Inspired about this thread about the proposed new Orion spacecraft – part of a whole new family of spaceships for different purposes in NASA’s Project Constellation.
I’ve argued before that the human race needs to colonize outer space – not just explore, but colonize – to guarantee racial survival, to free us from absolute dependence on one planet’s natural ecosystem. But, of course, you can’t expect people to go to space, nor to fund space travel, for that reason. Nor even because space colonization is Way Cool. Governments do it for prestige and potential military advantages and scientific research – but none of that is going to get large numbers of people living their whole lives, and raising their children, somewhere other than Earth’s surface. For that, you need some kind of economic incentive. At present, the only thing that seems to be in the offing is tourism – short spacehops for the ultra-rich – and, again, tourists don’t go to stay. Is there anything else? Something that could make an L-5 colony or a Moon colony profitable?
Certainly there are untapped mineral resources on the Moon and every planet and moon in the Solar System. There are untapped mineral resources in Antarctica. They remain untapped because the operating costs of mining operations on a continent under a mile-thick ice shield would be too high for the enterprise to make a profit. Lunar mining no doubt would be even more expensive. And the only things we might hope to find there would be metals and stones; I doubt there are deposits of fossil fuels anywhere in the Solar System but Earth, since, as far as we know, this is the only planet that has ever had a biosphere.
SF writers often imagine a future in which we get a lot of our energy from solar power collected by orbital platforms – but then, how would we ship or transmit the energy to Earth?
In 1966, Robert Heinlein imagined a scenario where a lunar colony’s economic importance to Earth would be as a farm. He failed to anticipate (1) that farming technology would improve dramatically in the coming decades and (2) that widespread industrialization would tend to slow population growth in industrialized countries. As it stands now, this planet produces quite enough food for its six billion mouths; if some are starving, that’s a distribution problem. There’s no apparent need to build domed or underground farms on an airless world. (By the same token, I don’t expect any space colonies to be founded just for the sake of “living space.”)
I’ve often read stories where SF writers allude to “vacuum industries” – industrial processes that can be done optimally only in a zero-g and/or hard-vacuum environment – but I’ve never been clear on what these might be.
Any other possibilities?
And, do these new NASA ships – and new private-sector spacecraft such as Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne – change the economic calculations any?
To propel what? And what would be the requirements of such a system?
Such as?