Corporate Sponsored Space Travel

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t see any hard factual answers here, and I feel it presumptuous to tag this as a “great debate”, so I’ll submit this as my opinion.

As we know, there are some corporate giants that have seriously taken on the race for space. Is it for the purpose for procuring immense profits? Is it for creating “Elysium” before they finish turning our planet into an unlivable hell hole? Both perhaps?

The James Webb telescope has revolutionized astronomy. One of the alleged discoveries are planets MADE of diamonds, bodies in our own solar system rich in rare and expensive minerals, and so on. According to my understanding of supply and demand, there are two things that make no sense to me. First of all, if there are astronomical bodies MADE of these things, that ups the supply to virtually “unlimited”. What does that do to demand and thus worth? If we suddenly had an unlimited supply of cut diamonds as big or bigger than the Hope diamond, would they be priceless? On top of that, there is the cost of mining and transport. Even if you could maneuver an asteroid out of the belt and into an orbit around the earth, it would still be as expensive as hell to mine, load, and shuttle the contents to earth.

Finally, there is tourism. Sure, we have enough rich people to finance a modest “space travel company”, at least until one of them crashed and killed a few dozen people. Then, I’m thinking business would fall off drastically. Remember the Concorde? That was travel for the rich until one crashed. They retired it within 3 years and never replaced it.

So, what is the plan here?

2

I don’t think there is really a plan here. A few billionaires decided they wanted to be part of a “commercial” space program, and happen to have the money and energy to spend on it in their spare time. It’s not that different from when millionaires used to have magnificent yachts built that they would use every now and then but were really just for show.

I think most of this is being driven by competitive egos. They want to make their mark on the world and sending rockets into space is one way to do it. If they can make even more billions by gathering and returning valuable minerals, such as gold or diamonds, so much the better. How this might impact the value of these rare minerals is anyone’s guess.

3

Near term, private space is about mining the government for contracts to deliver government payloads into space. SpaceX gets most of its revenue from the Feds and has for years.

The other big drive is communications and Earth observing. There is money to be made in building, launching, & owning things like Starlink. Likewise the sats that deliver pictures, radar data, and all sorts of other info about the surface and sky to businesses that want that stuff.

Asteroid mining, like Mars colonization, is SF stuff to capture the imagination of the gullible. Not actual projects anyone is going to do in the next century, even assuming human society & politics holds together that long.

4

Ah, thank you! Makes a lot more sense now. :slight_smile: