Is there any economic potential in space exploration/colonization?

Great Debates
1

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization:

At SF conventions I’ve sometimes seen the following message-button: “The surface of a planet is no place for an expanding industrial civilization.” Sounds compelling – but how can industrial operations be transferred to outer space and still be run profitably, given the enormous expense of transporting materials to and from Earth’s surface? I’ve also read books such as A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle (Ace Books 1983), arguing that Space Can Make Us All Rich, by opening the way to new industrial processes – “vacuum industries,” “zero-g industries” – that can be done only in space, as well as an unlimited supply of solar power. My brother, who is an engineer, is highly skeptical. You can make perfectly spherical ball bearings in space, but ball bearings don’t need to be perfectly spherical. Vacuum? We can make perfect vacuums here on Earth. Moving industrial pollution off the Earth’s surface? Think of the enormous amount of pollution we would have to generate in the process of making all those spaceships. Solar energy? We don’t have the technology to fully exploit what reaches Earth’s surface; a solar cell represents a net energy loss – that is, at the present state of efficiency, it takes more energy to make one than it will collect over its useful life.

Are there any compelling economic reasons to go to space? Are there any fortunes to be made there? Economic problems whose solutions are waiting for us beyond the atmosphere?

2

Is it really that expensive getting stuff back down from orbit? I was under the impression that gravity and air resistance do most of the work in that task.

I don’t have any qualifications on this topic, but it seems to me that, after getting the initial materials into space, much of the operation could be self-sustaining. There is a lot of material in space, and once we have infrastructure up there, it could gather materials to build products on it’s own, and would (hopefully) be capable of self-sustained life support and food systems. Of course, we can’t do that now, but with many small steps into commercial spaceflight, it will hopefully be possible in the future.

3

“How can industrial operations be transferred to outer space and still be run profitably, given the enormous expense of transporting materials to and from Earth’s surface?”

Could the off-planet industries use raw materials from off-planet locations? The moon, the asteriods, comets, etc.

Shouldn’t sending things down from orbital (or other space location) factories be a lot cheaper than sending things up? Going up, you’re fighting gravity; going down, you’re not.

So you build your space factory as much as possible from materials from the asteriods or the moon (but probably not from planets with significant gravities), and also get the raw materials for your processes from such sources.

Also, aren’t there profits to be made from space cruses and vacation spots in orbit or on the moon? I’d go if such were available. If I could afford it.

4

Dr. Love put it better than I did.

“Many small steps,” yes. I wish we’d get started.

5

Maybe it’s just me, but I think Hazel made some excellent points! :smiley:

I found one estimation on how much wealth is available in space from HowStuffWorks

6

At the moment , getting things up is expensive, but getting things down is gravity assisted

Compelling ? IF there were any compelling reasons we would be doing it at present and probably since the 80s. I would probably say that it would be the opposite , a successful space economy could create a situation where orbital automated factorys making normal widgets could flood the terrestrial market and displace earthbound market economies.

Start up costs would be astronomical , but once in place , having a steady stream of asteroids being strip mined for volatiles , heavy metals , water etc. Would be self sustaining for a very long term.

One thing that comes to mind , is that the more money that you can make is going to be determined by how far out , earth’s legal system can reach. I think in the movie outland, with sean connery , the jovian shuttle run was aprroximately six months. So for industries like space tourism, it won’t all be trips to an orbital hilton, criminal economics may account for a large part of the dollars to be made. Hydroponics , acres and acres of marijuana grown in glass domes.

You name it , it can probably be done

Declan

7

There was a book written back in the 80s that dealt in part with the economic potential of space. Several possibilities were cited: the ability to build large diamonds and other crystalline structures in space, free of contaminants and gravity, so they would have size and clarity unequalled on Earth. Other forms of manufacturing, as yet unguessed, that would use the lack of gravity to produce metals, composites and other materials not possible in a gravity well, assembled in ways not possible in a gravity well.

Along the lines of meteors, I’ve heard a proposal to build a giant lens in space – a magnifying glass if you will – kilometers in size, at an appropriate distance. It’s easy and cheap in space because the lack of gravity allows you to build with very flimsy materials – clear mylar, for instance and to avoid distortion of the lens as well. The focal point of such a lens would be so hot you could use it to smelt any ore you wish – like the nickel iron in nickel iron meteors.

Lotsa POTENTIAL in space, just not sure where the money is yet. When we figure it out, the real space age begins.

8

Yeah, there’s a HUGE potential for economic benefits from space - we could move virtually all our mining operations out there, for instance, as has been mentioned. The problem is that it would take a huge investment to get it all going. A space elevator would be a lovely solution to the problem of getting stuff out into orbit, if we could just overcome that pesky materials science problem and find a substance strong enough to make one.

Steven Baxter’s “Manifold” series feature a guy who starts a private enterprise called Project Bootstrap dedicated to getting out into space and making it productive using only relatively cheap technology. He has some interesting ideas.

9

Is there economic potential in exploration/colonization? Sure, but its minimal and will require a massive initial investment. For exploration and colonization. You don’t really do either of those things with an eye towards turning a quick profit…especially colonization. Colonization is something thats a very long term investment as the initial cost of setting up a colony is huge, and it takes quite a long time for colonies to get on their feet and become self sufficient…not to mention profitable.

Now, if you want to talk about the over all potential for economic growth in space, and not about just exploration and colonization, then thats different. There is a HUGE potential for profit and economic growth in space. Again, its going to take a massive initial investment to get things going…which is why it hasn’t been done yet. No one wants to put up a massive investment to get the ball rolling when we still have materials we can exploit cheaply here on earth. As such resources become more scarce and harder to get too the treasure chest that is our solar system will look more and more attractive.

There are a lot more things that can be done in zero-g than make perfect ball bearings. As to exploiting resources out in, say, the asteroid belt, the problem is getting initially into space. Once you are there you don’t need to bring the ship back into the gravity well you know…only the ore. Once the installations and ships are in space they stay in space…they don’t keep going down to the surface. You send up the crew (and perhaps some supplies)…but thats it.

As to the ore or other raw materials…well, like others have said, basically you wrap it in some kind of ablative or heat resistant material and drop it into the gravity well so that it drops somewhere you can recover it…and let gravity do all the work. Same with manufactured goods if you eventually build them in space. But just the raw resource exploitation will eventually repay your initial investment.

And the thing is, once you actually get up there and start operating it will drive change…think of it as a new industrial revolution, driven by the same things that drove the last one. Capitalists and other visionaries will find new ways to do things, if for no other reason that efficiency sake. Perhaps it will even drive us to new levels in solar power…because its needed so much.

The biggest problem I can see for all this is…water. Its the one thing that I’m unsure exists in any vast quantities outside of the planetary bodies…and the one vital thing that you can’t get or manufacture alone without bringing in outside materials. Food you can grow in zero g with power…and water. Power you can get from solar or nuclear…or a combination of both. Breathable air can be recycled nearly endlessly, can be manufactured if needs be (if you have a quantity of water). But water, afaik, unless it exists as ice or unless other raw materials exist out there in space, exists mostly on planetary bodies…which means you are fighting the gravity well to send them up to your potential miners.

-XT

10

I hate to say it, but I think the near-term (say, next 50 years) commercial viability of space is greatly exaggerated. Take, for example, the wild claims of trillions of dollars of metals in the asteroids. Those claims ignore one factor: Once metals are as numerous as sand, they’ll be worth about as much as sand. Supply and demand. So haul back that trillion-dollar asteroid and auction it off, and you might find that it’s only worth 1/100 of that amount.

Second, we are a LONG way from mining anything in space. Hell, we haven’t even managed sample return missions from other planets. We’re looking at decades before we can even get mining equipment working on other bodies and collecting materials, even if we undertake a crash program to do so. To mine enough materials to pay back such an investment plus transportation costs is something that could be hundreds of years away.

Then you have to look at the unused resources of the Earth. Before we go mining Mars and the Asteroids, we’ll have fully exploited every mining operation on this planet, because it’s bound to be infinitely cheaper to mine places like the ocean floor and Antarctica before we go mining other planets. And I don’t see that happening for decades either.

Will there be extensive mining of resources off the earth one day? Sure. In 500 years. One day, we’ll need all those resources. But the odds of us seeing major industrial activity in space in our lifetimes is pretty small, in my opinion. I’d love to be proved wrong.

The short-term opportunities for space include three major areas: Scientific research, exploration, and tourism. If the cost of space access could be dropped to 1/10 of what it is now, we’d see hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in research, I’d think. NASA will spend about 200 billion in the next ten years as it is. Maybe a similar amount from all the other government space organizations. But if we could put telescopes in orbit for 1/10 the cost of Hubble, you’d start seeing universities and science foundations get involved in a big way.

Tourism? Depends on how safe and inexpensive space travel can be made. If a reasonably-sized hotel can be put into orbit (say, one that can hold 100 guests), and it can show a profit at $10,000 per night plus $10,000 for the trip up and down, it’ll be permanently full. There would be enough demand for a $40,000 three day space vacation to keep it full forever. Hell, I’d take out a second mortgage on the house tomorrow and go, and I’m not rich.

$10,000 per day per person is 365 million a year. Ten of those in orbit, plus other cheaper excursions, would mean dozens of space flights a day, and a 4 billion per year industry. But if it were profitable, it might bootstrap itself to the point where one day we have as many people in space as we have floating around on cruise ships. At that point, sheer iteration and incremental design is going to refine and improve space travel very quickly.

I could see this happening in our lifetimes. At 41, I think I still have a chance to take a vacation in space without becoming obscenely wealthy.

But that’s the only industry I can see that has even a remote chance of turning a profit in a reasonable timespan of years or decades. Everything else is so far off that we won’t even see significant private investment in startups and proof of concepts for decades.

There are, however, some enabling technologies that could change this. Nanotech in particular. Imagine building nano-bots that can scour the Moon’s crust and extract Helium-3 for fusion. You build a single factory on the moon that can create nano-bots out of local materials, and start it running. You don’t even need to have a way to get the stuff back to Earth yet, because this process is going to take a long time - geometric expansion of the nano-bot population means at first they’ll collect almost nothing, but after years of making more and more of them, eventually they’ll be very numerous and collect significant amounts. Perhaps they’ll leave the stuff in ‘nodules’ on the surface, waiting to be collected by some future machine. As more ‘nodules’ build up on the moon, the commercial pressure to go and get them will mount, leading to the investment required.

I could see that kind of long-term harvesting happening all over. Perhaps we’ll drop a replicating factory on Mars to begin collecting oxygen and water, so that when we try to establish a colony there in 100 years it will be waiting for us in quantity.

On the science front, discoveries could change the pace of spending/progress. Discovering complex life in the oceans of Europa might lead to an explosion in research capital. Likewise, if the Terrestrial Planet Finder spots signs of biology in the atmospheres of remote planets, we might see an explosion of funding into truly huge telescope arrays so we can see what’s there.

11

The computer you’re reading this on is a by-product of the space program. The realized profits of space travel have very little to do with finding $150 billion platinum lodes (which would, under the best circumstances, wreck our economy and devalue platinum); they have more to do with engineers solving problems associated with space travel, and having those solutions applied to more mundane challenges.

We might have had electric cars without developing the Lunar Rover, but probably not as soon. The pressure to develop computers that are small enough to fit in a Command Module hasn’t brought us any closer to conquering the Asteroid Belt, but it has given us laptop computers, Vaios the size of checkbooks, and Blackberry handhelds. And it’s made all of these things affordable to the average citizen, at a profit far in excess of the cost of the space program.

The problems with staying in the International Space Station are exaggerated versions of the problems of living in a small apartment and driving a compact car. But it’s the guy with the apartment and car who will eventually benefit from the Space Station’s innovations in storage, garbage disposal, fungicide and water treatment.

12

Krokodil: do you have a cite that the space program has had a large impact on other industries, or that the same advantages would not have been achieved more efficiently by investing in them directly instead of indirectly?

Specifically, do you have a cite that modern computers are a byproduct of the space program? I’m not attacking you, I’d be very interested if it were true.

I rather doubt, for example, that laptop computers or electric cars owe a lot of technology to the space program. While there are some superficial similarities, the design goals for a lunar rover are really quite different from those of an electric car. And when it comes to computers, NASA has always deliberately stayed well away from the leading edge of commercial technology, because stability and predictability is so important to them. I really doubt that the laptop industry got a very significant head start from NASA, and I’m quite sure that the designers of the first PDAs did not look to the 1960’s space program for guidance.

I’m not saying that the NASA engineers never ever developed a solution for something which was later used for civil purposes. But does that mean that the same thing would not have been developed once there was a demand for it, or would have been developed much more slowly, without NASA? What’s so special about the space program that it’s indirect spin-offs are worth more than direct, demand-driven industrial engineering?

Or, what The Perfect Master said (and much better, of course):
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030307.html

13

Maybe I should make myself more clear here, since obviously the claim that the space program has led to lots of spin-offs in other industries is a very popular one, and easy enough to find a cite for.

However,

[list=a]
[li]The things you (Krokodil) mentioned in your post, such as computers, PDAs and electric cars, are not normally among the things first named in this context, so I’m curious where you got them from.[/li][li]Most of those lists of spin-offs seem to take the position that if a technology was used by NASA while still in its infancy, and was used in other sectors afterwards, then it counts as a spin-off of the space program. I suspect, however, that most of these are situations where NASA simply used something for which “the time was ripe”, and further developments along the same line either did not really owe a lot to NASA’s use of the technology, or would have happened anyway because the non-space-related benefits were obvious.[/li][li] Even if you grant that the space program developed a lot of cool new stuff which had useful spin-offs in civil industries, it is still not clear that a space program is the best way to get those benefits. If a government has a couple of spare billions lying around and wants to use them for fostering innovation, why not ask some scientists to identify a number of promising growth areas and then invest into innovation in those areas directly?[/li][/list]So wat I’d be interested in is a) a cite for the specific things you mentioned (computers, laptops, Blackberries and electric cars), and b) an explanation of why the development of space travel is a particularly efficient way of getting useful spin-offs.

14

There’s a major indirect effect that may not be as immediately obvious: NASA’s demonstrated ability to put object in orbit and bring them down on command was a critical part of the USA’s cold-war defense, which deterred them Russkis from getting all “Amerika” on your asses, thus ensuring that the iPod market would remain intact for future generations.

Personally, I’d like to give the private space business a grace period similar to the 23-year gap between the Wright brother’s flight and the formation of the FAA. No point strangling this nascent industry with regulation, and if someone gets killed while attempting orbit, well, that’s just assumption of risk.

15

This is very true if the materials get transported back to earth. However, asteroids might still be valuable because they save the cost of bringing materials up from earth. I could see the first in orbit hotel being built out of a hallowed-out asteroid that was conveniently passing by close to earth. This may be seen as appealing given the huge cost of transporting hundreds (or thousands) of tons of material from earth.

xtisme: Comets are the major source of water (ice) in space. They probably won’t be easy to get to, but it’s a possibility for a large enough operation.

16

Another commercial activity that would prosper in space is agriculture. Orbital stations can provide a prefect environment for crops; precisely controlled climate, no parasites or diseases, and literally all the “space” you want. Shells can be built from asteroid materials and the crops themselves are basically combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen - all of which are available in space.

17

The problem is that nobody spends their last dollar buying stock certificates. The commercial development of space will undeniably take a major investment before it starts producing returns. If society waits until we desperately need resources from space, we probably won’t have enough resources left here on Earth to go out and get them. You have to plan your future when you still have some extra wealth to invest in it.

18

Still not a trivial problem. You have to get your package from space to Earth (1) without burning up in the atmosphere, (2) without being damaged or lost on landing or splashdown, and (3) without damaging anything important on the surface (which is easy now but might become problematic if such traffic becomes common). In short, you either need to use a space shuttle or its equivalent, or invent some kind of special drop-capsule – with limited atmospheric navigation capability, so it can be directed to land in a designated retrieval zone.

19

And water?

In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a few inhabitants of the Luna penal colony resolve to organize a rebellion against the rule of the Earth-based Federated Nations – not because they’re chafing under the Warden’s administration, but because Earth is using Luna primarily as a farm, and neglecting to send up water to replace the biomass that is periodically shipped down to Earth. Their friend Mycroft the sentient computer calculates that this will, within a definite number of years, lead to starvation and food riots in the colony. Were they worrying about nothing?

20

I agree…this is a major problem, ice bearing comets not withstanding. Of course, as far as the moon goes there is a theory (that hasn’t been disproved yet afaik) that the moon may actually HAVE water in the form of ice at one or both of the polar caps, as well as in shadow filled craters scattered about. If this is true, then its possible that a small lunar colony or research station could be self sufficient.

Water is one of the major stumbling blocks as I see it…unless you can find a way to cheaply move large masses out of a gravity well. If you can do THAT then things change. Of course, if we could do that space exploration and exploitation would cost a fraction of what it costs now.

As to Sam Stone’s point about flooding the market with raw materials, this posits a static market. Myself, I see the market adjusting as it did when new materials flooded into Europe with their exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world. Perhaps we’d have a second industrial revolution based on the availability of new materials…who knows?

However, as I hinted at in my post, I doubt we will go looking for new raw materials until it becomes cost effective to do so…i.e. when its cheaper to mine the asteroid belt than to mine the same things on earth, then we’ll do it…and it will be economically viable to do so. Sort of like cheap oil…as long as it remains cheap it makes alternatives less attractive. If it becomes more expensive though those alternatives become more attractive.

That said, this is a good point:

We need to keep up research and development of new space technology, keep pushing the envelop. Some folks seem to think that if we just wait for a few decades or centuries the technology will just magically appear. The problem with that is, if we don’t keep pushing things it will NEVER appear…the technology will go in other directions (where the money is). I think we, as a species, NEED to explore and exploit space to extend our time AS a species. If the most we can do is spread out into our own solar system then thats what we should do. My guess though is doing that, we will find new ways of moving even further. Just because we can’t envision them today doesn’t mean they won’t exist a few centuries from now. After all, 2 centuries ago people could hardly comprehend where we are today.

-XT