You severely underestimate the challenge of bringing tons and tons of raw materials into orbit.
All of this space industry is going to have to get power somehow. Solar? Nuclear? Whatever power source you’re using, why not just use that same power source on Earth to power Earth-based industries?
There are reasons to want space-based industries. You want space industry to build things in space. But for building things on Earth, it makes far more sense to use Earthly industry.
Well, one could hope that NIMBY wouldn’t be as much of a challenge to nuclear power on the moon as it is down here 
but yes, you are right.
Right, exactly. The main reason to harvest raw materials in space is to make spaceships or space stations, not to bring down to Earth. I guess if you have so MUCH space industry that anything Earth needs is a rounding error, that doesn’t apply, but obviously we are multiple centuries at least from that point. That’s not a solution to global warming by any stretch.
I don’t see moving heavy industry off Earth anytime soon; you’d need something like a space elevator to make that economically viable. But I agree that SpaceX’s Starship is a game changer and not just for technological reasons. What SpaceX has done is to finally break the grip of the government/aerospace paradigm on space launch. The paradigm where contractors are happy to stay on the government teat forever supplying billion-dollar rockets for pork-barrel procurement programs (Boeing and SLS, I’m looking at YOU). SpaceX is turning space launch into a practical business, the business of moving cargo into orbit as economically as possible. Whatever you might think of Musk personally, if it took a billionaire fanboy to finally make affordable space launch a reality, fine. No one else was both able and willing to.
Excellent point. This more than anything else cuts the OPs argument off at the knees. Even if there were ways to get power in space that were not available on earth (say square kilometer sized solar arrays made of micro thin mylar) its probably better just to find ways to beam the power down to earth rather than try and manufacture things up there.
Blockquote Elon Musk will save the world!
But who will save the World from Elon Musk?
The only person who can stop someone like Elon Musk is a suave British secret agent with a fondness for gadgets and vodka martinis.
Musk isn’t pushing hard on moving industry to space. On the contrary, he’s said that space solar generation is a bad idea and that we should keep solar on earth.
Bezos is really the one making a bunch of claims about heavy industry in space. But his company, Blue Origin, isn’t actually doing anything in orbit yet, so it’s hard to take them seriously on much.
Musk wants to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars. That will require industry, but it’s unlikely that the products ever get shipped back to Earth. Maybe, maybe in many years it will become more practical to build large spacecraft on Mars due to the shallower gravity well, but it seems more likely that this will happen via asteroid resources instead.
Starship is very likely to revolutionize the launch industry, and I certainly hope that people think of all kinds of things to do in space that are not practical now due to launch costs. What, exactly, I don’t know. SpaceX plans to make money from their Starlink internet service, but so far hasn’t announced anything else.
If nothing else, Starship will enable a new generation of cheap, heavy, and capable scientific probes. Planetary exploration always suffers from mass and size constraints. Low mass means they can’t put large fuel tanks on, meaning they have to depend on time consuming and limiting gravity assists. Size constraints mean they need expensive and unreliable folding systems for things like mirrors, antennas, and heat shields. And the cost means we just don’t have many probes overall. Starship however can send something like a 100-ton probe to Jupiter (the Europa Clipper for example is only 6 tons, of which only 350 kg is actual scientific payload).
I’d rather see a fleet of ships to TNOs than yet another Jupiter probe. Eris. Homea. Makemake.
Musk did not inherit any “blood emerald money.” His parents are still alive, for one thing. Musk became a millionaire when Compaq bought Zip2, a hundred-millionaire when eBay acquired PayPal, and a billionaire when SpaceX and Tesla grew to what they are today. This is all obvious public-record stuff, so whoever is supplying you with information is bullshitting you.
Ah, so he will inherit blood emerald money.
That’s much better.
As long as you acknowledge that you’ve been lied to, and in a clumsy and easily disputed fashion, and that the conclusions you drew from those lies are also wrong.
Musk isn’t going to inherit any emerald money since it’s already gone. Though why someone worth $180B would care about an extra million or whatever is beyond me in the first place.
He’s where he is today because his parents were in a position to reap the benefits of apartheid.
True, and I’m reaping benefits from slavery in the US. A bit more distant, but the connection is still there.
I’ve known several white South Africans in the same age range. All benefitted from apartheid. None regretted leaving. I can’t exactly hold them responsible for being born white. Maybe Musk can contribute something back to South Africa someday. His parents were not extremely wealthy, but they were better off than the average South African.
Come on now. Any engineer or scientist working for Elon Musk is happy to be doing so, or more than qualified to work somewhere else. You may not agree with their beliefs; you may claim that they are wasting their time on trivialities while more serious issues plague us due to greed or a desire for fame; you might even have a point. But none of them are being FORCED to work there.
Or imaginethinking that SpaceX or Tesla is doing some cool shit and wanting to be involved.
Again, you might not agree, but it isn’t particularly difficult to imagine.
I have a lot of sympathy for people in marginal economic situations that have little choice but to do whatever their management says to. Service industries, construction, etc. deserve a degree of worker protection.
The engineers at Tesla are not in this category. They get paid a lot and have a great deal of economic freedom. In California especially, non-compete agreements are unenforceable and so the engineers can go wherever they like if they wish to quit. Tesla engineering is well-respected everywhere and ex-employees gain from this reputation when looking for other jobs.
Independent of this, Tesla is using their bot as a means of hiring people. They want to gain expertise in electromechanical tech and machine learning. They aren’t going to force random employees into the program; they want to fill it out with people from Boston Dynamics, etc., and use the resulting expertise in other areas.
There is. The US government has spent several tens of billions of dollars on the SLS program, for a rocket that is obsolete before it will even launch. Fortunately, NASA also threw a few pennies at SpaceX, which developed the first practically reusable rocket, and has brought down the cost of space for everyone (including NASA).
The SLS program is a porkbarrel joke, but this is not because all government programs are inherently like that.
No, but YouCannotGargleSand implied that SpaceX is only in business because there isn’t enough funding for our space program. Funding is not the problem; the way the funding is used is. Unfortunately, it is inherent in our system of government that large projects will be pork-barrel disasters. However, NASA does very well with more limited scope projects like satellites and interplanetary probes. There is less need to divide up the work among states or shackle themselves to technologies that a particular business provides.
The relationship between NASA and SpaceX has gone very well indeed and I hope they can replicate that success with others. As bad as Boeing has done with their Starliner capsule, I expect they’ll fly eventually, and they’ll have paid the cost overruns–not the taxpayer. Not as good as SpaceX, but within a factor of 2. I’ll call that a win. SLS on the other hand uses a more traditional development scheme and is probably 10x or 20x the cost that it should be.
His reusable rockets seem to be doing just fine