to achieve an equatorial orbit. You can't just launch due east from some point far north or south of the equator and go into a nice equatorial orbit, because the orbit by definition has to be an ellipse around the centre of mass of the planet. This is especially a problem if you're launching via a ground-based mass driver, because any fuel you have to load onto your craft for manoeuvring subtracts from the payload capacity.

Fair but - and I'm sorry I'm asking what must be basic questions at this point - what is the advantage of equatorial orbit? Is that where we'd expect to park inter-planetary ships? I'm guessing we couldn't just catapult the cargo directly into Hohmann transfer with a mass driver? Or is equatorial necessary for that as well? (Earth equatorial orbit isn't aligned with the planet plane, is it? So you still need to make corrections to go from Earth to Mars if you start from Earth's Equatorial orbit?)

Grey Wolf

[Fat Rooster]

Fair but - and I'm sorry I'm asking what must be basic questions at this point - what is the advantage of equatorial orbit? Is that where we'd expect to park inter-planetary ships? I'm guessing we couldn't just catapult the cargo directly into Hohmann transfer with a mass driver? Or is equatorial necessary for that as well? (Earth equatorial orbit isn't aligned with the planet plane, is it? So you still need to make corrections to go from Earth to Mars if you start from Earth's Equatorial orbit?)

Grey Wolf

If you are only sending stuff up occasionally, very little. If you are aiming for more than one launch a day though, things start to get messy. Your 4 O'clock launch will end up in a different plane than your 5 O'clock launch, and meeting them up will not be easy. Simply having that much stuff orbiting in different planes is asking for trouble, and a mass driver doesn't make much sense for low launch numbers. A mass driver on the equator could have every launch go towards an equatorial mega-station with only minor orbital manoeuvres after circularisation. All satellites could be forced onto non intersecting orbits or resonant ones, minimising the risk of something colliding with such a structure.

For transfer orbits, being stuck on the equator is actually a bad thing. The insight lander launched from Vandenberg partly because the initial launch window needed a highly inclined orbit anyway. The direction you leave a sphere of influence is restricted to the plane you are in unless you are prepared to spend a huge amount of delta V changing that plane somewhere. Off the equator you get a whole range of inclinations simply from varying the time of day. This has positives and negatives.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

<snip>

Thank you, I think I follow now.

Grey Wolf

[factotum]

Yeah, what Fat Rooster said. It does depend what the ultimate destination of your payload is, but it seems to make sense to consolidate multiple launches in orbit before sending them on to their final destination.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

OK, this is what I have understood. Please let me know if I'm still misunderstanding something.

We'd want to put the mass driver on the equator because, even though the mountain there is significantly smaller, it allows us to inject the payloads directly into equatorial orbit rather than having to give them extra fuel for them to adjust orbits after the fact. Sure, it will probably take more energy for the mass driver to get them into orbit, but a) it's the orbit we want off the bat and b) who cares? the whole point of the mass driver is that we can plug it to a land-based nuclear power and thus our energy budget for each launch is no longer subject to the rocket equation, because the fuel doesn't need to be lifted with more fuel.

Is that broadly correct?

Thanks,

Grey Wolf

[wumpus]

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is that Olympus Mons only works for something like a mass driver. If you are building a space elevator, you are stuck with the equator.

I don't believe that launching from Vandenburg (and getting a high inclination) gave any direct advantage to the delta-v requirements for going to Mars, but probably did help a lot in allowing arbitrary launch windows (launching polar means every 24 hours you are lined up for a launch, low inclination could leave long months off the table).

There's also the issue of your ultimate orbit. If you want a transfer to Earth (or anywhere else in the Solar System), it may well make more sense to launch a mass from Olympus Mons with nearly escape velocity and fix the inclination in the same burn that circularizes (or in this case merely raises periapsis outside of the Martian atmosphere. Note that you will need such a burn regardless (unless you are willing to have an orbit that dips down to your launch altitude each orbit), so combining the two shouldn't be that much of a cost.

I suspect that it will be generations before anybody really cares about launching Mars-built satellites into "Low Martian Orbit".

[Grey_Wolf_c]

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is that Olympus Mons only works for something like a mass driver. If you are building a space elevator, you are stuck with the equator.

Eldan mentioned it and, as per Fat Rooster and factotum, no, Olympus would not work as well as Pavonis even for the mass driver.

Grey Wolf

[abhi pranesh]

I need more information about this can anyone suggest me with some ideas.

[Xyril]

I need more information about this can anyone suggest me with some ideas.

Bets that in 9 posts this account posts a helpful link about a natural medicinal product that will help your rocket launch as often as it did when you were a teen?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Bets that in 9 posts this account posts a helpful link about a natural medicinal product that will help your rocket launch as often as it did when you were a teen?

Just as a heads up: I've gotten an official warning for replying to a spambot before. Report them if you're feeling generous, or try to ignore them.

[Xyril]

Just as a heads up: I've gotten an official warning for replying to a spambot before. Report them if you're feeling generous, or try to ignore them.

Ah, thanks for the heads up.

I opted not to report because it was literally the only post the guy made, and just from the phrasing I thought it was plausibly an incredibly awkward attempt to make conversation or to crowd source an idea for a startup.

In retrospect, if it was the former, the new guy might not take gentle teasing particularly positively.

[wumpus]

Eldan mentioned it and, as per Fat Rooster and factotum, no, Olympus would not work as well as Pavonis even for the mass driver.

Grey Wolf

Don't forget you have to slog through closer to 40km of atmosphere (assuming a 12km rise: you'll need about 1.2km/s delta-v to get beyond the atmosphere and 3.6km horizontal velocity. This gives you about an 18 degree launch angle). Or you go for extreme results and launch horizontally (which might save a whole .2km/s plowing through a huge swath of atmosphere).
-Note: I think I botched this and you need 3.8km/s launching horizontally (before air resistance). Expect to add another .2km/s to launch at 18 degrees (or adjust to balance air resistance vs. delta-v spent on launching less horizontally).

Launching closer to escape values would likely make Olympus a better site. And for "wonky orbits", anything launched out of Kennedy has a considerably more wonky orbit: KSC is at 28 degree lattitude (Wallops is at 37, Baikonur launches to more than 50 degrees (ISS is 51.6), although some of that is to avoid launching over China. Vandenburg is irrelevant as it only launches polar orbits).

[Grey_Wolf_c]

And for "wonky orbits", anything launched out of Kennedy has a considerably more wonky orbit: KSC is at 28 degree lattitude (Wallops is at 37, Baikonur launches to more than 50 degrees (ISS is 51.6), although some of that is to avoid launching over China. Vandenburg is irrelevant as it only launches polar orbits).

If I understood their point correctly, it is not that easy:

KSC* launches things that carry their own fuel, and thus need to carry fuel to lift that fuel. And fuel to lift the fuel that lifts the fuel. Etc. But since they do carry all that fuel and have the engines, they can then do orbit correction.

The idea for a mass driver is to minimize the need for all of that, though, so turning around and putting a whomping great engine so it can course correct seems unlikely to be as efficient as shooting the loads straight into the most useful orbit and send them up with just maneuvering fuel for tiny corrections. And in the spot where you'd put the fuel and engine, you can put more cargo. If it takes a bit more energy to get them through the extra 12 km of atmosphere, well, just throw another rod into the barbie of the planet-side nuclear power plant.

Grey Wolf

*I can't help but read this as "Kentucky Sfried Chicken". You Americans are way too good at branding.

[Excession]

The idea for a mass driver is to minimize the need for all of that, though, so turning around and putting a whomping great engine so it can course correct seems unlikely to be as efficient as shooting the loads straight into the most useful orbit and send them up with just maneuvering fuel for tiny corrections. And in the spot where you'd put the fuel and engine, you can put more cargo. If it takes a bit more energy to get them through the extra 12 km of atmosphere, well, just throw another rod into the barbie of the planet-side nuclear power plant.

The payload will still some sort of engine to circularise it's orbit, otherwise the best you can do is drop the payload back on the mass driver after one loop. Another option might be to have a tug in orbit to catch it, but then the tug will be using fuel to intercept then circularise the payload. Even if you're shooting for a transfer orbit to Earth, you'll need engines to stop when you get there. Unless you're shooting at Earth I guess.

The mass driver can greatly reduce the fuel needed, bit it can't completely remove the need for engines.

[wumpus]

The payload will still some sort of engine to circularise it's orbit, otherwise the best you can do is drop the payload back on the mass driver after one loop. Another option might be to have a tug in orbit to catch it, but then the tug will be using fuel to intercept then circularise the payload. Even if you're shooting for a transfer orbit to Earth, you'll need engines to stop when you get there. Unless you're shooting at Earth I guess.

The mass driver can greatly reduce the fuel needed, bit it can't completely remove the need for engines.

"Tug to catch it". Docking would require matching the exact [non] orbit of the launched device. Hitching a cable and pulling it in one direction might work, but I expect the length of cable to be extreme (and have to be some carbon fiber line). Hitching a fuel pipe and adding fuel would have even worse length issues, but might work if you can pump fast enough. The worst part is that the really high-efficiency bits that work out in space (ion thrusters) aren't likely enough to raise a mass driver shot to orbit. They might work fine for going from low Mars orbit to nearly escape orbit.

I get the feeling that learning to use a "catch with a tug" orbital insertion will make SpaceX's "how to land a rocket" blooper reel seem dirt cheap. It might be a great technique, but it has a lot of challenges.

[Eldan]

*I can't help but read this as "Kentucky Sfried Chicken". You Americans are way too good at branding.

I can't help but read it as a Kerbal Space Center. But this thread made me dig out Kerbal again, yesterday. I dicked around a bit and failed to get a mission back from the moon.

[Democratus]

These are humans we are talking about. If we get a permanent presence in space, we will find a way to make it profitable.

The most obvious thing, though, is the asteroids. They have metals, carbons, volatiles, water...everything needed to expand in space.

Once you have ISRU working in the asteroids you have centuries of fuel, oxygen, construction material...whatever is needed.

[darkrose50]

Following on from the life on the moon thread, if a little over one pound of e.g. toffee (because that's easy to make, something easier would be better, but I'm not a sweetmaker so I don't know what's easier than toffee) was made in space, and divided into pieces of approximately one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth down to perhap a one tenth of a gram size, then each piece auctioned off with a reserve price of three times the cost of production including the costs of taking the ingredients to orbit and bringing the product back down, I think that with a nice little certificate of authenticity those would sell.

Gold. It is strongly suspected that the amount of gold that we actually have and the amount of gold that is "owned" though holding companies is not even close. Basically if a holding company can "sell" the same bit of gold to multiple folks . . ..

When the apocalypse comes and gold, bullets, zombie ears, Twinkies, and cigarettes are the currency . . . that space gold will be worth its weight in gold.

[halfeye]

Gold. It is strongly suspected that the amount of gold that we actually have and the amount of gold that is "owned" though holding companies is not even close. Basically if a holding company can "sell" the same bit of gold to multiple folks . . ..

When the apocalypse comes and gold, bullets, zombie ears, Twinkies, and cigarettes are the currency . . . that space gold will be worth its weight in gold.

The problem is that the launch costs to orbit of any mass are greater than the value of that weight in gold. Getting stuff down from orbit in a collectable way (dropping it so it can be picked up by random people would lead to 70% going into the seas) is nearly as expensive, and you have to get whatevers going to do the mining up before you can even think about getting stuff down. Even diamonds and platinum aren't worth enough to make space mining profitable. There is also the problem that most value is based on rarity, and as the rarity drops, so does the price.

[wumpus]

The problem is that the launch costs to orbit of any mass are greater than the value of that weight in gold. Getting stuff down from orbit in a collectable way (dropping it so it can be picked up by random people would lead to 70% going into the seas) is nearly as expensive, and you have to get whatevers going to do the mining up before you can even think about getting stuff down. Even diamonds and platinum aren't worth enough to make space mining profitable. There is also the problem that most value is based on rarity, and as the rarity drops, so does the price.

As far as I know, all "space mining" proposals involve locating a valuable asteroid (preferably composed of something like platinum or iridium) and then bringing the metals back from the asteroid belt (probably smelted, but possibly just haul the whole asteroid).

This almost certainly involves ion propulsion and a lot of time (possibly using gravity tricks, which greatly limits your choice of asteroids). The time between launching the miner and returning with [each] asteroid is probably what makes the whole process uneconomical: the "interest counter" starts when you begin construction of miner and pay launch costs, while the payback doesn't happen until after you collect the asteroid dropped back onto the Earth (presumably involving wildly fun politics to find somewhere that will allow things returned from orbit *and* have sufficient rule of law to allow the miners to claim their property without too much competition from bandits).

It probably isn't that hard to price out a mission where the raw value of returned ore is more valuable than the raw value needed to obtain it. The 10 year delay (or more) that accounting demands interest be added to the cost is something else. Maybe, just maybe you could cover the costs on the third trip to the asteroid belt (ion propulsion is great at that type of thing), but that means you are just barely breaking even. The whole point is that economic space mining can't look anything like a NASA return sample mission (or even picking up large diamond isn't profitable): it has to move things like asteroids that aren't locked at the bottom of a gravity field (even if you need plenty of delta-v to send them to Earth).

[halfeye]

As far as I know, all "space mining" proposals involve locating a valuable asteroid (preferably composed of something like platinum or iridium) and then bringing the metals back from the asteroid belt (probably smelted, but possibly just haul the whole asteroid).

This almost certainly involves ion propulsion and a lot of time (possibly using gravity tricks, which greatly limits your choice of asteroids). The time between launching the miner and returning with [each] asteroid is probably what makes the whole process uneconomical: the "interest counter" starts when you begin construction of miner and pay launch costs, while the payback doesn't happen until after you collect the asteroid dropped back onto the Earth (presumably involving wildly fun politics to find somewhere that will allow things returned from orbit *and* have sufficient rule of law to allow the miners to claim their property without too much competition from bandits).

It probably isn't that hard to price out a mission where the raw value of returned ore is more valuable than the raw value needed to obtain it. The 10 year delay (or more) that accounting demands interest be added to the cost is something else. Maybe, just maybe you could cover the costs on the third trip to the asteroid belt (ion propulsion is great at that type of thing), but that means you are just barely breaking even. The whole point is that economic space mining can't look anything like a NASA return sample mission (or even picking up large diamond isn't profitable): it has to move things like asteroids that aren't locked at the bottom of a gravity field (even if you need plenty of delta-v to send them to Earth).

People keep saying it's difficult to move asteroids to Earth. It's not trivial, but it's a lot easier than people seem to think, the Earth is in the plane of the Ecliptic, and so, approximately, are the asteriods. The asteroids are in higher orbits, so you need to slow them down a bit, but then if you get it right, they will just drop down towards Earth's orbit, and if you hold them in a slightly higher orbit until the Earth comes by, then you can drop them into an orbit near Earth, and then catching them is a matter of getting the approach right. I think we really ought to avoid anything Chicxulub big while we're practicing.

For propulsion I favour solar sails myself, They're as near to a free lunch as we're going to get.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

For propulsion I favour solar sails myself, They're as near to a free lunch as we're going to get.

But they need to be positively huge to have an impact on anything happen, and they get the most traction moving away from the sun. I guess you could drag one behind an asteroid like a drag parachute, tipping it slightly towards the sun, pulling outwards to slow down, but it's going to take a while. Fuel cost for that stage is minimal, I'm just unsure of all other costs.

[factotum]

The asteroids are in higher orbits, so you need to slow them down a bit

You need to slow them down a *lot*. To get from Mars orbit down to Earth orbit requires about 2.9km/s delta-V, and that just gets the asteroid to Earth--you need to do another manoeuvre once it gets there in order to capture it, else it'll just swing right back out to Mars again. Anything beyond Mars orbit (e.g. most asteroids) will take more delta-V than that.

[gomipile]

You need to slow them down a *lot*. To get from Mars orbit down to Earth orbit requires about 2.9km/s delta-V, and that just gets the asteroid to Earth--you need to do another manoeuvre once it gets there in order to capture it, else it'll just swing right back out to Mars again. Anything beyond Mars orbit (e.g. most asteroids) will take more delta-V than that.

As far as the engineering goes, that's not a problem because Earth has an atmosphere to use for aerobraking. However, I admit that aiming an asteroid within 100 km of Earth at solar orbital speeds might present some public relations challenges.

[halfeye]

But they need to be positively huge to have an impact on anything happen, and they get the most traction moving away from the sun. I guess you could drag one behind an asteroid like a drag parachute, tipping it slightly towards the sun, pulling outwards to slow down, but it's going to take a while. Fuel cost for that stage is minimal, I'm just unsure of all other costs.

There's a thing called tacking, sailors do it all the time. The thrust from a light sail is quite small, but it's continuous, which is a huge difference, once they're off Earth, most rockets burn for seconds, minutes tops, I don't think any rocket has ever burned contiuously for an hour, there just isn't enough fuel to do that.

[Kato]

Not sure how serious you are..
I mean, sure, you can just drop it anywhere on Earth / we're pretty good at orbital calculations by now but if you want to do this in a way that gets you profit and not a massive lawsuit you don't want to play space billard from the asteroid belt to here.
I cannot provide any numbers but I think 'slowing it down and dropping it towards Earth' is WAY harder than it sounds.

What do you think is the profit margin for cleaning up space junk in leo?

[halfeye]

Not sure how serious you are..

Personally, I am very sure that light sails are the propulsion of the future, at least within solar systems, it's free acceleration. I am pretty sure space mining is a bust, I don't think it's going to be profitable.


I mean, sure, you can just drop it anywhere on Earth / we're pretty good at orbital calculations by now but if you want to do this in a way that gets you profit and not a massive lawsuit you don't want to play space billard from the asteroid belt to here.
I cannot provide any numbers but I think 'slowing it down and dropping it towards Earth' is WAY harder than it sounds.

It's not going to be easy, but with lightsails it's not impossible. Even with lightsails I don't think it will be profitable.


What do you think is the profit margin for cleaning up space junk in leo?

At this point negative, it's a cost. If someone put up a big enough bounty it would be doable, but at this point it would purely be a cost.

[wumpus]

People keep saying it's difficult to move asteroids to Earth. It's not trivial, but it's a lot easier than people seem to think, the Earth is in the plane of the Ecliptic, and so, approximately, are the asteriods. The asteroids are in higher orbits, so you need to slow them down a bit, but then if you get it right, they will just drop down towards Earth's orbit, and if you hold them in a slightly higher orbit until the Earth comes by, then you can drop them into an orbit near Earth, and then catching them is a matter of getting the approach right. I think we really ought to avoid anything Chicxulub big while we're practicing.

For propulsion I favour solar sails myself, They're as near to a free lunch as we're going to get.

My point (ion or sails) is not that it is difficult (or particularly expensive to launch a craft capable of doing so), just that it is *slow*. And as long as time is money, slow is expensive.


There's a thing called tacking, sailors do it all the time. The thrust from a light sail is quite small, but it's continuous, which is a huge difference, once they're off Earth, most rockets burn for seconds, minutes tops, I don't think any rocket has ever burned contiuously for an hour, there just isn't enough fuel to do that.

Only if you claim that ion propulsion is "not a rocket". NASA's Dawn probe fired its ion drive for months at a time (it had to, the thing has next to zero thrust) and had a total delta-v of 11km/s (*after* being launched past escape velocity [~12km/s]. That's essentially impossible for a chemical rocket). I think the motor was tested for *years* of continuous use.

[gomipile]

Personally, I am very sure that light sails are the propulsion of the future, at least within solar systems, it's free acceleration.

Not entirely free. There is the cost of maintaining/replacing the sail. Hopefully lightsails will be as good of a deal as sailing with the wind on our oceans is. As long as you don't care too much about speed, they'd be the cheapest way to get around.

[halfeye]

My point (ion or sails) is not that it is difficult (or particularly expensive to launch a craft capable of doing so), just that it is *slow*. And as long as time is money, slow is expensive.

Ships motor across the oceans slowly, but they're the preferred way of transporting most goods.


Only if you claim that ion propulsion is "not a rocket". NASA's Dawn probe fired its ion drive for months at a time (it had to, the thing has next to zero thrust) and had a total delta-v of 11km/s (*after* being launched past escape velocity [~12km/s]. That's essentially impossible for a chemical rocket). I think the motor was tested for *years* of continuous use.

If I'd heard about that (entirely possible) I'd forgotten. I would hope that light sails could do better than that.


Not entirely free. There is the cost of maintaining/replacing the sail. Hopefully lightsails will be as good of a deal as sailing with the wind on our oceans is. As long as you don't care too much about speed, they'd be the cheapest way to get around.

No, you're right, you do have to pay for the sails, as is usual for sails.

[factotum]

Ships motor across the oceans slowly, but they're the preferred way of transporting most goods.

"Slowly" is relative here. Even the slowest freighter would be able to go entirely round the world in two or three months. It would take decades to perform all the manoeuvres needed to move your asteroid around using a light sail. Oh, and also, ships are only preferred for transporting goods because of money, again--you *could* transport the same cargo by air as you send by ship, but you'd have to send thousands of planes where a single ship could do the job, so the ship is the cheaper option even though it's slower.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Or, in historic context: investors in European sailing ships to Asia had to wait up to about 7 years for their profits. One year there, one back, five in between to do some local runs to pump up the profits. It wasn't a particularly great investment because of both this delay and the risk, which is why when the volume of trade became large enough traders started companies, so people could invest in just sort of the average results. I'd say seven years is a good benchmark for our puroses. Plenty people with lots of money to invest will figure they have more than seven years to live. If the expected payout is good enough it's worth it. If it takes three times as long it gets seriously questionable.

[Fat Rooster]

Maybe more recent context is worth considering too. The value of significant dot com business is astounding, and sometimes they are floated having not ever returned a profit.


Markets are not scared of long term investments, even risky ones. The value of an investment is determined by the returns compared to other investments, and they are surprisingly low. Investors dying before it matures is not as much of a problem as you might think, because the value of their investment will have been increasing as it got closer to maturity. They can cash that in any time.

An interesting thing happens when we consider the viability of metal return missions. Metals like platinum, iridium, and gold are investments in their own right, and operate in the same market as all other investments. We can directly compare the cost of a mission to return some metals to a future option on those metals to see whether it is viable, because market effects cancel. That would give a figure of about $300-$400 million for a 10 ton return mission of those 3 metals over any timescale.

[wumpus]

Not sure how serious you are..
I mean, sure, you can just drop it anywhere on Earth / we're pretty good at orbital calculations by now but if you want to do this in a way that gets you profit and not a massive lawsuit you don't want to play space billard from the asteroid belt to here.
I cannot provide any numbers but I think 'slowing it down and dropping it towards Earth' is WAY harder than it sounds.

What do you think is the profit margin for cleaning up space junk in leo?

It also requires you to know exactly what the weight and outer envelope of the returning vehicle. Constructing this (especially assuming that the exterior presumably comes from Earth) would almost certainly kill your profits. I'd assume that you would shave the asteroid until it was the shape you wanted (possibly with some ballast corrections) and then send it off to land in the Outback, Mohave, or similar.


Ships motor across the oceans slowly, but they're the preferred way of transporting most goods.

If I'd heard about that (entirely possible) I'd forgotten. I would hope that light sails could do better than that.

No, you're right, you do have to pay for the sails, as is usual for sails.

Sails still exist, but few people are outfitting container ships with sails (although modern "sails" have been researched in the last few decades). Granted, the fuel they do use can be really nasty.

[LordEntrails]

An interesting thing happens when we consider the viability of metal return missions. Metals like platinum, iridium, and gold are investments in their own right, and operate in the same market as all other investments. We can directly compare the cost of a mission to return some metals to a future option on those metals to see whether it is viable, because market effects cancel. That would give a figure of about $300-$400 million for a 10 ton return mission of those 3 metals over any timescale.
So since we know launch costs are $60-100 million, and vehicle development is easily upwards of $200 million (and more likely a non-orbital launch and deep space craft with return capabilities is more likely in the $1-2 billion range), at least for the foreseeable future it is not economically viable.